by Janet Todd
Unlike the anxious Edward Howard, Ravenscroft accepted the easy mockery of playwrights. Like Behn he composed quickly, being irritated at those who made a fetish of writing and saw it as more than the trade he felt it to be. He was secure in his status of gentleman and confident enough to approach a ‘Person of Quality’ for a dedicatee. Behn noted the swagger with which he declared his impertinent address excusable in ‘them that Write for Bread, and Live by Dedications, and Third-Dayes.’ Like Howard, Ravenscroft had the easy confidence to let off theatrical steam by addressing the reader directly in his printed text.
Behn had experienced the elation of pleasing an audience, enjoying the crowd’s laughter and rapt involvement with her creation. In her new play, she wanted to follow Ravenscroft and please more, but he was not yet her model and change was not sudden. Although she had exhausted much of her early material, she was still attached to the form of tragicomedy. She always accepted Dryden as the foremost dramatist of her time and his play, Marriage A-la-Mode, pointed a way forwards to a combination of her old heroic and romantic mode with modern rakish intrigue, not using the second as comic relief or subplot, but rather keeping the two equal. Perhaps she might be even more successful than Dryden in connecting the disparate elements, by allowing her rake hero to enter both strands.
In addition to her artistic aims, Behn required her new play to exploit a political moment. In March 1672, the Third Dutch War had broken out between England and Holland. Various wrongs were cited, including the treatment of English planters after the ceding of Surinam, but many regarded the war as absurd. To encourage this opinion and detach England from French interest, William of Orange, now the power in Holland since the assassination of De Witt, used spies and agents, smuggled in pamphlets, and sponsored propaganda such as England’s Appeal, which tried to whip up fear of Catholics from outside and within. There was a need to counter the effort, and the King urged Dryden to write Amboyna with an ‘English heart’ concerning the old Dutch massacre. Behn had no love for the Dutch who, apart from any unkindness on her Antwerp mission, stood for what she most deplored in society: mercenariness, acquisitiveness and vulgarity. A comic and cloddish Dutchman might do well on the stage. So she created Haunce, a typical English country bumpkin marked as usual by his lack of metropolitan delicacy; decorated with anti-Dutch prejudice, he could also express the national contempt for the mercantile and unromantic enemy.
Behn had probably written part of The Dutch Lover before seeing The Rehearsal, since two of her characters are snatched away when young in the manner mocked in Buckingham’s play, while Silvio, the changeling, blusters through a Jacobean plot of incestuous passion, his story at times fitting awkwardly with that of the modish lover Alonzo, who speaks the bantering language of Etherege, Ravenscroft, and Dryden in worldly mode. In much the same way, Cleonte and Clarinda, who continue the innocence as ignorance theme of Cloris in The Amorous Prince, contrast with the sprightly Euphemia, who has long since conquered such naivety.
Set in Madrid, the story, like that of The Amorous Prince, drew on Spanish prose: a collection of linked and embedded short stories by Francisco de Quintana called The History of Don Fenise (1651). Behn amalgamated several of these so intricately it suggests she worked from memory of something read in her youth. In one strand a man out of revenge seduces a woman and turns her into a courtesan. In another, the brother going to kill his fallen sister, meets a lady who persuades him to marry her to outwit a ‘beastly’ suitor; in the last, a bastard tries to kill the real son of the family. It was unpromising material for a comedy, except that Behn had the idea of making the beastly suitor into her comic Dutchman.
The play turns on much mistaking of veiled ladies in the dark and of armed gentlemen entering the wrong houses, as the over-protected daughters of Spain take to the streets to throw themselves on the astonished but always gallant Alonzo, a Flemish colonel of unknown parentage who draws the plots together. Thus, despite his sudden promise of marriage to the veiled Euphemia, Alonzo finds himself in a compromising position with Clarinda, which, since she turns out to be his sister, he happily fails to exploit. The opposite good fortune attends Silvio, who learns that his father is in fact the great Spanish minister, Count d’Olivarez: thus he and his seeming sister Cleonte can now indulge their passion with propriety: ‘I must own a joy greater than is fit for a virgin to express,’ says Cleonte, who, earlier on, had provoked fury in her lover when he had mistakenly thought her returning his passion. Less easy to resolve is the predicament of Hippolyta. Having been seduced by Antonio and placed against her knowledge in a brothel, she grows tired of playing the victim, assumes male dress and intends to fight and kill Antonio in a duel. In male attire she tries to suppress her residual femininity, destroy ‘the feeble woman’, and assume masculine qualities. Men and women are still psychologically distinct in this play then, but, more than in The Young King, the distinction is social rather than biological. (Since a cross-dressed woman can only become a young man and a pretty young man is almost as much a sex object to older men as a beautiful woman, transvestism is not a manoeuvre of great use to the serious heroine. It will, however, become a suitable ploy for the sprightly one with too sure an identity as a woman to begin to believe she can take on a man’s role.) After the fight, Antonio proposes to compensate for his sadistic treatment of Hippolyta by marriage, transforming the woman he had humiliated as a whore into his wife.10 Only a dance and comic masque, in which everyone, even the ‘beastly’ Haunce, gets coupled, can end such a play.
Despite her flirting with tragic themes, Behn was here allowing space for the rational and ridiculous: she avoided the magical in the Spanish source—an enchantress dwindles into a single reference to a beautiful woman as a ‘fair Inchantress’—and some of what might earlier have become courtly discourse becomes brisk badinage. Probably it was from Dryden, but more from the satirical The Rehearsal, that Behn learnt to present and undercut simultaneously:
ALONZO:... Her veil fell off and she appeare’d to me,
Like unexpected day, from out a cloud;
The lost benighted traveller
Sees not th’approach of the next mornings sun
With more transported joy
Than I this ravishing and unknown beauty.
LOVIS: Hey day! What stuffs here?11
Behn’s most successful element is her new depiction of the rake, Alonzo, the ‘brisk young Lover’, to match the pert girl, a minor character in her earlier plays. Alonzo is captivated, but declares no constancy, prepared to take adventures and couplings where he can. Unlike Behn’s former heroes, he desires ‘Sweets’ of love without the ceremonious ties of marriage. There may be a hint of morality in the fact that, had he been successful on his second adventure, he would have committed incest, but, if so, it is slight. Alonzo’s closeness to the Cavalier exile, that most romantic of figures, coming like Killigrew’s hero, Thomaso, from a time before the sordid money-grubbing present, is marked when he calls himself ‘a Wanderer’.
The brisk heroine, Euphemia, anticipates Behn’s later ones in responding to control with cunning, but she cannot take the ‘Sweets’ without marriage; this remains an option only for men. Yet her desire for them attracts the rake: claiming he has seen the world and can allow women freedoms forbidden in Spain, Alonzo is cajoled into matrimony through her trick, but he enjoys the joke and humorously threatens:
What shall I come to? all on the sudden to leave delicious whoring, drinking and fighting, and be condemned to a dull honest Wife. Well, if it be my ill fortune, may this curse light on thee that has brought me to’t: may I love thee even after we are married to that troublesome degree, that I may grow most damnable jealous of thee, and keep thee from the Sight of all mankind, but thy own natural husband, that so thou mayst be depriv’d of the greatest pleasure of this life, the blessing of change.
To which Euphemia reasonably replies, ‘would you have the conscience to tye me to harder conditions than I would you?’12
Be
hn was excited about the new theatre in Dorset Garden and intended to use it fully for her new complicated play. Meetings set in the dark would remain tricky, since both stage and auditorium were brightly lit, with hoops of candles in chandeliers hanging above the forestage and footlights of candles or lamps flickering at the edge. Some might be extinguished but real darkness took too much bustle to create. So a ‘dark’ scene had to persuade spectators that actors in full view of them and each other were in fact in pitch-blackness. Other scenes might be easier, now that more shutters could probably be opened and closed to create multiple locations on the single deeper stage. Behn liked the sense of people walking along streets and being followed; this she could now enact.13
Despite the instability and creakiness of The Dutch Lover, Behn knew her play was better than anything she had yet presented, close to Dryden’s successful Marriage A-la-Mode and even improving on it in the interweaving of disparate sections. Her friends, probably Ravenscroft, Otway and possibly Wycherley, had read and listened to it before she gave it to Betterton, and their response had been encouraging. Much depended on the performance, however. Appreciating the popularity of the Duke’s Company comics, she had written the farcical parts of Haunce and his cash-keeper Gload to exploit their talents. The roles were potentially very funny, but the actions needed to be slick, and the confusion between Alonzo and Haunce maintained by careful attention to costume and gesture. The part of Haunce might have been intended for Angel whom she knew as a crowd-puller since she had used him as Fallatius in The Forc’d Marriage. However, she feared his propensity to develop his own buffoonery.14
Once rehearsals began, Behn’s heart sank. Perhaps no one at the Duke’s could really animate her gay couple, although the actress, Jane Long, played sprightly girls reasonably well, was appreciated by Betterton, and may have played Euphemia. The real horror was the comic who was clearly not learning his lines. She was angry but kept strategically quiet. Then she suffered another setback. Ravenscroft had apparently promised a prologue and gone off to write it, or so he said. In fact, as she discovered later, he had contracted a bout of venereal disease and was taking the cure of sweating and mercury. The pain of both affliction and cure banished his promise from his head and no prologue arrived. As for the epilogue, this was hurriedly supplied from another unknown source. Despite her usual concern to keep everyone as favourable to her as possible, Behn could not express gratitude. This was strange since the epilogue was no better or worse than others of the time. Perhaps the problems were its mockery of Dryden whom she admired and the comparison it made between her and her famous compatriot, Mary Carleton, the ‘German Princess’. Carleton had just been hanged for pilfering, and pamphlets were tumbling from the presses describing her career from her early days in Canterbury to her last years of roguery. Behn was uneasy at her art’s being compared with this counterfeiting:
Hiss ’em and cry ’em down, ’tis all in vain,
Incorrigible Sciblers can’t abstain...
...sad experience our eyes convinces,
That damn’s their Playes which hang’d the German Princess.
The Dutch Lover was performed in February, with the King in the audience. Behn too was there and she distinctly heard a man mock the play before it began—because it was by a woman. The remark stung her, especially as she enjoyed using her sex to advantage: it was a novelty still and made the prologue and epilogue more piquant when spoken by a pretty actress. But, between prologue and epilogue, her sex was immaterial and this prejudiced damning irritated her profoundly. Then misery joined irritation when Behn realised that the play itself was undoubtedly a flop. She felt bitter towards the audience but, like Edward Howard and Ravenscroft, she mainly blamed the actors. She had reason. The actor playing Haunce, probably Angel, was adlibbing ‘with a great deal of idle stuff, which I was wholly unacquainted with’.
The complaint that actors strayed too far from the written part out of ‘Pitiful Ambition’ had been most famously made in Hamlet’s advice to the clowns to ‘speak no more, than is set down’. In his Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton (1710), Charles Gildon claimed that extemporising was ‘too frequently done by some of our popular but half Comedians’. Behn was in good company in her criticism, but, since she would have to go on working with the actors, she did not make it too stern, and she did not name and shame when she came to lament in print. To add insult to Behn’s injury, some Jonsonian, probably Shadwell, though it might even have been Howard, dared to suggest that it was the crowded, unregulated nature of The Dutch Lover that made it fail. She knew exactly what she thought of men’s obsession with dramatic rules and with Ben Jonson. She had also been insulted as uneducated. This made her furious. Here Shakespeare was again a comfort: his lack of training made him a good ally.
Despite its failure on the stage, Behn published the play in the following year. Anti-Dutch feeling was strong and satiric works such as Hogan-Moganides: Or, The Dutch Hudibras were encouraging the mood. But, if she had some slight propagandist aim, her main one, beyond money, was to respond to her self-appointed critics and the actors who had combined to render her best-written play a flop. So, like Ravenscroft (and Ben Jonson, though she did not make the parallel), Behn argued her case to the reader in an epistle. Realising that the pique displayed by Edward Howard and mocked by Shadwell and by The Rehearsal—‘the vulgar never understand us,’ says Mr. Bays—was not the best defence, she wrote in burlesque mode, using the abusive prologue style. Her butt was the absurd intellectual pretension of men and its connection with dramatic rules.
It was common enough to denigrate one’s own work in prefaces: Dryden was always doing it when he addressed the great. Fewer playwrights had the temerity to denigrate the actual business of play-writing, as Behn proceeded to do. Indeed she was one of the very few writers to dare to undermine the basic classical assumption that art should instruct and delight. Throughout the century the stage had been attacked by Puritans as a pernicious influence on the morals of spectators. Playwrights like Jonson had sought to counter this by urging the ethical and moral base of their work—certainly Dryden did so, but even Thomas Sydserff in his dedication of the light confection, Tarugo’s Wiles, claimed that his ‘Comical Trifle’ had ‘like most other Plays... its useful moralities’. Behn disagreed, and she regarded the attitude as a dangerous holdover from the time leading up to Civil War, when politics and theatre were defined by religion. She did not share the desire for drama or politics to be primarily ethical, for she saw this desire as coercive to others. She herself was writing to make money by pleasing those who paid for their seats; she suspected others of doing the same. Spectators came to the theatre from idleness and desire for amusement, not for edification.15
Behn was especially annoyed by the complacency of the bulky, arrogant, and dull Shadwell, avatar of the huge Ben Jonson. His plays were as naughty as anyone else’s but he prated constantly of moral purpose.16 He also boasted of his learning. Perhaps the tedium of sermons heard during her childhood fuelled Behn’s contempt for the learned fools ‘pestering’ their hearers, but she was also in fashion. Her acquaintance, the cleric Thomas Sprat, had negotiated the Restoration for himself and the new Royal Society by setting science on a firm apolitical and utilitarian basis. It had to be apolitical since the pursuit of science was tainted by its use in Interregnum political agendas of recreating society and it needed to be utilitarian in the Baconian mode to separate its business from sterile speculation and silly empiricism. In his History of the Royal Society, which created the image that body wanted of itself, Sprat described fanaticism and pedantry as the enemies of knowledge. In similar vein, John Eachard mocked the custom of forcing a classical education on boys, ‘let their parts be never so low and pitiful’.17 He asked ‘whether it be unavoidably necessary to keep Lads to sixteen or seventeen years of Age, in pure slavery to a few Latin and Greek words’ instead of letting them read English authors, and he commented, ‘you shall have Lads that are arch knaves at the Nominative Case, an
d that have a notable quick Eye at spying out the Verb, who for want of reading such common and familiar books, shall understand no more of what is very plain and easie, than a well educated Dog or Horse.’18 Behn did not despise classical education, but she did take Eachard’s attitude, that knowing ‘how many Nuts and Apples Tityrus had for his Supper’ was less important than commonsense. Memory was not knowledge.19
Despite such contempt and despite admission of her own lack of letters, however, Behn was eager to show she was able in her epistle to mock attacks on Hobbes such as Alexander Ross’s criticism of Leviathan (Hobbes had a similar scathing attitude to wordy philosophers and so-called learned men) and with Henry More to attack Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius, a Greek Pythagorean philosopher. Hobbes and Apollonius were interesting examples since both represented alternatives to orthodox Christianity, so Behn was lightly suggesting that her thoughts were not quite as conventional and simple as was expected from a female. ‘Women were not born to read authors and censure the learned,’ remarked the wife of the diarist Evelyn.20
Male addiction to sterile learning led to an absurd drama of rules which delighted no one. Despite her sympathy with Edward Howard, Behn had already rejected the doctrine of the unities of time, place and action, as well as the necessary imitation of Ben Jonson, which Shadwell, crowing over the success of his play, The Sullen Lovers, insisted should be the practice of all playwrights. Shadwell disliked the witty couple which Behn realised was her forte; he declared the hero-rake a drinking, swearing ruffian, with an impudent ‘tomrig’ for a mistress, whose bawdy conversation only the author thought ‘brisk writing’.21 Behn was further riled by Shadwell’s division of writers into those composing for pleasure and those scribbling ‘for profit’ and by his opinion that a ‘Correct Play’ took a year at least to write, even for the ‘Wittiest Man of the Nation’. Plays such as Behn’s did not take a year to write, although they were not thereby contemptible in her view. Nor were they the most important productions of human endeavour, as some absurdly claimed, being rather ‘among the middle if not the better sort of Books’. Over a century later, Jane Austen would bemoan the fact that the umpteenth male adapter of history was more valued than the sensitive woman novelist. Behn anticipates her by implying that the crudest male pedant is preferred to one who, like herself, briskly ‘inscrib’d Comedy on the beginning of my Book’.