Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  In this criticism of pretension, Shadwell was certainly a target. So, possibly, was Dryden, despite her probable indebtedness to his work. Behn seems to be mocking the smug prologue Dryden wrote to the University of Oxford in 1673, in which he described dramatists coming there to be taught literary precepts. In Oxford, poetry was an ‘Art’, Dryden declared, where in London it was merely a ‘Trade’. There followed an implied attack on the unlearned who could ‘ne’er Spell Grammar’ and who ‘made plays ‘the Lucretian way’ out of ‘so many Huddled Atoms’, then dignified their ignorance as following nature.22 If Behn did have Dryden in mind, however, she was not foolish enough openly to include him in any attack and, at the appropriate moment in her epistle, she excluded him from her statement that no man of today was writing beyond the scope of a woman. Dryden was, in her eyes, still the best dramatist around.

  The ‘Epistle to the Reader’ gives an impression of a lively gossipy, rowdy, abusive and vociferous theatre. Plays were not greeted with a reverential hush; authors were not transcendental dramatists, on a plane above ordinary life, but jobbing playwrights who collaborated with many others to realise their work. Not isolated artists, they inhabited an ordinary economic and contingent world, fighting to be heard for money above the din of seducing and selling.

  One man who well realised that art could not be separated from ordinary life was Edward Ravenscroft. When Behn knew that his defection over the prologue was not due to carelessness but sickness, she rallied him in a comic verse epistle. Their relationship was based on the theatre; so fittingly she wrote in different characters, at one point a conventional lyric poet, interrupted by the sudden vision of the tub, at another, a forthright friend speaking in man-to-man tones of venereal disease, tumescence and prostitution.

  Behn’s ‘Letter to a Brother of the Pen in Tribulation’ wittily parallels Ravenscroft’s compulsory withdrawal for treatment with the religious self-mortification of Lent. The parallel was apt, for the cure involved fasting and avoiding meat. Syphilis had moist issue; so, following the notion of humours, to counteract it the patient had to eat dry biscuit, almonds and currants. Savile complained to Rochester that he was once confined to ‘dry mutton & dyett drinke’, while Ravenscroft’s hard, dry food should mortify ‘Soul and Body’.23 Since the condition was rampant, there were many potions around for venereal disease. Physicians prescribed china, sassafras and sasparilla root, antimony, coriander, raisins and liquorice, all to be drunk instead of beer. Some such potion had been given to Ravenscroft, a ‘Damn’d Penetential Drink, that will infuse / Dull Principles into thy Grateful Muse’. He was now sitting in a sweating tub to sweat out the disease, counterfeiting summer as Behn whimsically put it: ‘Much good may’t do thee; but ’tis thought thy Brain / E’er long will wish for cooler Days again.’

  Now she knew the truth, she could mock Ravenscroft for his modest pretence that he had been away writing plays. Since the disease must have been contracted through copulation, his predicament revealed what he had in fact been doing:

  who thought thy Wit

  An Interlude of Whoring would admit?

  To Poetry no more thou’lt be inclin’d,

  Unless in Verse to damn all Woman-kind:

  And ’tis but Just thou shouldst in Rancor grow

  Against that Sex that has Confin’d thee so....

  ...ev’ry Grove does in its Pride appear:

  Whilst thou poor Damon in close Rooms art pent,

  Where hardly thy own Breath can find a vent.

  Yet that too is a Heaven, compar’d to th’Task

  Of Codling every Morning in a Cask.

  Now I could curse this Female, but I know,

  She needs it not, that thus cou’d handle you.

  Besides, that Vengeance does to thee belong,

  And ’twere Injustice to disarm thy Tongue.

  Curse then, dear Swain, that all the Youth may hear,

  And from thy dire Mishap be taught to fear.

  Curse till thou hast undone the Race, and all

  That did contribute to thy Spring and Fall.24

  Aphra Behn would not always be so light-hearted with men.

  Chapter 14

  John Hoyle and Abdelazer

  ‘mischievous usurper of my Peace’

  Those friends who had read ‘Our Cabal’ and noted the powerful portrait of John Hoyle may have anticipated Aphra Behn’s fate. Hoyle was a pitiless and violent man who, when still a student at Gray’s Inn in August 1663, had been on a capital charge for stabbing an unarmed watchmaker in the street, then fleeing from the scene. He left his victim to die over six painful days. Perhaps bribery made the jury bring in a verdict of ‘Ignoramus’ despite the number of hostile witnesses: lawyer Hoyle was frequently lucky in his brushes with the law. Behn may have been unaware of this incident, for Hoyle was taciturn when he wanted to be and neither he nor she was frank about the past. Her outline in ‘Our Cabal’ indicates that she apprehended the authority and violence of Hoyle’s character, as well as his sexual bent; yet she did not keep her distance, and soon she was infatuated with a man whose attraction partly lay in his self-absorption.

  The catalyst was music, which always aroused Behn. John Banister, the King’s musician, had instituted public concerts or music meetings in his house in Whitefriars near where she lodged.1 They were mainly of new music, sometimes his own compositions, sometimes the popular songs and airs of the day. On payment of a shilling each, the audience assembled at five or seven in the evening in a room with seats and tables, where they could purchase refreshment of wine, cake and ale. The musicians sat in a box behind a curtain.2

  On one occasion Behn heard passionate songs sung by a Mr P, possibly Henry Purcell or his brother, so powerful that she could declare, ‘If I can live, and hear you sing, / No other Forces can my Soul subdue.’3 On another, she encountered John Hoyle and was overwhelmed by the unison of sweet sound and male attraction. ‘One Charme might have secur’d a Victory, / Both, rais’d the Pleasure even to Extasie / ... Beauty and Musick must the Soul disarme.’4

  Music turned admiration into love. Since Hoyle too was responding to the singing, it was a fine opportunity for voyeurism: his ‘Body easey and all tempting lay, / Inspiring wishes which the Eyes betray’ in anyone like herself gazing too much. The image is sensuous and baroque, as the object of Behn’s gaze turns into a young angel listening raptly to the music of the spheres, while lying ‘Charmingly Extended on a Cloud’.

  The courtship was only partly amusing if her poetry can be credited. When Hoyle as Amyntas sent Behn some verses written as if made in a dream, she replied in poetry herself. The result was an intimate portrait. She had been awakened by a page, either hers (the same, perhaps, who had run to Jeffrey Boys with a copy of her second play) or more likely Hoyle’s, perhaps a Benjamin Bourne but here called Bellario after a woman disguised as a page and causing a jealous stabbing in Fletcher’s famous play Philaster. In this allusion to a beloved of indeterminate gender, Behn may be allowing herself a dig at Hoyle’s other proclivities. The page brought a verse message from Hoyle: ‘Thy Name to my glad Ear was brought: / Amyntas! cry’d the Page.’ Behn broke the seal with trembling hands and let the amorous words wash over her as she tried to conceal her smiles and blushes. Of course she failed and the boy may have made a saucy remark. In her response, Behn praised Hoyle’s eloquence—he wrote, she assured him, ‘beyond the Sence... / Of ev’ry scribling Lovers common Art’. Hoyle had power whether he rallied or retreated, which suggested that he alternated the two. He was not a comfortable man to love.

  A similar impression comes from verses entitled ‘The Return’ which caught the arrogance of the seducer and accused him of seeking ‘Glory... when you rifle the Spoil’. It was not sex but conquest Hoyle desired, as Behn had remarked as early as ‘Our Cabal’. His enjoyment was in the humbling of female pride. A ‘Tyrant was never secure in his Throne’ and he might one day be served as he was serving—perhaps Behn imagined herself turning the tables.
Mostly, however, she felt the victim of love, the duped of Cupid.

  Having given herself up completely to a relationship at last, Behn hoped for some satisfaction from it even if, as seems likely, she had to be the more forward in love-making. In ‘Our Cabal’, she had noted Hoyle’s love of young men, but had grumbled only as it removed an eligible man from female grasp. Although there exists a letter purportedly blaming Hoyle for his sexual preference, it is probably bogus since, in her published works, Behn easily (in theory) accepted homosexuality for men or women as part of sexual life—although, like others, she was easier with the classically sanctioned love of youths than with adult male love.5 Yet, she clearly did have sexual problems with Hoyle, which may or may not have been connected with his bisexuality. There are simply too many descriptions both of male impotence and of male retreat from sex for there not to have been some autobiographical resonance, and Hoyle was Aphra Behn’s main lover.

  Most of the time she knew her hold tenuous. Hoyle dominated her thoughts but she did not dominate his. She responded more quickly than he and could not hold back. Here Behn was falling into conventional gender stereotypes and she knew it: the loving female and the self-reliant male.

  She could not hide her uneasiness from her friends. ‘Amoret’, whom Behn had herself tried to console on the May Day picnic, asked why she had lost her sparkle. Behn replied in the pastoral verse with which she so often masked her vulnerability and which converted feelings into something manageable. She imagined Hoyle adorned with tributes from women, expecting further conquest. He pretended insouciance but was all calculation and desire for sexual power. Again she told of his silences, his moodiness, the harshness that her infatuation modified, his magnetism and male allure. In the dance in Arcadia into which this complex relationship had been translated, Behn was his partner:

  To whom much Passion he did Vow,

  And much his Eyes and Sighs did show;

  And both imploy’d with so much Art,

  I strove in vain to guard my Heart;

  And ere the Night our Revels crost,

  I was intirely won and lost.

  Like Carola Harsnett with Boys, Elizabeth Barry was warned not to fall for Hoyle herself. Yet Behn must not have feared this much, for Barry had more important men in her sight. Rather, Behn was ending with a graceful compliment to the irresistible ones, Elizabeth Barry and John Hoyle. She loved both in different ways.

  The relationship of Aphra Behn and Jack Hoyle was fraught. Behn was an outgoing, talkative woman; Hoyle was moody and self-centred. Both were used to freedom. Soon Hoyle found Behn overwhelming, too talkative, too demanding. She suggested they moderate their relationship by not being together all the time, hoping he would not agree, though, like most using the ploy, she knew he would. She also realised that, if she saw less of him, she should also avoid writing.

  Hoyle’s absence prevented her sexual advances, and yet Behn was more than ever in thrall to him, more than ever desiring. Even when he was ill she wrote of him as an exotic potentate, an ‘Eastern Monarch’. It was a figure that fascinated the Restoration, but Behn turned it into an image of female masochism. If he died, women would live melancholy and lovesick, but she, ‘Astrea’, who had the happiness ‘To be ador’d by thee, and to adore thee most’ would die with him. Had he lived in ancient times, in the world of Plutarch’s Lives, he would have changed the course of history, since Cleopatra and Caesar would both have fallen for him.

  Possibly at this point Behn wrote a series of self-revealing and cajoling letters, catching the taste of sweet honey that held a sting. After her death, the letters were published, first as a separate short story and then as a part of her biography. It is never easy to separate fact and fiction in Behn and these writings are no exception, but, while conforming to a male stereotype of romantic woman lamenting her cruel treatment and propensity to love, they may also have served as personal letters sent to the arrogant Jack Hoyle.6 If so—and I am tentatively accepting them as such—Behn probably sent them off through her boy and Hoyle replied through his, perhaps the child Benjamin Bourne, who may have brought the verses at the start of the affair.

  Behn began by explaining her desire for a separation. Because he was tired of her talkativeness, probably her sexual demands, and certainly her flirtatious, flighty behaviour in public, Hoyle had grown cold and even more taciturn. Cruelly, he had obeyed her request for distance and Behn was now writing after a period of silence to complain of his neglect. He had let her know that he was going to have a life apart from her from now on, intending to take up public dancing. Inevitably she wanted his partners to be ‘Ill-natur’d, Ill-dress’d, Ill-fashion’d, and Unconversable’. She also forlornly hoped that his time would be ruined by thoughts of her. She could not pretend that she was not more miserable than he, however, that she was not ‘profoundly Melancholy’. Her sprightly heroine Euphemia from The Dutch Lover would not have given so much away.

  Then out of the blue Hoyle did come to her, bringing with him a coveted letter. Behn had a crowd of other visitors and, since Hoyle did not want it known that he now had a relationship with her, she did not run to embrace him as she wanted to do. But she could not refrain from signing to him how much she desired him to stay. Indeed she may have ‘acted even imprudently to make my Soul be understood’. Hoyle was unimpressed, irritated no doubt at finding her yet again in company; he took umbrage, ignored her frantic efforts to detain him, and left with his letter, even though he knew that she ‘burst to speak’ with him. It was a little miming drama that could have taken place on the stage as well as in a private room.

  Inevitably Behn wanted Hoyle to come again but in a better temper. She had yet to learn that, contrary to what French romances indicated, women could not easily affect male temperament. Perhaps he did come, for the next letter referred to some discussion of their relationship. This time she was constrained by his presence, having to prevent herself from saying what she would have been pained to see taken amiss. What then was she doing writing now?

  though I scorn to guard my Tongue, as hoping ’twill never offend willingly, yet I can, with much adoe, hold it, when I have a great mind to say a Thousand Things, I know will be taken in an ill sense. Possibly you will wonder what compells me to write, what moves me to send where I find so little Welcome; nay, where I meet with such Returns, it may be I wonder too.

  Since she had last written, Hoyle had seemingly continued his tormenting of her in public. Banister’s music meetings were inextricably bound up with her lover in her mind. So it was especially cruel when, at a recent one of these, he had refused to sit next to her. It was hardly the action of a friend and fitted oddly with his statement that it was she who had changed: ‘You say I am chang’d... [but] whatever I was since you knew me, believe I am still the same in Soul and Thought.’7

  When Behn took up her pen again after some time of silence, she found, as many writers of love letters before her, that she was becoming interested in her own psychology. Since Hoyle had always set up for ‘Prudence and Discretion’, she had been typed, femininely, as indiscreet and impetuous. So she found risible Hoyle’s urging her not to deceive him: ‘you need not have caution’d me, who so naturally hate those little Arts of my Sex, that I often run on freedoms, that may well enough bear a Censure from People so scrupulous as Lycidas.’ She was a gambler, venturing against the odds, hazarding all while he chanced little. Uselessly she blamed Hoyle for the inequality of love, in a way revelling in her own feelings as inherently superior:

  you woud have me give, and you, like a Miser, wou’d distribute nothing. Greedy Lycidas! Unconscionable! and Ungenerous! You wou’d not be in Love for all the World, yet wish I were so, Uncharitable!—Wou’d my Fever cure you? Or a Curse on me make you Bless’d?8

  Then Hoyle visited again and was so unexpectedly kind and tender he caught Behn off her guard. He now became her ‘Soul’s Delight’, while she would be his, ‘befal me what will’. The evening was wonderful. He indulged in those intimac
ies and caresses that she so much wanted from him. There had been no attempt at sexual intercourse and so there was nothing for him to be disturbed about, but she was pleased to know that he could be ‘soft and dear when he please, to put off his haughty Pride’. So she could see not a fundamentally self-centred man, intent on his own pleasure, but a basically kind one, hiding his true nature, his ‘native sweet Temper’. It was a myth into which she vigorously threw herself. If he continued to show love as now and if, as he assured her, he did indeed love her despite all appearances to the contrary, she begged him to continue in his ‘plain-dealing’, for she could be ‘purchased with Softness, and dear Words, and kind Expressions, sweet Eyes, and a low Voice’. The evening was so heady that Behn simply could not go to bed, but stayed up to write to Hoyle. She finished her letter with no shred of the caution she knew she should show, but against which her whole being revolted: ‘I love thee dearly, passionately, and tenderly, and am resolv’d to be eternally. My only dear Delight, and Joy of my Life, thy Astrea’

  As the next letter showed, the moment did not last. The pair had been in a tavern or at a friend’s house and, after Hoyle had gone, Behn stayed on for supper, reading out an act of her new play to a common friend. She was pleased to receive compliments for her depiction of the hero, who was, it was said, the image of Hoyle. The friend was a gallant man, Aphra Behn was known to love gallantry, and he did not quite comprehend the depth of her present infatuation. Thus he thought, after they had all supped together and grown mellow, that there might be room for another man in her life. So he began ‘some rallying Love-discourse’, to which he found her unresponsive—or so Behn assured Hoyle. The friend perceived that Hoyle’s image still dominated her mind and he teased her by saying that Hoyle was not a handsome man. Another man was called over to confirm the opinion, but he agreed with Behn, that Hoyle was indeed handsome. This third man was named ‘Philly’ in the letter and it is just possible that this is a reference to Lord L’Isle, the ‘Philaster’ of the dedication to The Young King. More likely, however, it was simply another playwright or lawyer of middling status.