by Janet Todd
Another friend of this time was ‘Ephelia’, who may have been Behn’s link to Rochester’s enemy, the Earl of Mulgrave. Her ‘infant Muse’ now ‘i’th’Bud’, Ephelia was far more successful than Katherine Philips and even Aphra Behn at secrecy (she still manages to hide her identity). Like Behn, she seems to have become a Londoner. Possibly she was a failed actress and possibly freckled or red-headed, since the name was close to the Greek term for freckles. One or two references to ‘Easiness’ suggest she lost her ‘honour’ young. The portrait accompanying her poems displayed a woman with abundant ringlets, large eyes and almost naked breasts; on her falling gown is the miniature of a man, presumably the object of her passion. The reader is left to decide whether the seminakedness expresses grief or the foolishness of the man who could run from such substantial charms.40
Ephelia may have been briefly intimate with the Earl of Mulgrave, often called Bajazet after the proud Turkish sultan. An anonymous poem of complaint circulating at this time, ‘Ephelia to Bajazet’, was quickly burlesqued in a work written as if by the vain Mulgrave: ‘in my deare self, I center ev’ry thing.... If heretofore you found grace in my Eyes, / Be thankfull for it, and let that suffice.’ Possibly ‘Ephelia’ did write the first poem or possibly the whole exchange of submissive woman and dominating man was a Rochesterian game, with Etherege writing the Ephelia verses as Rochester wrote Bajazet.41
Behn and Ephelia, mocked by Robert Gould as a ‘ragged jilt’, were brought together in satire, for both were impudent and wrote for bread.42 Indeed they may even have collaborated on some verses in the paperwar about the nature of women started by the misogynistic Gould and spiritedly continued by ‘Sylvia’ of Sylvias Revenge. Possibly his knowledge of both women prompted Rochester to assume the mask of the witty and bleak female poet, Artemiza, who warns herself:
Dear Artemiza, poetry’s a snare:
Bedlam has many Mansions: have a Care.
Your Muse diverts you, makes the Reader sad;
You Fancy you’r inspir’d, he thinkes, you mad...
... Whore is scarce a more reproachfull name,
Then Poetesse.43
If the poem is written with Behn anywhere in mind, however—and it has something of the gossipy voice of her verse epistles—it is not fierce. Poetry appears a snare and delusion for everyone, not only for women, and general satires ‘against the Poets’ warn all of them that Bedlam will be their end, a warning later exemplified by the horrid fate of Nat Lee, who, falling into insanity, was confined in chains in the dark. Certainly Behn was not publicly upset about the poem, knowing that, in any case, a man could scorn the type yet hold her in high esteem. In epilogues and prologues Behn herself often echoed the male viewpoint, that women’s art should be in pleasing men rather than in writing, but this did not make her lay down her pen.
The comic misogynous urbanity of Rochester was not shared by all his readers. Robert Gould took up the whore-poetess conjunction to very different effect, damning both Behn and Ephelia:
...Hackney Writers, when their Verse did fail
To get ’em Brandy, Bread and Cheese, and Ale,
Their Wants by Prostitution were supply’d;
Shew but a Tester, you might up and ride:
For Punk and Poetess agree so Pat,
You cannot well be This, and not be That.44
But Gould, wreaking on women much of his own social frustration, saw any trespassing on male preserve as an affront: ‘Songs Obscene fit not a Woman’s Pen.’ Satire is a male province. Behn did not agree.
Chapter 16
The Rover and Thomaso
‘I will gaze - to let you see my Strength’
With her work circulating in manuscript, Aphra Behn was by now fairly well known as a poet, and even limited association with the Rochester circle must have increased her fame. She was pleased to find Edward Phillips (Milton’s nephew) mentioning her in his compilation of poets, Theatrum Poetarum (1675), although he reserved his highest praise for the dead Katherine Philips as ‘the most applauded.... Poetess of our Nation’. Ironically she was perhaps more gratified to be included in a widely read satire on playwrights called the ‘Session of the Poets’, which might have been by Elkanah Settle since it mocked Dryden, Shadwell and Otway, his foes of the moment—as well (very mildly) as himself. Certainly Otway, ridiculed for his lice, mange and pride, assumed it so and attacked Settle back. It could just as well have been by Rochester, however, or a combination of wits.1
Like the Countess of Winchilsea’s ‘Circuit of Apollo’, it was in the ‘session’ mode in which the god had to award a prize to the leading playwright. Each stepped forward. The Laureate, Dryden, was eliminated because it was rumoured he might be ordained and go to Oxford, Etherege because he was idle though witty, Wycherley because he was not a professional ‘Trader in Witt’ but a ‘Gentleman-Writer’, Shadwell because he was bibulous and vain, Nat Lee because he was clever only when drunk, Settle because he was out of fashion and so on. After Ravenscroft came his friend Aphra Behn:
The Poetesse Afra, next shew’d her black Ace;
The Lawrell, by a double right was her owne,
For the Plays she had writ, and the Conquests she had won.
Apollo acknowledg’d, ’twas hard to deny her,
But to deal franckly, and Ingeniously by her,
He told her, were Conquests, and Charmes her pretence,
She ought to have pleaded a Douzen yeares since.
She was about thirty-five at the time, and the poem was generous considering the usual mockery of a sexually aware woman of her age. She shared her black arse (both dark colouring and licentiousness since darkness and sexual ardour were conventionally tied) with the King, who is reported by Burnet to have quipped to an opponent, ‘At doomsday we shall see whose a—is blackest.’2
In the end, the actor-manager-adapter Tom Betterton points out that ‘since Poets, without the kind Players, may hang’ and since he had not rushed vulgarly into print, the prize should be his; so it is agreed. The unprovocative point is made that play-writing is communal, and poetic pretension absurd in a commercial, collaborative world.3
As at the beginning of her career, so now in the late 1670s, Aphra Behn was mapping out several plays. She hoped that, staggered through the months, they would provide a reasonable income. Possibly to compensate for Hoyle’s financial defection, she may now have made some arrangement with Betterton for a yearly payment. Many playwrights shunted between the two playhouses; Behn seems to have been loyal to the Duke’s.
Abdelazer had taught her the quick benefits of adaptation or revision and her next play, The Town-Fopp, was made from George Wilkins’s Jacobean drama, Miseries of Inforst Marriage, last printed in 1637. It concerns a hero, Bellmour, prevailed on for the sake of his inheritance to jilt his beloved, Celinda, and marry Diana. He grows dissipated from shame but, after much agonising, all is righted in one of those marriage annulments Behn so often fantasised. (In the source play the hero has to adjust to a real marriage and an unwanted wife, as well as two sons he has hitherto been calling bastards.) The only casualty in Behn’s play is Bellmour’s sister who, dreading poverty, marries the unsavoury Sir Timothy Tawdry, a foppish rake without the rake’s saving wit. The poor girl probably reflected Behn’s own occasional feelings in the depth of her affair with Hoyle when she exclaimed: ‘Wou’d I were in Flanders at my Monastery again.’
So much worldliness, drinking and dissipation were portrayed in Sir Timothy that there was no room in the play for any sympathetic raffish character like Alonzo in The Dutch Lover or for a comic portrait of the fop, as in Etherege’s The Man of Mode, produced earlier in 1676.4 The actions of Bellmour are hard to make either funny or heroic, since he simply distresses the simple Celinda, as well as Diana who, when her sexual overtures are sternly repulsed, reasonably echoes Alcippus of The Forc’d Marriage in asking, ‘Why, since you could not love me, did you marry me?’ In his dissipation in the brothel, Bellmour has some comedy, but his self
-hate is more tragicomic than comic, and the potentially satirical scene is not allowed to comment, as it might have done, on the erotic politics of sexual relations.5 Below the level of the hero, there is a Restoration easiness across sexes that sits ill with the stern attitudes of the original play.6 Abandoned by Bellmour, Diana falls for Celinda dressed as a boy; the latter is horrified by the display of explicit female desire, but, on learning her mistake, Diana simply exclaims, ‘Bless me!—did I then love a Woman?’ She does not seem unduly upset.
All in all, The Town-Fopp was a less successful and careful job than Abdelazer, with some long undramatic speeches left in and a muddled morality. Yet it has interest in being Behn’s first London comedy, catching her sense of metropolitan life and culture. A nurse says to Sir Timothy, ‘I live without Surgeons, wear my own Hair, am not in Debt to my Taylor... who wakes thee every Morning with his Clamour and long Bills, at thy Chamber-door.’ Whores scrap over clients and debate the status of kept women and prostitutes, growing philosophical over the changing times: since surface is everything, the stale woman with a fine petticoat, right points and clean garnitures is more valued than the pretty novice.
The Town-Fopp was staged in the autumn season of 1676 probably in September. No cast list is given, but Betty Currer may have played the aptly named mistress of Sir Timothy, Betty Flauntit.7 The pert, vivacious Currer from Ireland was one of the new actresses at the Duke’s, her whorish reputation offstage being eminently exploitable in the double entendres of prologues and epilogues.8 Over the years she would inspire Behn to some sprightly comic writing, especially once Elizabeth Barry had veered towards pathos. A cheeky epilogue was supplied for the play by Mr E. R., probably Ravenscroft, who had appreciated the saucy poem Behn sent him in his sweating-tub and was sorry for his delinquency. The play was successful enough to be revived in November when Nell Gwyn went to see it and it was printed in 1677 by Magnes and Bentley.9
After The Town-Fopp came several anonymously published adaptations, probably commissioned by Betterton. One or two might have been collaborations between himself and Behn. This is made more likely from the speed with which they were published, since Betterton was never in a hurry to get his plays in print, as the ‘Session of the Poets’ indicated, though the ‘Stage has been dishonoured with ’em many a time’.10 The first was another City play, The Debauchee, put on in about February 1677 and printed by a man hitherto unassociated with Behn, the legal publisher John Amery. It was a slightly shortened revision or rather translation into more modern, elegant and abstract English of Richard Brome’s comedy, A Mad Couple Well Matched of 1639.11 To bring it up to date, the authors provided a new London geography, translating old taverns and tourist spots into contemporary ones. The changes quickened the old play’s pace, but destroyed some of its crude vernacular quality.
Compared to Behn’s secure plays and adaptations, The Debauchee gives little wit to women, allows an uncharacteristic dignity to a City knight, penetrates far into the trading classes and allows some decidedly democratic sentiments. Like Sir Timothy Tawdry of The Town-Fopp, its rake hero, Careless, is a bit too unpleasant, too unthoughtful and unwitty to make the comic saving at the end entirely palatable. Yet, some of the less pleasant components of Behn’s later rakes may derive from him: for example, Careless considers becoming a gigolo, a role Behn later allows one of her ‘heroes’.
The prologue to The Debauchee was by a ‘Person of Quality’ and it painted an ebullient portrait of the spark as spectator, a type Behn must have had to deal with throughout her career:
... you come bawling in with broken French,
Roaring out Oaths aloud, from Bench to Bench,
And bellowing Bawdy to the Orange-wench;
Quarrel with Masques, and to be brisk, and free,
You sell ’em Bargains for a Repartee,
And then cry, Damn ’em Whores, who ere they be.12
The epilogue was again signed Mr E. R., probably Ravenscroft, although some have found a claimant in the Earl of Rochester.13
In the summer, the ‘bawling’ upper-class youths were supposed to have gone to the country, leaving the playhouses to provide ‘Vacation Chear’ to the ‘honest Tradesman’. This was the theme of the prologue to the next anonymous revision, which might again be by Behn or partly so: Thomas Middleton’s No Wit, No Help, Like a Woman’s, first performed before the Interregnum and now called, in its revised state, The Counterfeit Bridegroom.14 It was not meant for ‘sparks’, said the author, since Middleton satirised neither marriage nor City wives; besides it had a decidedly secondary cast, with few major actors included, as was common in the unfashionable summer months. To please the projected audience, this play, like The Debauchee, gained a bawdy drunk scene; it also displayed a woman ‘in her Nightgown’.
Together with The Dutch Lover and The Town-Fopp, Behn’s anonymous plays and parts of plays formed an important group in her life: as her transition from tragicomedy to her strongest dramatic mode, farcical social comedy. In all of them, the components were difficult to unite, and heated heroics were too thoroughly discomposed by the urbane flytings of witty couples or by the sheer nastiness of the action presented. Perhaps the generic instability echoed an instability in Behn’s own life. She wanted to be witty, light-hearted and urbane, yet her own experience, as well as habit, pulled against the style. She never entirely rid herself of the vision of the tragicomedy of life, but she never again immersed herself so entirely in it either.
The transition was complete in the last of her anonymous plays, an adaptation-cum-imitation rather than a revision-cum-adaptation like the others, in which at last she moved close to Ravenscroft’s formula of light intrigues round a ‘gay couple’. It was based on Thomas Killigrew’s Interregnum play, Thomaso, and called The Rover.15 To Behn’s delight it proved immensely popular. For the first time in her work it put the ‘gay couple’, including the sympathetic Restoration rake, firmly in the centre. It could do so since the Duke’s now had a notable comedienne in Elizabeth Barry, whom Behn could coach in precisely the gestures she wanted for her heroines.16 The popularity had a downside, however, since it obliged her to admit authorship and end her anonymous run.
The Spanish Don Juan figure had been a prankster and seducer, but, as he travelled through Italy and France, he became serious, took on philosophical libertine views and avoided repentance and reform. In the Restoration, he was infused with the popular version of Hobbes’s philosophy and associated with libertine court wits, although he also acquired a commercial sense of the world in which everything had a market value, the price desire would pay.
Court and theatre were symbiotic and it was an endearing aspect of the former that it liked to see itself portrayed, sometimes even mockingly. While in the 1660s Charles II’s defeat at Worcester, his exile and Restoration underpinned the tragicomic theme of the true king restored, his amorous progress in the 1670s gave substance to the rakish Cavalier, and the character appeared frequently on the stage. In 1675, for example, Wycherley put on The Country Wife with a hero so intent on sexual gratification he was prepared to claim impotence to follow his desires. The following year came a more admiring portrait in Etherege’s Man of Mode, in which the patrician and arrogant Dorimant, many years later alleged to be based on Rochester, was a devil with something of ‘the Angel yet undefac’d in him’; master of men, women and language, he was the most perfect theatrical libertine.17
Necessarily the character was mildly political. Shortly after the Restoration, Charles II ordered Killigrew not to portray on the stage any ‘representations of scenes in the cities of London and Westminster’.18 So theatrical politics had to be coded. When the increasingly vocal opposition wanted to mock the court, it could attack the rake figure and everyone would know the target, as they did when Shadwell put on The Libertine at Dorset Garden in 1675, making of the rake an ugly seducer. It would be equally understood if one staged a sympathetic rake. Hoyle’s treatment of Behn, coupled with her desire to follow fashion, ensur
ed that she too would create such a character, but with a difference.
The name of Thomaso had been jogged in Behn’s mind by a production of a curious play called The Siege of Constantinople, acted both at court and at Dorset Garden in November 1674. It was by her playwright-friend, Henry Nevil Payne, whose staunch Royalism may have been influencing her to think more specifically of state politics herself. The play was a kind of political allegory featuring the King and his ministers and revealing the treachery of some subjects during the last Dutch War. In the idealised picture of Thomaso, it portrayed the upright James, Duke of York.
Beyond making a living in espionage with its professional loyalty, Aphra Behn had not been singular in her Royalism. Her early plays clearly expressed it, but also implied criticism of privilege and arbitrary rule. Now in the late 1670s, as King and Parliament jockeyed for power in echo of the 1640s, some clearer public commitment was wanted. She did not toe the complete Royalist line expressed in Filmer’s Patriarcha, which grounded kingly power in the ‘natural’ rule of a father in his household; instead, she was closer to Hobbes who, putting order over chaos, simply argued for a strong government. This would be based on hereditary kings because of precedent not ‘nature’; power should be vested in them whatever their individual characters, for, like Margaret Cavendish, Behn believed a foolish head better than a factious heart in a state. By taking sides, Behn would alienate part of the theatre audience but, since the court was still the largest patron, there was much to recommend expressing its views. The safest thing was to be nostalgic and set the rake-Cavalier before the Restoration, a period as complex as the present, but now mythologised into simplicity. It was long since 1660 and the glamour of Interregnum activities had grown with Restoration disillusion. For Cavaliers, it had been an irresponsible time when money was none the less not the measure of a man.19