Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  Politics inheres in Sir Patient Fancy, presented as a Whig Dissenter. His name probably reminded the audience of Sir Patience Ward, a substantial London merchant, strong Protestant, and sheriff of the City.13 His fame as the lord mayor who inscribed on the Monument to the Great Fire his opinion that the Catholics had started the conflagration lay in the future, but his views were already known; in Behn’s play Sir Patient accuses ‘French papishes’ of having a ‘design to fire the City’.14 As an anti-Catholic who equates convents with the theatre and the court as corrupters of youth, Sir Patient looks back longingly to ‘the good days of the late Lord Protector’ and praises ‘a good Commonwealths-man’ who sent his sons to Geneva for a ‘virtuous Education’ in Calvinist principles.15 By the end of the play Sir Patient learns that one might as well be cynical: he intends to ‘turn Spark...keep some City Mistress, go to Court, and hate all Conventicles’. Too much moral concern for others corrodes a family and a state. The cynical have the advantage of being tolerant and unshockable into extremes of behaviour when human nature fails to live up to unreasonable ideals.

  As with Killigrew, so with Molière, Behn adds female scheming and she even provides a child go-between, Fanny, who mimics amorous intriguing language. The play opens with the kind of knowing young women of the town who have happily replaced the ingénues of her first works, talking the sort of liberated talk that makes the subsequent restrictions and arranged matches of brothers and aged fathers ridiculous: ‘the Insolence and Expence of their Mistresses has almost tir’d out all but the Old and Doting part of Mankind,’ one remarks for example. Isabella expresses the play-acting that the pretence of female innocence and actual subordination forces on rational women:

  Custom is unkind to our Sex, not to allow us free choice, but we above all Creatures must be forced to endure the formal recommendations of a Parent; and the more insupportable Addresses of an Odious Foppe, whilst the Obedient Daughter stands—thus—with her Hands pinn’d before her, a set look, few words, and a mein that cries—come marry me: out upon’t.16

  In fact, the acting teaches women also to direct; so, when Wittmore is discovered by her husband, Lady Fancy quickly tells him, ‘keep your distance, your Hat under your Arm, so, be very Ceremonious, whil’st I settle a demure Countenance.’ Lady Fancy becomes an impresario, forcing Wittmore into something of Willmore’s foolish role. She makes narrative of all contingencies, a lover in the wrong place, a loud watch, a chair tipping over, to the point where she is forced to exclaim, ‘I have almost run out of all my stock of Hypocrisie.’ Wittmore admits, ‘I’me a Damn’d dull fellow at Invention’ and Lodwick is advised, ‘You were best consult your Mother and Sister, women are best at intrigues of this kind.’17 In a tight place, men can only reach for their swords, women are ready with fictions.18

  Sir Patient Fancy is a veritable comedy of discourses. As conversation, it is as clever as The Rover, while Behn’s contrapuntal technique, used first in the whispering scenes in The Amorous Prince, is perfected as Wittmore and Lady Fancy talk doubles entendres aimed at each other and at the eavesdropping Sir Patient Fancy. Groups converse animatedly at cross purposes. Sir Patient is much tickled by his name which, following a habit picked up from The Debauchee, Behn makes him use as a tag—‘Patience is a Virtue.’ He speaks the biblical language of Dissent, which is both hypocritical and too extreme since Lady Fancy remarks that such cant covers sexual desire: the brethren ‘do so sneer upon me, pat my Breasts, and cry fie, fie upon this fashion of tempting Nakedness’. In Dissenting language, London becomes a place of Iniquity, where ‘the Young men are debaucht, thy Virgins defloured, and thy Matrons all turn’d Bawds!’, a place full of ‘immodest Revellings, and Profane Masqueradings’. Sir Patient addresses people as if at a public meeting and covers ordinary failing with rotundity.19

  In cynicism, Sir Patient Fancy surpasses Behn’s earlier plays. The swapping of bodies in beds implies that any body will do and there is no reason to suppose that the couples that end the play will be static.20 The conclusion of the Fancys is sourer than the ending of Molière’s play or of the Molière adaptations by Otway and Ravenscroft, and Lady Fancy’s exultation with Wittmore by the bed of her assumed dead spouse is as cruel as anything Behn had written: ‘That which the Slave so many years was toiling for, I in one moment barter for a Kiss... I now having no more to doe, but to bury the stinking Corps of my quondam Cuckold, dismiss his Daughters, and give thee quiet possession of all.’21

  Sir Patient Fancy was produced on 17 January 1678, equipped with a prologue, spoken by Betterton and written by a friend. Perhaps this was Ravenscroft again or Otway or, given the ironic reference to Pope Joan—‘Defend us from a Poet Joan again!’—conceivably Henry Nevil Payne, who grasped any opportunity to attack anti-popery. The mythical Pope Joan had become a notorious and lewd figure in anti-papist propaganda, used to frighten good Protestants with the excess and gender chaos of Catholicism.22 She formed a neat analogue to the Poet Behn, who had dared to invade the male realm of dramatic poetry.

  The female poet’s threatening assertiveness was exemplified in the epilogue which Behn herself wrote and appropriately gave to the actress Ann Quin, who had played the aspiring Lady Knowell.23 Quin quoted a male spectator, heir to the ‘fop’ Behn lambasted in her Epistle to the Reader of The Dutch Lover:

  I Here, and there, o’reheard a Coxcomb Cry

  Ah, Rott it—’tis a Womans Comedy,

  One, who because she lately chanc’t to please us,

  With her Damn’d stuff, will never cease to teaze us....

  After this reminder of The Rover’s success, the epilogue swerved into a seemingly serious plea for a more splendid present for women based on their cultural past:

  What has poor Woman done, that she must be,

  Debar’d from Sense and Sacred Poetrie?

  Why in this Age has Heaven allow’d you more,

  And Women less of Wit than heretofore?

  We once were fam’d in Story, and cou’d write

  Equall to men; cou’d Govern, nay cou’d Fight.

  We still have passive Valour, and can show

  Wou’d Custom give us leave the Active too,

  Since we no Provocation want from you.24

  The passage may refer to the Elizabethan age of aristocratic female culture or, more likely, to something fantastic, the age of romance and Amazons as presented in La Calprenède and de Scudéry, when women did daring deeds. Behn’s positive female models were nearly always mythical or royal.25

  So ringingly feminist in isolation, the verse slides into the present, declaring itself one of Behn’s mediated addresses. It is not just the author speaking as an aspiring lady, but the actress and professional playwright doing their number and pleasing men. Mrs Quin is there to seduce the audience. Players submit to spectators, as women to men. Whatever they did in romance and the past, women do not now fight fiercely and so do not ‘scorn and cudgell ye when you are Rude’. The epilogue collapses into the conventional cajoling of spectators. Behn’s clever women negotiate a man’s world rather than seeking to change it. Since they are raised to please and play-writing is pleasing, ‘pray tell me then / Why Women should not write as well as Men.’ The sexual attraction of men and women always subverts any feminist agenda.

  The cast of Sir Patient Fancy was impressive. Betterton took Wittmore and the new comic actor, Anthony Leigh, played Sir Patient Fancy, coupled, as he increasingly was, with the reliably funny James Nokes as the effete and gullible fop, Sir Credulous Easy. Growing notorious for tough unconventional women, Betty Currer played Lady Fancy.26 The flirtatious Emily Price was Lucretia and Thomas Farmer, one of the King’s violinists and a prolific composer of music for songs by Ravenscroft, Otway, Lee and Dryden, provided his usual stolid fare. Behn expected success but braced herself for remarks on her ‘hints’ from Molière, on her politics, on her form, and on women writers.

  Not everyone had comments of course, for several had not really come to watch the stage at all
. The Earl of Arran, who saw ‘the French play’ on 19 January, was more concerned to record whom he met, while the King’s chief mistress, Louise de Kérouaille, in deep distress at the triumph of a new rival from France—the dashing and spirited Hortense, Duchess of Mazarine—‘got up, had herself dressed, and dragged herself to her Sedan chair, to be carried to the French play, where she heard the king was to be with Madame Mazarin’.27 She could not have noticed much. Others did not let Sir Patient Fancy and its polemical epilogue pass unnoticed, however. Shadwell countered with The True Widow, mocking Behn’s style of farcical comedy; possibly even Dryden glanced at her when, in Oedipus, he insisted on tying lack of traditional dramatic regulation to political chaos: ‘when you laye Tradition wholly by, / And on the private Spirit alone relye, / You turn Fanaticks in your Poetry.’ Behn refused this link.

  She had to contend with more specific and immediate criticism as well. This was worse than she had anticipated, suggesting she had slightly misjudged the times: she was loudly accused not only of plagiarism, as expected, but also of bawdiness. The country was full of scorn for the royal mistresses and contempt for petticoat rule. A woman playwright, openly peddling bawdry in the theatre at such a moment, became just another symptom of a world turning upside down again. The only course for Behn was to rush into print with the text, so that a more informed judgement could be made. She could also exploit the notoriety by providing a vindicatory preface, as she had done with The Dutch Lover. The disorganised ‘To the Reader’ was attached to a carelessly printed text by her new publishers, Jacob and Richard Tonson (with whom Magnes and Bentley had been associated, so it was a reasonable progression). Perhaps they were unimpressed with her status and yet, although Jacob had a dazzling future career, it was now only in its early stages: if anyone were doing a favour with the collaboration, it was probably Aphra Behn.

  As in her preface to The Dutch Lover, Behn followed Restoration fashion in creating fictional characters for critics, an amalgamation of foppish dress and vacant attitude. It was a device adopted by Dryden and Ravenscroft as well, but it was more comic employed by a woman creating men. She began on bawdry. Could the critics who grumbled at it know anything about sex? Behn asked. Perhaps they were too old or too prudish to judge on the matter or perhaps they had not listened to the play: ‘if such as these durst profane their Chast ears with hearing it over again, or taking it into their serious Consideration in their Cabinets; they would find nothing that the most innocent Virgins can have cause to blush at.’ Then she turned to the old charge of plagiarism. Against those who ‘cryed it was made out of at least four French Plays’, she claimed she ‘had but a very bare hint from one, the Malad Imagenere... but how much of the French is in this, I leave to those who do indeed understand it and have seen it at the Court’. She hoped these consisted of like-minded Royalists who agreed with the play’s political tenor and could overlook other aspects.

  Both defences were dubious. Behn had purloined the plot from Molière and some of the language from the translator—although the borrowing was nothing like as large as that from Killigrew’s Thomaso. As for bawdry, it was certainly possible for an innocent but perceptive virgin to blush at the antics of Lodwick in his soon-to-be step-mother’s bed.

  Then, having defended, Behn attacked. Both criticisms of bawdry and plagiarism were due to her sex:

  The play had no other Misfortune but that of coming out for a Womans: had it been owned by a Man, though the most Dull Unthinking Rascally Scribler in Town, it had been a most admirable Play.28

  Often Behn saw her denigrators as men, but she was also aware that criticism came from women or was instigated by them. She admired racy, witty, ambiguous ladies like the King’s new mistress, the Duchess of Mazarine, who gambled, went cross-dressed, enjoyed wit of all sorts, and would tie herself to no man, not even the King. Conversely, she sniffed at those who displayed conventional marks of femininity, moistening handkerchiefs with tears she could never believe were not artificial. She was so aggrieved that only men were allowed to express sexual and amorous feelings candidly that she turned on her own sex in frustration. As a result Behn came close to the satiric male view of women: ‘if they durst, all women would be Whores.’29

  Behn had often spoken of this with Otway, whose conception of woman was far more sentimental than her own. Even he took Behn’s point, however, that women who complained about so-called bawdy plays were prudes and hypocrites. When he had to defend his cynical Souldier’s Fortune, Otway wrote: ‘I have heard a Lady (that has more Modesty than any of those she Criticks, and I am sure more wit) say, She wonder’d at the impudence of any of her Sex, that would pretend to understand the thing call’d Bawdy.’ This sounds like Aphra Behn over a tankard.30

  Although much in her address is robust, Behn also showed a more vulnerable, petulant side. She was a jobbing poet, obliged to write ‘for Bread and not ashamed to owne it’, so she courted public favour. This was fine, but she went on to add, ‘though it is a way too cheap for men of wit to pursue who write for Glory, and a way which even I despise as much below me’. This snobbish attitude, foreshadowed in the Epistle to The Dutch Lover, was hardly an advertisement for her play.

  Caught in enmeshing statuses of sex and class, Aphra Behn was, then, both defensive and scornful of her own work. She defended it as equal or superior to the regulated stuff penned by university-educated men, whose learning was irrelevant or inappropriate for the theatre. At the same time, she subordinated it to work written for ‘Glory’. Here she invoked not so much gender as class, that touchy distinction between amateur and professional. It was constantly made among writers but, even as she loudly reasserted it, she began to suspect it might be both false and pernicious. She wrote for ‘bread’ and yet her irritation and defensiveness suggested some ambition for ‘Glory’.

  There is, too, something personal in her insistence on professionalism. Whatever she, Aphra Behn, felt obliged by the public and the times to write, there was in her view nothing bawdy in her private life. She was now not even a kept woman. That was one implication of the statement that she wrote for ‘bread’ without shame.

  Chapter 18

  The Popish Plot and The Feign’d Curtizans

  ‘Common Sense, was Popishly affected’

  The theatre had responded uneasily to England’s anxious politics.

  Now it was outclassed, for no playwright from Dryden and Behn to Settle and Shadwell thought up anything quite as extraordinary as the Popish Plot, the drama performed on the national stage in 1678.

  Its context was the perennial English fear of Catholicism harking back to the reign of Bloody Mary in the mid-sixteenth century and engraved on the popular mind through Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which described in macabre detail the fiery fate of Protestants under Catholic rule.1 Although in England Protestantism was flourishing—Catholics made up only between 4 and 5 per cent of the population—in Continental Europe it was in retreat in major states such as France and the Spanish colonies. Also, the few Catholics there were in the country tended to be in high ranks because only the wealthy could afford priests and withstand the intermittent financial persecution. Now popery had penetrated the highest circle of all through the militant Catholic convert, James, Duke of York, heir to the throne, flanked by two of the most expensive (and French) of Charles’s mistresses, the duchesses of Portsmouth and Mazarine. In this threatening national and international context, English Protestantism inspirited itself with outpourings of sentiment on the Accession Day of Elizabeth I, now a Protestant icon. At the climax of a procession of cardinals scattering indulgences for the murder of Protestants and of Jesuits plotting villainy, an effigy of the Pope was pitchforked into a bonfire at Temple Bar.

  For Protestants, Catholicism was not just a sect but a virulent political force. In An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, the poet Marvell saw it as part of a conspiracy ‘to change the lawful government of England into an absolute tyranny, and convert the established Prot
estant religion into downright Popery’. He was appalled by what attracted Aphra Behn: ‘colourful Vestments, consecrations, exorcisms, whisperings, sprinklings, censings and phantasical rites’. Behn was highly dubious about the common embodiment of this fear in the Jesuits, whose reputed cunning she regarded as overrated. (They were thought to be especially amoral since they possessed a philosophical justification for regicide.) When she wanted to mock her times, she presented rumours of ‘two French Jesuits plotting to fire Amsterdam, and a thousand things equally Ridiculous’.2

  In her doubts about huge conspiracies, Behn was in a small minority and the chief creators of the Plot could build on popular prejudices, that Catholics had been responsible for the Civil War, Charles I’s execution, and the Great Fire of London. It was a small step to assume that they were now proposing to assassinate Charles II and then massacre the Protestants, with the help of the Pope, the Jesuits and Louis XIV. The lack of originality in the scenario made it familiar and convincing.3

  The Plot was adumbrated in the hot month of August by Israel Tonge, a fanatical parson and ex-Puritan, whose London church had been burnt in the Fire. Some felt his intellects had been singed in the conflagration, which he attributed to the Jesuits. Tonge informed a sceptical King, who handed the matter to his ministers. In September, Titus Oates, the source of the information, made a statement on oath before Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey (the magistrate who had been unimpressed with Mary Carleton’s spiritedness in 1663). The Popish Plot which would convulse the nation and drive several great and little men to the scaffold had begun.