by Janet Todd
The habit in the upper orders of drawing up marriage contracts making provision for both husband and wife necessarily influenced the commitments people made to each other outside matrimony. Restoration comedy is full of proviso scenes like the one Behn had just written in The Dutch Lover, in which the witty pair of lovers try to regulate intimate behaviour, agreeing, for example, not to invade privacy or not to humiliate or caress the other in public. Hoyle, the lawyer, had that evening whispered a set of rules to Behn to govern their future relationship: she was not to lie and dissemble, for he recognised her proclivity, nor was she to write often, lest she grow tedious. He intended to preserve love without letting it grow possessive, but, as so often in his demands, he overdid it with his ‘Niceties and Scruples’ and Behn was stung enough to tell him that the ‘Articles’ almost seemed to her a recipe for ending their complicated love. Beside, as she pointed out, Hoyle had already broken one of them in the act of composing, since ‘They are writ with Reserves’. She was now breaking another by writing for no reason but to assure him of her ‘Eternal Love’. Perhaps she needed to disobey to keep a shred of self-esteem.
One of the areas that clearly needed regulation was the sexual. Behn’s love for Hoyle was overwhelmingly so, but he had grown weary of importunity. She agreed to scale down her demands, though, under the influence of wine and music, it was not always easy. She begged him not to misinterpret ‘my Excess of Fondness’. If she did break the agreement, it would surely be enough to let the ‘Check’ she would be given make her desist. In any case, Behn knew the score and, if she did make sexual advances, he must know it was ‘more out of Humour and Jest, than any Inclination on my side’. For, as she assured him, ‘I could sit eternall with you, without part of disturbance: Fear me not, for you are (from that) as safe as in Heaven it self.’
Behn was probably deceiving herself. Her longing went on, translated simply into desire for Hoyle’s presence, for some revelation of his ‘heart’, and for some proof that she influenced him in any way. Neither admitted they were in a power struggle, but both made it abundantly clear. Her pretences at resistance were forlorn indeed: it was so easy to declare she would ‘march off if Hoyle did not use her ‘well’, so difficult to carry out her threat when he continued simply to be himself. Inevitably she was enthralled to the bad usage—‘I grow desperate fond of you.’
To erase the effect of the Articles, Behn begged Hoyle to visit again. If she were not at home, he should try ‘over the way, where I have ingaged to Dine, there being an Entertainment on purpose to Morrow for me’. When she read over her letter, she was worried that it revealed too much of a life outside her relationship, as well as representing her as too clinging and dependent. In fact it showed her almost afraid to go out in case Hoyle happened to call. She wanted to mitigate the effect and tagged on a postscript denying that she was the sort of person the letter was portraying. She was not demanding and insistent—Hoyle far surpassed her in ‘that unnecessary Fault’.
By the next letter, Behn was again moaning about Hoyle’s coldness. Although his love was ‘the only Blessing I ask on Earth’, his manner of leaving on the last occasion argued his ‘No Love’. The result was the usual confusion of affection and mortified self-esteem: ‘My Soul is ready to burst with Pride and Indignation; and at the same time, Love, with all his Softness assails me, and will make me write; so that, between one and the other, I can express neither as I ought.’ She knew Hoyle was embarrassed by her expressions of passion: he found them artificial and sentimental, and Behn too promiscuous with her words. Full of resentment, she responded, ‘what shall I do to make you know I do not use to condescend to so much Submission, nor to tell my Heart so freely?’ She had never loved or talked ‘at the rate I do to you, since I was born’. Infatuation and resentment jostled each other: ‘You ought, Oh Faithless, and infinitely Adorable Lycidas! to know and guess my Tenderness; you ought to see it grow, and daily increase upon your Hands.’ Somewhere, Behn realised that such a man as Hoyle would not brook so many ‘oughts’. Deep down, she knew the truth: if her expressions of love were troublesome to Hoyle, it was ‘because I fancy you lessen, whilst I encrease, in Passion’.
By now a curious comfort was appearing between the self-abasement and pride: of expression itself. It did not tend towards Behn’s greater understanding of her predicament but, in its histrionics, was therapeutic and comforting. The pride is located in Hoyle’s question, why she should express herself more than other women. Why should she not, she replied, for she knew herself more skilled with words? The writing of literary complaint pulled Behn on to the stage and made her predicament theatrical and more bearable: acting, she gained some control over her self and thus over herself in the relationship. She could be Dido or Sappho lamenting their faithless lovers:
oh! you went to Joys, and left me to Torments! You went to Love alone, and left me Love and Rage, Fevers and Calentures [delirium], even Madness it self! Indeed, indeed, my Soul! I know not to what degree I love you; let it suffice I do most passionately, and can have no Thoughts of any other Man, whilst I have Life. No! Reproach me, Defame me, Lampoon me, Curse me, and Kill me when I do, and let Heaven do so too.9
The final letter of the series came after an interval during which Behn had stopped writing, according to Hoyle’s wish; yet it was he who broke the silence. Although she was still in love, accepting that ‘whatever Resolutions I make in the absence of my lovely Friend, one single sight turns me all Woman, and all his,’ she could now contain desire, while lightly expressing her refusal to control it or to abide by articles: ‘I will henceforth never be wise more; never make any Vows against my Inclinations, or the little-wing’d Deity. I do not only see ’tis all in vain, but I really believe they serve only to augment my passion.’ Yet she knew, ‘’Tis only the vanity of being belov’d by me can make you countenance softness so displeasing to you.’ She saw that Hoyle had colluded in her infatuation, fanning flames whenever they appeared to be dying down, retreating when they flared up. Their relationship had been a power struggle for him from the start, hence the speed with which he jumped on any incipient bid for power on her side. He had, too, tormented her with failings he paradoxically wanted to reveal in himself: so he rebuked her for loving other men when it was he who had been unfaithful or cold.
Hoyle had also been wilfully cruel. Knowing she wanted to see him, he had yet passed by the end of her street without calling. He had been seen—for Behn spied on him though she knew he disliked it—in any number of coffee houses, ‘squandering away’ his time. When he did come, he was dull and melancholy because he resented her and could not be merry before her oppressive affection. She imagined him saying he was ‘a Fellow that do not desire to be pleas’d’. Then, the moment she stopped trying to please him, he was back demanding to know where her ‘Good-Nature’ had gone.10
The relationship with Hoyle seems the dominating one of Behn’s life, exploited by her and others when they wanted to make amorous images for good or ill. Ironically, it may not have been consummated or at least have been always sexually unsatisfactory. Yet it was not the less intense for that. As a bisexually inclined woman, Behn wanted sexual closeness but may not have longed for penetration by a man. What she clearly desired was emotional security, the very security against which her personality seemed to rebel. Behn had pointed out in one letter that she had no domestic ties, no parents or siblings who would care what she did, nobody to fear. So she could make choice of (and needed) an emotional tie, take someone to love without any family pressure for marriage. Yet, such apparently desirable freedom brought greater problems than anyone caught in family and marriage could appreciate. The failures of love, perhaps inevitable in so unconventional a person, could in the end be blamed only on oneself. She had chosen ill.
Roger Morrice, a Presbyterian cleric ejected from his living after the Restoration, kept a register of events from 1677 to 1691. In 1687 he had occasion to mention Hoyle and he noted that it was ‘too publickly known that M
r Hoyle 10. or 12. yeares since kept Mrs. Beane—’. This was probably the time. Behn’s failure with The Dutch Lover perhaps made a keeping arrangement desirable and it may have lasted for a few months, maybe longer. Friends were no doubt amused at the pair and their efforts to modify their strong and independent personalities, for Aphra Behn could not have been the easiest woman to ‘keep’. But to be part of a recognised couple, even an unconventional one, had some sweet social aspects and, for a public woman, be she actress or writer, to be kept was acceptable. Although both might have gained respectability from a match, Aphra Behn as a wife and Hoyle as a married man less open to charges of buggery, they did not marry. A lampoonist suggested he, like Ravenscroft, helped her with plays instead of marrying her, implying that Hoyle was the one to hold back from commitment, but perhaps both were idealistic, hoping for a relationship of love and affection without external ties. Perhaps neither wanted to be trapped in the familial vortex of domestic needs.
Roger Morrice ended his comment on Behn and Hoyle by mentioning a ‘difference between them’. He supposed that ‘they two had interrupted all acquaintance many yeares since.’ He was mistaken. Behn did not interrupt acquaintance with anyone if she could help it and, if she had to relieve herself of malice or resentment, it was better to do it in private to a few chosen listeners. There was no sense for a public woman to open herself to the malignancy of men—in her penultimate letter Behn had imagined Hoyle ‘Lampooning’ her. Also, she never ‘interrupted all acquaintance’ with Hoyle. Indeed, for all the unsatisfactory nature of the tie, perhaps because of it, he remained a potent force in her life. Intellectually exciting, controlled when it came to giving affection or pity, uncontrolled in anger and resentment, potential and enigmatic in his silences, Hoyle persisted as an object of fascination even when the sexual longing for him began to subside. Behn would desire other men sexually, but no one rivalled Jack Hoyle in her imaginative and emotional life.
As her works tumbled out over the next years, it starts to seem as though the beloved Hoyle were both lamented and used. Without such obsessive love, Behn probably would not have written much of what she did write and without the freedom he forced on her she may not have continued writing at all. As it was, her bonding with such a man and the fact that she had no family to ‘fear’ meant that she could mount in her work the sort of criticism of the family and of family values, of Christian, social and economic marriage and any legalised bonds, that few women could begin to make in the centuries to come.
In political terms, Hoyle probably intensified Behn’s Royalism. He was an open republican, far more opinionated than Scot had been, and someone to react against rather than follow, when, much later, Behn did come close to investigating aspects of the relationship: in her first attributed prose fiction, Love-Letters, she made the heroine into a staunch Royalist and the seductive man into an opponent of any authority except his own. Republicanism was thus a sort of egomania, a ludicrous sense of one’s own importance that could not brook any hierarchy without the self on top. Democracy became synonymous with brutal control of others, rather than with the freedom to which it was erroneously linked, while monarchy, by providing a single overarching relationship, freed people in all other respects and relations. If Behn could not control her feelings for a man whom she ought not to love at such a rate, she could at least show some independence by opposing his psychologically suspect political views.
As the affair concluded its infatuated phase, Behn needed some immediate relief. This might be gained through histrionics, through writing words that such a man as Hoyle might have spoken but which she, Behn, could control. She could imagine what it was like being Hoyle, imitate to gain a little of his authority and to distance him. The friend with whom she had had supper after Hoyle’s departure and to whom she had read out part of her new play considered the main character like Hoyle. Some readers assume this refers to Willmore, the hero of Behn’s most famous play, The Rover. But Willmore is talkative, good natured and securely Royalist and the author laughs at and with him. She was not yet ready to laugh at Hoyle. More likely, the reference is to the hero of the next play Behn wrote, the exotic and arrogant potentate, Abdelazer.
Love in Fantastique Triumph satt
Whilst Bleeding Hearts a round him flow’d,
For whom Fresh paines he did Create,
And strange Tyranick power he show’d;
From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire,
Which round about in sport he hurl’d;
But ’twas from mine, he took desire,
Enough to undo the Amorous World.
From me he took his sighs and tears,
From thee his Pride and Crueltie;
From me his Languishments and Feares,
And every Killing Dart from thee;
Thus thou and I, the God have arm’d,
And sett him up a Deity;
But my poor Heart alone is harm’d,
Whilst thine the Victor is, and free.11
When Aphra Behn published these powerful verses in her collection of poetry in 1684 as ‘Song. Love Arm’d’, she placed them next to ‘Our Cabal’ which, starting light-heartedly enough in the May Day party, ended with contemplating the enigmatic and compelling character of Lycidas, the ‘haughty Swain’ whose eyes killed with ‘Fierceness, not with Love’. It cannot have been accidental that ‘Love Arm’d’, her most ferocious depiction of desire, was brought into such close contact with the main pseudonym of Hoyle.12 If she had ever thought that she or anyone else could tame or domesticate a libertine, Behn had changed her mind. The truly selfish man in sex or ambition was beyond female sway. ‘Love Arm’d’ had been written for her relentless tragedy, Abdelazer, ordered by the enthralled Queen to be sung at the beginning of the play for the cruel Moorish general, Abdelazer. It makes him the embodiment of obsessive female love or lust in a work that circles round the themes of sexual submission and domination.
Apart from her sexual longings for Hoyle, Behn, ever the professional, was inspired in Abdelazer by the new fashion for extreme tragedy. It was a curious mode, since audiences simultaneously admired and mocked it and since it co-existed with a liking for cynical dramas which more obviously reflected the spectators’ own compromised principles and political manoeuvrings. In May 1674, the young Nathaniel Lee had had an interesting failure with his first play Nero, an intense depiction of the psychology of power, in which the central character represented motiveless evil and expanding energy within a plot of family murder. There had been power-hungry men in plenty on the Restoration stage—Dryden’s Almanzor in The Conquest of Granada being one of the most famous—but they were usually reconciled or tamed at the end. Lee’s Nero was neither. A similar extreme play, put on at the Duke’s in the summer of 1673, was Elkanah Settle’s Empress of Morocco, where a mother poisons her son so as to put her lover on the throne. Dryden was incensed at the immoderation, perhaps because it exaggerated tendencies in his own work.
Christendom used alien Islam for a variety of purposes, from erotic titillation to religious historiography, but, in the seventeenth century, there was a growing scholarly interest in the social and ideological aspects of the faith. In the early years, high churchmen had studied Arabic scholarship as part of the search for pure biblical texts.13 In the later, Islamic doctrine was used to bolster up Unitarian arguments about the Christian God and to challenge orthodox theology. Behn fitted this tradition, revealing again the scepticism she had felt in Surinam and suggested in her address before The Dutch Lover. The ‘case of Sanctity was first ordain’d, / To cheat the honest world’, she wrote, and she expressed Abdelazer’s scorn for the mob in religious terms: ‘The giddy Rout are guided by Religion, / More than by Justice, Reason, or Allegiance.’ The religion she had in mind was probably Protestant Dissent, now becoming increasingly vocal: for James, Duke of York, the heir to the throne, had openly embraced Roman Catholicism and England was feeling very Protestant indeed.
Islam and exotic southern Europe coul
d also be used politically to comment on the northern Christian world, mainly because it was assumed that, in Muslim countries, power was not constrained by moral considerations but could course through individuals in a pure way. So, within Islam or a single Muslim, the political philosophies that fascinated the English could be embodied. This was not only hereditary kingship, seemingly both natural and biblical, but also the rule of the most masterful male, utterly dominating both women and weak or morally bound men.
Like Dryden’s great political drama, The Conquest of Granada, Behn’s tragedy was set in Spain and turned on the hatred of Muslim and Christian. It had, however, a very tenuous connection with history, converting as it did the excessively pious fifteenth-century Queen Isabella into a lust-crazed murderer. Far more it drew on literature, and Behn’s Moor came from a Renaissance theatrical tradition of rationally villainous Muslims. Such men cannot blush, because of their swarthy skin, are faithless, fearless, contemptuous of women and adept at plotting. Given her interest in comparative religion, Behn may also have drawn on Alexander Ross’s translation of the Koran from French, which depicted a cunning and sensual Mohammed establishing a religion not of conscience but of power.14
The story of Abdelazer centres on the Moor, Abdelazer, whose dark skin represents the devilish compact of Lee’s Nero. Wanting to revenge the ousting of his father by the Spanish, he destroys most of the royal Spanish family and much of their court. His instrument is the equally cruel Spanish Queen, who kills her husband, connives in the murder of one son and declares the other, Philip, a bastard, all through infatuation with Abdelazer. She is an ageing beauty, however, and, though she can still work magic on others including a cardinal, she is no longer loved by the Moor. When she has served her turn, he treats her as he has persuaded her to treat so many of her family: he has her murdered.