Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  Men desire but, as usual, do not need to plot very deeply, exclaiming as men all round Behn were doing over politics: ‘the Game’s too deep for me.’ The woman, however, cannot afford to stop planning and analysing: not for her the man’s indulgence in fury, violence and misogynous abuse. Instead, she must always look to her performance. Men can be themselves, women must act and disguise, play parts from start to finish.

  Marcella overtops Florinda of The Rover in her verbal skills and her disguises. She needs to, for her lover is more attracted to a courtesan than Belvile had been and is even less able to see virgin and whore as one. When he claims to Marcella, acting as whore, that he has seen her face on a virtuous woman in a dream, she replies

  You only dreamt that she was virtuous too;

  Virtue it self’s a Dream of so light force,

  The very fluttering of Love’s Wings destroys it;

  Ambition, or the meaner hope of Interest, wakes it to nothing;

  In Men a feeble Beauty shakes the dull slumber off.

  Indeed she ventriloquises so thoroughly she begins to sound like Angellica before her fall into love and Hellena in her gallanter moments: when urged to constancy Marcella as whore cries

  ...’twere to cheat a thousand,

  Who between this and my dull Age of Constancy

  Expect the distribution of my Beauty...

  Was all this Beauty given for one poor petty Conquest?

  She feigns so thoroughly she almost affects herself and, fearing she is going the way of Cornelia, she suddenly breaks off her ‘dissembling’.18

  The direct political commentary in the love plot is sparse. The unwanted suitor is deformed, which gives point to Marcella’s loathing and reminds the audience of the popular caricature of Shaftesbury as monstrous and deformed. But, on the whole, the politics is reserved for the comic subplot. This concerns two other English arrivals, Sir Signal Buffoon, successor to Blunt, and Sir Credulous, the young country squire, heir to £8,000 a year in Behn’s own county of Kent. His wealth is presumably from sequestrated Cavalier property and his knighthood bought to aggrandise the family, where Fillamour’s marks the baronet. The young fool is on the grand tour with his chaplain and tutor who is to preserve him from popery; the main effect of his travels so far is his habit of converting English names and words into a garbled mixture of Romance languages. He even insists on calling his man Giovanni, instead of plain Jack Pepper from Kent—perhaps a sly poke at Behn’s foster-brother, the Kentish Colepeper. The chaplain is the farcical Tickletext—a delicious name Behn had already introduced into The Town-Fopp for Lord Plotwell’s silent chaplain—one in a long line of lusty and hypocritical Puritans who ‘tickled’ texts.19 Although ‘in the Autumn’ of his age, ‘when Nature began to be impertinent’, Tickletext still believes that a young lady could dote on him: this lack of realistic self-estimate marks out Behn’s fools, young or old, men or women.

  As with Sir Patient Fancy, Behn can, with her pair of squire and tutor, mock the nationalism of Protestant Dissent which breeds fear, as opposed to the easy internationalism of Catholicism. Tickletext and Sir Signal respond to foreign culture with ignorant credulity and slavish imitation or with a chauvinism that allows unfavourable comparison of the massive St Peter’s in Rome to an English country church. When Tickletext reduces Roman art to superstition, idolatry and popery, it allows Fillamour to declare the absurdity of seeing ‘harmless Pictures’ as idolatrous, a point against which the Accession Day crowds would vociferously bray. In Fillamour, Behn expresses a Utopian belief that the true old gentry are tolerant, even if the Puritan variety appear bigoted. In fact, anti-Catholicism was found equally in every rank.20

  The elevation of law into ‘The Law’ and the replacement of morality with the sophistry of legal argument Behn saw as characteristic of Dissenters, Whigs and City merchants. Tickletext is persuaded that ‘Fornication [is] licensed’ in Rome and he reasons, ‘when its licens’d, ’tis lawful; and when ’tis lawful, it can be no Sin’. Trying to extricate himself in the brothel, he cries to the supposed courtesan: ‘by what authority dost thou seduce with the allurements of thine eyes, and the conjurements of thy Tongue, the wastings of thy hands, and the tinklings of thy feet, the young men in the Villages?’ Since he is now in the city of Rome, not in the villages, it seems he has made this morally muddled speech before in Kent. Cornelia responds: ‘give him clean straw and darknesse, / And chain him fast for fear of further mischief.’21

  Tickletext is a clear Oates-ish figure, a travelling chaplain given to quoting scripture in self-gratifying or erotic contexts. He is fascinated with Romish finery and absurd foreign fashions, in echo of Oates’s episcopal magnificence, and is eager to affect the luxury he condemns. Both reinterpret texts and actions at will, making up new narratives to fit events as they are exposed. Sir Signal catches his tutor Tickletext in pursuit of a whore and uses his language against him: ‘for you I say to be taken at this unrighteous time of the Night, in a flaunting Cavaliero Dress...going the high way to Satan to a Curtizan! and to a Romish Curtizan!’ Tickletext momentarily admits to being ‘Paid in my own Coyn’, but then adjusts his story: he is about the conversion of a papist whore. When this new story threatens to make Tickletext seem mad, Sir Signal shows he has learnt the lesson of adaptation: he quickly explains that his tutor is having a fit, ‘a whimsie—a maggot that bites always at naming of Popery’.

  Behn’s stage directions for her play suggest considerable theatrical planning, and The Feign’d Curtizans was staged with all the resources of the Duke’s Company. Nokes played Sir Signal Buffoon and Underhill Tickletext. The romantic leads were taken by Smith as Fillamour and Betterton as Galliard. Elizabeth Barry, who, during her retirement for pregnancy, claimed she was going to ‘quit the World’, was back on the boards playing Cornelia. Betty Currer, who also spoke the prologue in the character of a real courtesan, was Marcella, while Mary Lee, who had played the leading role of the Queen in Abdelazer, played the third roving woman, Laura Lucretia. It was an impressive cast and the prompter Downes declared the play well acted.

  Yet it did not take. Its trivialisation of the Catholic threat had been risky and Behn had not caught the public mood. Written prophetically before the first night or elegiacally after it by herself or a friend, the prologue grumbled that wit had fallen out of fashion and that Betty Currer’s charms, like the play’s, were going to waste:

  Suspicions, New Elections, Jealousies,

  Fresh Informations, New discoveries,

  Do so employ the busie fearful Town,

  Our honest calling here is useless grown:

  Each Fool turns Politician now, and wears

  A formal face, and talks of State-affairs;

  Makes Acts, Decrees, and a new Modell draws

  For regulation both of Church and Laws;

  Tires out his empty Noddle to invent

  What rule and method’s best in government:

  But Wit, as if ’twere Jesuiticall,

  Is an abomination to ye all.

  To what a wretched pass will poor Plays come...22

  The alternative drama of the Plot, with its conception of the ‘Whore of Babylon’, had seduced the public, and the playhouse had become a cast-off mistress. The beautiful Mrs Currer ‘neglected at eighteen’ in her tattered clothes, stood for the ‘neglected’ theatre in these ‘hellish times’.23

  Behn must have been disappointed with the reaction, for she knew hers to be a skilfully constructed play. She retained enough faith in it to try at last for patronage for the printed version. She fancied a woman but, for a person like herself, associated with theatre bawdiness, whose private life had not been impeccable, one of some ambiguity was needed—like an established royal mistress. Behn seems to have been much attracted to Hortense, Duchess of Mazarine, but it was not the moment to dedicate a play to a Catholic whore, accused as a potential poisoner of the King.24 As for the powerful Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, Behn tended to share the nation’s d
istaste for this French agent—called ‘Fubbs’ by the King and ‘Squintabella’ by her rival Nell Gwyn. This was perhaps unfortunate, since Portsmouth was a devotee of the theatre and was said to have given Otway twenty guineas for Venice Preserv’d.

  It was probably Otway who suggested Nell Gwyn, although it seems that Behn had been thinking vaguely of her since the inception of the play. She was the obvious choice, although she had herself received very few dedications.25 She had left the stage just when Aphra Behn was making her debut, but she continued to visit the theatre. She now had two children by Charles II, ‘two noble branches’. Although she was regarded as the commonest of the King’s major mistresses—and she herself made much of being a whore to irritate the snobbish Portsmouth—and although Burnet dismissed her as ‘the indiscreetest and wildest creature that ever was at court’, Behn did not make the mistake of putting herself on the same social level as Nell Gwyn. She addressed the wealthy mistress as a great lady because she shared the King’s bed in similar manner to a wife and because she was at court where Behn was not.26

  So the dedication was conventionally eulogistic. Indeed, like her earlier used form, the pindaric, it was positively formulaic: ‘the Poet begins with the commendation of [the dedicatee’s] Country.... From thence he falls into praise of... his Person, which he draws from his great endowments of Mind and Body, and most especially from his Hospitality, and the worthy use of his riches.’ In this example, the successful playwright, Aphra Behn, begged to have sanctuary under the illiterate Nell Gwyn’s gracious influence, where her tender laurels could thrive. Nell was the sort of vivacious, talkative woman who worked the system and Behn always admired this: the ‘Sex’ in general could only benefit from her success, for she refuted the common misogyny that ‘will allow a woman no wit’. Nell Gwyn’s physical and mental attributes were outrageously flattered and, in the next century, Dr Samuel Johnson found the dedication offensive in its ‘meanness and servility of hyperbolic adulation’.27 In fact, it was no better and no worse than most others of the time and certainly did not outdo Dryden’s fulsome address to the rising political star, the Earl of Sunderland, before his Troilus and Cressida. Perhaps it offended because it was a transaction between two women.

  Although it was Nell Gwyn’s Protestantism which made her a suitable dedicatee at this moment, Behn made nothing of it. Indeed there was not much room for God where Nell herself had become the deity. Behn also made nothing of any political power Nell might be supposed to have had. The attacks on the royal courts of Charles I and Charles II most often centred on their allowing improper female power and it would be playing into opposition hands to suggest any female influence at all on the King. It was one thing to have a sexy king, quite another to have an effeminate one—as men influenced by women were inevitably termed.

  It is possible that Nell Gwyn appreciated The Feign’d Curtizans if she watched it or had the manuscript copy read to her. Behn had tried to lighten the tone of the times as Nell Gwyn herself tried to do. Possibly the royal mistress was influential in having the play performed at court in the following year. At any rate she must have acceded to Behn’s request to dedicate the play to her and it was customary to give some money to the dedicator. The usual rate was £7 to £10 depending on the importance of the work, the dedicatee and the author. Aphra Behn and Nell Gwyn were both important in their ways, though novices in the patronal tie.

  Yet it is possible too that Behn miscalculated in print as in performance. Although she was not ironic in her words and made absolutely no connection between her feigned courtesan and the real one, conceivably Nell Gwyn was not best pleased to be associated with Catholic pseudo-whores.

  Had Nell been able to read, she would have had definite cause of vexation, since the publisher Tonson had delivered one of the most carelessly printed works Behn ever produced, equalled only by her first and last plays. It muddled characters and names, made people exit who had never entered and printed much as a bizarre sort of prose-poetry. Strange that Behn should have allowed her first dedicated work to emerge in so ragged a form. But, perhaps by the time it was being printed, she had already despaired of its popularity with either the public or its dedicatee.

  Chapter 19

  Deaths of the Earl of Rochester and Viscount Stafford

  ‘Here’s no Sedition hatcht, no other Plots’

  Not all dramatists confined plotting to the theatre and Behn herself may, at this time, have become involved in the unsavoury activities of informing, seditious copying and ghost-writing for people of various persuasions. Publicly, however, she was staunch, as an admirer declared:

  Long may she scourge this mad rebellious Age,

  And stem the torrent of Fanatick rage,

  That once had almost overwhelmed the Stage....

  ... while that spurious race imploy’d their parts

  In studying strategems and subtile arts,

  To alienate their Prince’s Subjects hearts,

  Her Loyal Muse still tun’d her loudest strings,

  To sing the praises of the best of Kings.1

  If Aphra Behn were recruited for any secret activity, the link may have been one of two men generally dismissed as rogues but whom she went out of her way to praise: the playwright and propagandist Henry Nevil Payne who, it was said, actually made money from informing, and the arch villain and double dealer, Thomas Dangerfield.

  In the fraught days of the Popish Plot, Payne busied himself with pamphlets and lampoons, possibly at the distant request of the Duke of York or someone else at court who feared the effect of the national anti-Catholic mood.2 Perhaps it was his loyalty and the consistency of his Catholic sympathy without any clear Catholic belief that allowed Behn to call him a faithful ‘English Subject’, admirer of ‘Truth’, ‘man of Wit’, ‘Eminence’ and piercing ‘Judgment’.

  Payne had already been in trouble. Saddened by the execution of his Catholic friend, Edward Coleman, he had written an elegy making the dead man a martyr and himself a supplicant for his intercession. He thus had difficulty portraying himself as a ‘good Protestant’ when he was taken before the Privy Council in January with the offending manuscript in his pocket. Though he pleaded that his work had not been intended for publication, he was labelled ‘homo pernitiosus & seditiosus & machinosus’ and confined in the King’s Bench prison for ‘high misdemeanour on act of the said verses’.3 There he was recruited as a propagandist or ‘Pen-man’ by the Catholic lords still imprisoned in the Tower, and employed to write both plays and pamphlets supporting the Catholic cause. The go-between was the Catholic convert, the ‘Popish midwife’, Mrs Elizabeth Cellier, a witty lewd woman in Burnet’s words, who had ministered to a large number of eminent Catholic women, including Mary of Modena, Duchess of York.4 Certainly one satirist made the link with Payne when he gave Cellier the words: ‘as for the Muses, they are my Handmaids. Don’t I direct the Pen of the great Nevil here present? I taught him to Pray in Verse to the Saint and Martyr Coleman.’5

  Another suitable agent found by Cellier starving in Newgate prison was Thomas Dangerfield, who claimed to be a Roman Catholic. She relieved his needs, moved him first to the King’s Bench, where he met up with Nevil Payne, then extricated him and redeemed his coat from the pawnshop. Presumably she did not know what she later knew: that his ‘name [was] Recorded in 28 places, having been Transported, Burnt in the Hand, five times Adjudged to the Pillory, seven times Fin’d, twice Outlaw’d for Fellony, and broke the Goal in several places eight times’.6 Nor did she realise that the keeper of Newgate thought him such a dangerous person when in prison that he ‘never durst talk with him alone’. Cellier’s view was rather different: her Dangerfield was a man of courage whose ‘Condition and Capacity’ she had thoroughly sifted.

  When Payne came out of prison, he tended to slacken in his output and hang around the theatre; so Dangerfield took over as private scribe and pamphleteer.7 Cellier promoted him and soon he was impressing James and was even introduced to the King. His experi
ence as a forger made him doubly useful, for the Catholics had a plan—or were persuaded by Dangerfield to have a plan—which they hoped would take the heat off them and divert attention from the Popish Plot. A Presbyterian, ultra Protestant plot would be invented, together with an underground army which would have Monmouth as general, his followers Ford, Lord Grey, and Thomas Armstrong as lieutenant-generals, and Viscount Stafford as paymaster-general. The forged proof would be placed by Dangerfield in the lodgings of a Colonel Mansell and then ‘discovered’ by Dangerfield.8 In the event, the device (or Dangerfield) was so clumsy that it was quickly suspected and Dangerfield was taken to prison. The trusting Cellier sent him instructions on how to handle interrogation.

  By now Dangerfield either doubted her, scented more reward from the other side, or had been double-dealing all along. He turned King’s evidence, going out of his way to implicate Henry Nevil Payne and Mrs Cellier, whose house he caused to be searched. Incriminating evidence was found at the bottom of a meal tub—hence the name of the affair, the Meal-Tub Plot. Cellier and her associate Lady Powis, wife of one of the imprisoned lords, were taken: the former to Newgate and the latter to the Tower, as befitted their ranks. Payne was also apprehended.