by Janet Todd
For her previous works, Behn had either invented her plot, albeit on conventional lines, or taken it loosely from books. Considering the scorn felt for those who borrowed by those who did not have to write for money, she must have had some trepidation when, for Abdelazer, she set about turning another person’s play into her own. The Rehearsal cannot have helped: one joke on Mr Bays the playwright was that he simply cribbed from other men’s works. In fact, Dryden made no bones about his practice and explained how hard-pressed dramatists were forced to borrow, usually from French plots.15 Shadwell too borrowed a good deal and was careful to name his sources and collaborators. In his 1675 version of Psyche, for example, he acknowledged not only French originals of Molière, Corneille and Quinault, but also the contribution of the composer, Matthew Locke, and the producer Thomas Betterton. Aphra Behn was secretive, however; so she opened herself to charges of plagiarism which the form of adaptation did not deserve.
In his English Dramatick Poets, Langbaine wrote of Abdelazer that it was ‘originally an old Play of Marloes, call’d Lusts Dominion, or The Lascivious Queen, a Tragedy written about Forty years ago, tho’ printed in octavo, Lond., 1661’. But, as well as accusing, Langbaine compliments: Behn ‘has much improv’d it throughout’.16 He was right. In spite of following the old play closely, her version has more speedy and shorter speeches, although occasionally this makes the devilish Abdelazer a slightly comic villain in the lively mode of Richard III. It was also more dramatic, with juxtapositions far more stylish than anything in the source.17 Crowded public scenes follow private ones, formal speeches soliloquies; rhetoric changes in a line. Kneeling by the dying Queen whom he has ordered killed, Abdelazer gives a moving performance of a man in grief, only to term her his greatest plague immediately she dies. Behn had not entirely abandoned her device of whispering, so mocked by The Rehearsal, but she did not make it so central to this play, which is full of sounds, from songs to the clanking of swords, from whispers to declamations. So an essentially monothematic work is given some variety.18
Abdelazer retains the monstrousness of his source, Eleazer in Lusts Dominion, and his strangeness is stressed, his wearing of exotic clothes and his faked profession of Christianity, but Behn invites her audience to give him a little sympathy, especially in his love for his wife, Florella. Although she emphasises difference, she downplays references to his actual appearance. The seventeenth century confused Moor and Negro, frequently combining their physical characteristics: the Moor in Lusts Dominion had been more Negro than Moor, but in Behn’s play it is the reverse. Abdelazer is conscious, even touchy about his race and colour. So he immediately takes disbelief in the Queen’s adultery as a slighting of himself: ‘what is there here, / Or in my Soul, or Person, may not be belov’d?’ When the Queen’s daughter declares her long-standing love for the handsome Alonzo, Abdelazer ascribes it again to his appearance, to ‘Nature’, that has ‘dy’d my skin / With this ungrateful colour’ and insists on an aesthetic of blackness, in which he is ‘soft and smooth as polisht Ebony’ in the dark.
The greatest change Behn made was in the ending. The original play presented a vision of overweening lust for power, finally caught in its own illusion. Philip is crowned and the wicked Queen takes the unlikely step of retiring to a life of penitence. In Behn’s play, Abdelazer is destroyed by his own follower and the Queen, after wishing for more sons to kill for her lover, dies a dramatically amorous death, fitting end to a career which in both plays mixed extravagant savagery and farce.
Immediately after the Restoration, plays were political in a Royalist way, avoiding many of the awkward questions avidly discussed during the previous twenty years. By the early 1670s, however, Dryden, Lee, Settle and Otway were interrogating state and church in their heroic plays, as well as power, its potential obscenity, the violence and destruction it could imply. Although Abdelazer seems in this mould and suggests a new departure for Behn, the play was not primarily theoretical, and it does not investigate the possible questions of usurpation, right to rule, political morality and law.19 (She was of course working with an old Renaissance play and some of its conceptions remained: one was Abdelazer’s notion of a king as a kind of god, the apex of earthly glory, rather a different notion from the Stuart sense of divine right depicted in The Amorous Prince and The Young King. There the concept shored up a human weakness and seemed, above all, a prerequisite of social order.) Despite regarding themselves as good monarchists, Otway and others portrayed monstrous regal tyrants who seemed to undermine the patriarchal theory of kingship on which their Royalism was based.20 Their violent chaotic tragedies had no convincing Shakespearean restoration of order and were quite unlike Hamlet or Macbeth. Behn might have realised how easy it was to slip from this position into the republicanism of Hoyle or Algernon Sidney, who ridiculed the idea that a trivial and dissipated monarch could be the father of a nation. Perhaps for this reason she saw to it that the most monstrous acts in Abdelazer were carried out by the Queen, who breaks sexual and maternal ties. An unmaternal mother is horrific, but not necessarily politically troubling.
In any case, Behn was more interested in the psychological than the political side of the story, the impossibility of fulfilling human desire. Spurred on by experience, she could in heroic tragedy resume the interest she had shown in The Forc’d Marriage in violent and uncontrollable men. In that play, Alcippus almost upset the state as well as everyone around him by his tendency to vast rages leading to violence. The women scuttled about him, forced in the end to a masquerade of ghosts to get his attention. It may have been the picture of extreme masculinity that attracted Behn when she read Lusts Dominion and saw what it might become. The man under the influence of such a concept was unable to respect women whom he could so easily hurt and murder, while simultaneously idealising a single woman for the purity and honour which she was somehow supposed to hold for his benefit.
Behn rightly saw that such a man could not be satisfied by any woman, since none would ever be pure enough. The Queen in her play, a kind of mother to the court, must prove her love to Abdelazer alone by killing husband and sons. She becomes then a mother only for the Moor, who wishes to placate her because she still has power at court. But she is not fitting as his sexual object; he is bored by her demands, for the woman he will desire sexually will not display her sexuality. The Queen killed Abdelazer’s desire when she revealed her own, so becoming for him the ultimate whore and threatening an effeminising in himself. His most satisfying act in the play is her murder when she expects sex. It is how men deal with female passion.21
By now, Behn probably had considerable control over casting her plays. Although Abdelazer was staged at the unusual time of 3 July, when in most years hirelings rather than the regular cast were left to act in London, she was pleased that Betterton wanted to depict the Moor and she gave the major female role of the Queen to Mary Lee, converted since The Forc’d Marriage into a leading tragedienne.22 The play probably had a prologue, but it was not printed with the play, and an epilogue ‘Written by a Friend’, possibly Ravenscroft or even Otway.23 It was spoken by a child ‘Miss Ariell’ from the Nursery (perhaps the future star, Anne Bracegirdle, being raised in the Betterton household). Saucily she imagined herself growing into a woman through applause, each session adding an inch to her height and increasing her budding charms.24
Abdelazer was a moderate success, providing a dividend for shareholders of £25, a quarter of that earned by an opera spectacle like Charles Davenant’s Circe but a great deal more than Elkanah Settle’s Conquest of China for example.25 It was seen by Nell Gwyn who had long given up her acting career for establishment as a royal mistress, and by her friend Otway, who probably introduced her to Behn. Flushed with his triumph with Don Carlos, Otway was in an expansive mood and he gushed over the play to its author afterwards in a tavern. Yet Behn was not satisfied with her play. Years later in 1687, when she wrote a poem to her friend Sir Francis Fane, eulogising his new tragedy The Sacrifice, she remarked:
I Read with Pleasure, tho I Read with Shame.
The tender Lawrels which my Brows had drest,
Flag’d like young Flowers by too much Heat opprest:
The Generous Fire I felt in every Line,
Show’d me the cold, the feeble Force of mine.
Behn never tried the experiment of dramatic tragedy again. Perhaps she had no emotional need.26
Aphra Behn was back in the theatre, but her spirits did not improve at once. She was upset by her failure to please others with The Dutch Lover and herself with Abdelazer, which, with its intense portrait of erotic female obsession, may have struck too close to an aspect of her life. She did not like the fervour of her feeling for Hoyle, knowing what a drug obsessive love could become. Her safety valve, besides writing and humour, was, perhaps, emotional promiscuity.
This she may have indulged with the pretty young Emily Price, who was probably a new actress with the Duke’s and may have been the daughter of a Captain Warcup, circulator of scurrilous works, a man perhaps known to Behn through her copying activity.27 Behn had exhausted her confessional strain with Ravenscroft and Elizabeth Barry; they knew too much about her and she needed to steady her mind with a new object. Emily Price was flattered at her confidences. Behn was somebody in the theatre.
The lesbian interest, if there were one, would not have shocked the demi-mondaine circles in which she moved. Indeed, the lesbian and the female transvestite were never as unsettling for society as the male ‘molly’—partly because of an inveterate male habit of seeing all sexual activity in terms of its attraction to men and of not regarding anything as sexual that did not include penetration. A woman loving a woman was not masculinised and was often seen in training for or stimulating male love. Such lore could be entertained in the theatre and, in an anonymous play staged in 1677 called The Constant Nymph, Elizabeth Barry acted a pastoral hero pretending to be a shepherdess so as to woo a nymph called ‘Astrea’ who has declared she will never marry. Behn may have had a hand in this work or it may teasingly allude to her; it plays with the lightly erotic tie of women so common in romance, including L’Astrée, from which Behn derived her nom de plume. If not shocking in the theatre and theatrical society, however, the new feeling for Emily Price may have been unsettling for Behn. After her death, three poems implying an anxious lesbian love were published; they may have been genuine or perhaps forgeries based on her known proclivities. The last two were addressed directly to Price, the first may have been to her as well.28
‘Verses design’d by Mrs. A. Behn, to be sent to a fair Lady, that desir’d she would absent herself, to cure her Love’ describes Behn’s visit to the country. A friend or relative suggested she stay for a few weeks in the little village of Dorchester close to Oxford and she had agreed.29 She might even get on with the ‘drudge’ of writing, as Dryden did when he retired from London. But, as usual, Behn found solitude and distance little help in combating ‘bright Eyes’: love was a disease that sufferers took with them.
The second and third poems accompanied the supposed letter to Emily Price. The young woman had been teasing Behn about her retreat, knowing that, for both of them, the bustle of the town was the life’s blood. It was summer, however, and the countryside looked enchanting. Behn put on her pastoral spectacles and, ignoring signs of labouring hardship, resolutely saw nymphs and swains in ‘rural sports’. Even the rivers joining near Oxford became not just a useful confluence for traffic but a bride and bridegroom uniting for content. As for herself, she was enjoying ‘Calm... Day, and peaceful... Night’ and she reprimanded Price for her ‘deprav’d’ preference for ‘that hated Town, / Where’s not a Moment thou canst call thy own’. Either the words were forged or Behn was showing herself a mistress of styles and opinions. Or they caught a momentary mood. The third poem, a postscript to the letter, was a love song to Price from whom the poet begged affectionate acts not words; if Behn’s love is not reciprocated, she will ‘cease to live’. The peaceful nights and calm days were only relative it seems.
Apparently, Emily Price wrote briskly back to her friend. After some pleasantries she gave unwelcome news: that Behn’s failure to declare the source of Abdelazer had backfired and the adaptation had been labelled plagiarism. Even Otway had been heard maligning her, giving his opinion that the critics would not forgive her just because she was a woman. Behn replied at once. She was hurt by the allegations and by the tone of young Emily’s letter. Of course she had taken Abdelazer from Lusts Dominion: she did not hide it. And she was stung by Otway’s reported words. She knew she used her sex in a coy way to puff her work, but that her sex really had any meaning in the critical reception of her plays she disputed. Otway’s damaging remarks were strange since she had so recently been listening to his rhapsodic praise. She put it down to natural hypocrisy—good-natured young men always wanted to please company. As for her play, she would explain matters when she took ‘the pains next to appear in print’; she hoped she could get Lusts Dominion republished, so that her ‘theft’ could be the more public. Since it was Emily Price’s opinion she was anxious about, she immediately sent her a copy of the source play, so that she could agree that Behn had indeed ‘weeded and improv’d it’. She ended coldly—Emily had obviously not responded in that partly genuine, partly sophisticated way Behn had hoped. She would not be seeing her now until mid-September, she said.30
Certainly the news from the town was not inviting, but Behn had to conquer her pique. Since her next play was due on at the beginning of the Autumn season, she could not really afford to stay in the country until September. Rehearsals took a month. So, sensibly, she returned to London.
Chapter 15
Poetry in a Theatrical World
‘his pleasing Extravagance encreasing with his Liquor’
By the mid-1670s Aphra Behn had thoroughly contracted court cynicism. Her ambiguous status as widow of an obscure man and one-time kept mistress of a bisexual libertine allowed her a latitude unavailable to the respectable woman, married or unmarried. She was no longer young but still attractive, and she relished the sexual electricity in talk between men and women.
With her indifferent health, she would have been wary of bouts of the venereal diseases circulating among her friends; she may have been ‘chaste’ or she may have enjoyed a kind of safe sex or sexual foreplay, so avoiding the danger and disappointment of more. In a poem entitled ‘The Platonick Lady’, the Earl of Rochester describes what must often have happened between highly sexed men and women who feared pregnancy or pox. The old platonics of Henrietta Maria’s court and Katherine Philips’s verses are rejected for something more erotic: the woman wants to retain desire not ruin it with fulfilment, to enjoy the man in her arms, to cuddle and kiss him, to stare in his eyes, to be toyed with and ruffled, to be petted and squeezed, enjoying everything except ‘the feate’. These are the ‘sweets of Love’, affirms the lady. Foreplay was the writer’s business. Words replaced or endlessly delayed consummation.
Rochester’s own ‘sweets’ were rather different, for they were now embodied in sex with Behn’s friend Elizabeth Barry. She had been a flop in her stage debut, probably as Draxilla in Otway’s Alcibiades. The story goes that Rochester and his cronies saw a performance and found it so appalling that the Earl, a natural actor and steeped in the theatre, struck an improbable wager: that he would in six months make Barry the most convincing actress in the theatre. He then set about training her, making her rehearse repeatedly on stage and in costume. Although she had no talent for mimicry, the usual basis of acting, Barry was intelligent and, where she could not learn lines and remember how to say them, she could enter into feelings, becoming another person when inspired. Rochester developed her potential power from September until July of the next year, when Behn was flattered to be asked to give her friend the small part of Leonora in Abdelazer; her first starring role was, however, Queen Isabella in the Earl of Orrery’s Mustapha.
If letters published after his death are genuine, Th
omas Otway had become passionately devoted to Barry from the moment he first saw her.1 Now he watched in agony as Rochester’s care for her acting changed into love. Soon the Earl was begging Barry to ‘Leave this gawdy gilded stage... / Where fooles of either sex and age / Crowd to see themselves presented.’ He began to measure time by his sightings of her and fall into ‘transports’ when he received a letter. Like Behn with Hoyle, Rochester could not simply wallow in the ‘soft’ phrases of their love, but needed constantly to interrogate Barry’s words. Which were authentic, which stagey and conventional? He did not know at the beginning and would not at the end. Barry was later accused of ambition and avarice, and called a ‘mercenary prostituting Dame’; so perhaps the famous Earl, who termed himself the ‘most fantastical odd man alive’, was something of a career move for her.2 Although perpetually broke and no great catch as a keeper, Rochester was a nobleman and a potent influence in the theatre. Like Behn, Barry knew herself to be a professional from a young age, a woman who had to be competitive to make her way in the world alone. She allured men despite her lack of conventional beauty, and she had few moral scruples about bedding them when she wished or when it was expedient.
The affair of Rochester and Barry was racked with jealousy on both sides and, on one occasion, Rochester feared his beloved was being advised by a lean lady and a fat one. When he returned to London and hurried to see her, he was immediately put on guard by the interruption of a neighbouring woman, presumably one of these advisors. He suspected the visitor of being a ‘shee Spy’, coming ‘to solicit your love or constancy’—probably on behalf of a man, perhaps on her own. Could this neighbour, the fat one, have been Aphra Behn? Rochester probably knew something of Behn’s past, so this might just have been a private joke.