by Janet Todd
Behn later blamed Payne’s misfortunes on ‘National Distractions’. Otherwise so excellent a subject would not have been persecuted. In her view, he was always ‘the same Man still, unmov’d in all Turns, easie innocent; no Persecution being able to abate your constant good Humour, or wonted Gallantry’.9 She might have found it harder to say the same for Dangerfield, whom James’s later chaplain, Father Warner, thought an agent provocateur throughout. But, although she admired heroism, Behn did not like a man worse for saving his skin.
‘The Dumb Virgin’, a short story written or inspired by Behn, may bear on her attitudes at this time. In it, a long-lost Venetian son turned Englishman enters an Oedipal plot, ignorantly seducing his dumb sister and killing his father. The narrator, associated with Behn, claims to have seen this man at a masquerade, ‘as fine an English Gentleman, as I ever saw step in the Ball’. She ‘made bold to ask him some peculiar questions, about affairs at Court, to most of which he gave answers, that shew’d his education liberal, and himself no stranger to quality; he call’d himself Dangerfield’.10 At the end of the story the dying Dangerfield, whose crimes have been inadvertent, addresses the narrator:
‘Madam, said he, I was your Countryman, and woud to Heaven I were so still; if you hear my story mentioned, on your return to England, pray give these strange turns of my fate not the name of crimes, but favour them with the epithet of misfortunes...’.
The narrator hopes she has ‘done him the justice... to make him be pity’d for his misfortunes, not hated for his crimes’. Conceivably, Behn was one of the few people in London to find some integrity in this notoriously false but obviously charming man, despite violently untoward appearances—as she did in Henry Nevil Payne. History decides who are rogues, but the contemporary truth is inevitably more complex.11
As for Cellier, whom Behn seems not to have known, though she must have provided a warning against overt politics for women, she was acquitted through a legal loophole that prevented Dangerfield’s testifying against her. She unwisely followed her acquittal with an exulting pamphlet that blamed Protestantism for the execution of Charles I and branded her recent accusers ‘Hangmans Hounds’. As Father Warner remarked of the staunch lady, she lacked ‘keenness of judgment and calm of mind—pardonable defects in the weaker sex’.12 As a result, she was condemned for libel and sentenced to stand on the pillory. So virulent was feeling against the new Whore of Babylon that she was allowed to put up a wooden shield to defend herself against the pelting of ‘Bones, Stones, Turnips, and Rotten-Eggs’.13 Behn knew that the misogyny unleashed by Cellier and the Plots could envelop any woman when a satire, attacking the ‘Rhiming Fops that Plague the Town’, depicted her ‘with Bawdry in a vaile / But swearing Bloodily, as in a Jayle’.14
Needing to continue making a living, Aphra Behn had to negotiate the stormy time and avoid the pillory herself: she required a play that would be less flippant than The Feign’d Curtizans, but still relatively innocuous. Perhaps her first published dedication reminded her of her first composed drama, to which she had once sketched out her first written dedication, the still unstaged Young King. She looked at it again and saw it had possibilities.
Indeed it even had some political relevance. Its story of a man born to be king but barred from his proper place by superstition could relate to the Duke of York, now in strategic exile in Catholic Flanders. Were he to become king, the play appears to warn, his periods of exile would have done him and his country no good. L’Estrange had anticipated the point at the Restoration when he remarked how difficult it was for a returned exile ‘to distinguish betwixt Truths and Appearances; especially for a Prince so long unwonted, and so much a Stranger to his People’. In his exile in Behn’s play, prince Orsames learns ‘a deal of Awe and Reverence to the Gods’ and that ‘his natural Reason’s Sin’, but little else.15 Had the play been entirely written at this period rather than being, as Behn insists, a revision of an early one, it could be construed as criticism of the King himself, who had, many thought, weakly acceded to the exile of the rightful heir to the throne.16
Although she was confident that much of the old play could stand, it also required modernising. Behn must have smiled at some of her former notions, such as the absolute gendering of the sexes, an essential sexual character that education might try to but could not pervert.17 She would always be sceptical about the power of education to supersede the teaching of experience, but she was no longer sure of the absolute difference in male and female sexuality. She also wondered at her romantic placing of country over city, although she had expressed a pastoral preference to Emily Price. The bluff soldier who had seen cities only in ruins had a heroism in The Young King lacking when he was transformed into the rustic buffoon of her later comedies.
It cannot be accurately known what Behn added; perhaps the fool as fop, since he is a feature of the 1670s rather than the 1660s, but probably the rather smutty sexual awakening of Orsames, unlike anything in her earliest plays or in her source, La Calprenède. This draws on the rewritten and much applauded 1667 version by Dryden and Davenant of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which the authors parallel Miranda with a man who has never before seen a woman. Orsames sees his first woman variously as a goddess, a female, and a sex object. Initially breasts are the rise and fall of familiar waves but quickly they betoken ‘other Wonders yet unseen, / Which these gay things [her clothes] maliciously do hide’. The new sexual feelings are uncontrolled by social decorum and Orsames tries to jump on each woman he sees, insisting she undress at once and instruct him what to do. He even responds sexually to his own mother, declaring when she exlaims, ‘But I am your Mother’: ‘No matter; thou’rt a Woman, art thou not? And being so, the Mother cannot awe me.’ Innocence does not baulk at incest.
More certainly, Behn added the horror of the rabble, the Wapping boys increasingly associated with Monmouth and Shaftesbury, the ‘Monster-people’ of Otway’s Caius Marius. They would be most elegantly stilettoed in Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel as ‘God’s pampered people, whom, debauched with ease, / No king could govern, nor no God would please’.18 In The Young King the good Royalist soldier asks the ‘Rabble of Citizens’ why they want a king when they had not done so before, to which comes the reply, ‘That’s all one, Colonel, we will have a King: for look ye, Colonel, we have thought of a King, and therefore we will have one: hah Neighbours! a substantial Reason.’ The citizens express the popular English resentment at the country’s loss of international place since Cromwell; they want a King because ‘’tis first a new thing to have a King,—a thing—a thing—we have not been acquainted with in our Age; besides, we have lost the Victory, and we are very angry with some body, and must vent it somewhere.’ When pushed further the citizenry admit it prefers civil strife to war against an enemy nation. As Orsames is restored, he is warned
though the World be yours, it is not safe
Depending on a fickle multitude,
Whom Interest and not Reason renders just.19
Charles II did not need to learn this lesson in the early 1660s when Behn was writing the first draft of the play, but by 1679 his son Monmouth did.20
In her attitude to the mob or rabble, Behn was as knee-jerk as her opponents to the papists. For all the contemporary fear there was very little serious violence in London, and the huge crowds that assembled for the November Protestant festivals of Guy Fawkes and Queen Elizabeth’s Accession Day never attacked Whitehall or assaulted Catholics indiscriminately. It was part of Tory propaganda to see Whigs as amazing manipulators of a threatening homogeneous mass, when in fact they had little organisational power and the crowd had many different agendas.
For her new prologue, Behn alluded to an up-to-date comic event of 23 June 1679. After a curious episode in the militia in Flanders, possibly nursing a heart broken by Elizabeth Barry, Thomas Otway attended the theatre where he encountered a blustering young man buying oranges from Orange Betty. This was John Churchill, future Duke of Marlborough and hero of Ble
nheim, but at present gigolo to the King’s ex-mistress, Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland. Either the price or the fruit offended and Orange Betty’s shriek was heard after the crack of a cane. Inspired by his stint in the militia, Otway challenged Churchill. Reports are unclear whether or not a real duel followed, but most likely the pair battled it out with canes; by most accounts Otway came off best. It was the height of his martial career, the depth of Churchill’s.
Behn was much amused by her friend’s performance which gave her another opportunity of treating male pretension, predicament, and violence mock-heroically:
Cudgel the Weapon was, the Pit the Field;
Fierce was the Heroe, and too brave to yield.
But stoutest hearts must bow; and being well can’d,
He crys, Hold, hold, you have the Victory gain’d.
All laughing call—
Turn out the Rascal the eternal Blockhead.21
At the end of the play, Elizabeth Barry, who probably played Cleomena, stepped forward to speak the epilogue, ‘at his Royal Highness’s second Exile into Flanders’ as the printed text expressed it. In creaking couplets, it conjured up an unambitious theatrical Golden Age vision, obverse of the factious London world, a vision in which Monmouth is contained and James is not ‘forcd by Arbitrary Votes to fly / To foreign Shores for his Security’. Of the ‘Lord of May’ alone it can be said:
No emulation breaks his soft Repose;
Nor do his Wreaths or Virtues gain his Foes:
No politick mischiefs can disturb his Reign,
And malice wou’d be busie here in vain.
Fathers and Sons just Love and Duty pay;
This knows to be indulgent, that t’obey
Here’s no Sedition hatcht, no other Plots,
But to intrap the Wolf that steals our Flocks....22
Behn always had trouble yoking monarchy with pastoral indolence. In ‘The Golden Age’ she had fantasised a pastoral world without kings and, in ‘Farewell to Celadon’, she let the King destroy pastoral bliss. Here she forces pastoral and monarchy together in a paradox of power in repose.
With the theatre so problematic, Behn now looked around for other ways than play-writing of making a living, ones that did not carry with them the risk of prosecution for libel or sedition. Perhaps in another genre she might even acquire some of the literary status about which she was so ambivalent. Many of her plays had been pleasing and quite good, some were mediocre, all followed rather than led fashion. They used the conventions with skill, but the genre of bawdy intrigue comedy was not the highest. Poetry had more cachet. Behn’s poems had been circulating among a coterie of readers for some time and, with a little help, she might attempt to publish in the prestigious mode of poetic translation from the classics. Perhaps she mentioned her desire to Tonson, who, like other booksellers, served as publisher, distributor, agent and even patron. Tonson may have mentioned the matter to Dryden.
Although as a professional Tory Behn publicly admired Dryden, she had had little personal contact with him. He had been writing mainly for the rival theatre and was more of a court figure than she. Now times were even worse for the King’s than for the Duke’s Company and it actually had to close for part of one year; Dryden was therefore looking around for other outlets for his writing and perhaps other alliances. In the summer of 1679 he left town to spend some months in Northamptonshire, but, before he went, he organised a volume of translations for Tonson from Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of monologues spoken by famously abandoned or grieving women. It was to be published early in the new year. Despite her ignorance of Latin, he asked Behn to join the project.23
Behn probably hoped for Greek Sappho, her great predecessor. By the seventeenth century Sappho had an ambiguous reputation, perceived by some as a promiscuous lover of women and a suicide, by others as a great lyric poet and feminine victim of heterosexual passion. Her image had recently been popularised in a soft-focus, rather sentimental version by French writers and this made it possible for respectable men to call respectable female poets by her name—Katherine Philips had been ‘the English Sappho’ for example.24 Behn might have done justice to this multi-faceted figure if she had had a chance; in fact she was assigned Oenone lamenting her faithless lover Paris, lured away by Helen of Troy.
It is unlikely that Behn had help from Dryden himself since, in the early months of 1680, he was recuperating from a vicious attack in Rose Alley made by bullies hired perhaps by the Duchess of Portsmouth or by the Earl of Rochester, both of whom had been mocked in a work ascribed to him. One of her university-educated theatrical or legal friends, Nahum Tate or Otway, both in the volume, might have given Behn a prose translation or, since she was remarkably fluent with poetry, might have translated orally while she turned the words into couplets. Or James Wright, who most likely helped with the Molière translation behind Sir Patient Fancy, might have come to her aid: he was known to translate from Latin as well as French.
Her ‘translation’ differed from work by men who knew Latin.25 In his preface Dryden wrote of Behn, ‘I was desir’d to say that the Authour who is of the Fair Sex, understood not Latine. But if she does not, I am afraid she has given us occasion to be asham’d who do.’ It was a compliment to someone he obviously did not know well and it fitted with his conception of feminine modesty, but Behn so routinely lamented her lack of classical learning that he was probably telling the truth. Where the others in the volume used literal translation or paraphrase, hers was, Dryden said, ‘in Mr Cowleys way of Imitation only’. She liked the parallel. Cowley had called his free and cultural translations of Pindar ‘libertine’, allowing the writer to supply the ‘lost Excellencies’ of the original language with those of a later. The author became a ‘pattern’ and the translator could write as the author would have done had he lived in the translator’s times.26
Dryden was serious about his volume and provided a substantial introduction. It began with a summary of Ovid’s life which included the kind of tart remarks on imperial morals that might have been risky in a man less highly regarded. In his hands the Roman Ovid began to sound like a Restoration gentleman, even appreciating English rank. Probably Behn felt a twinge of jealousy as she noted the kind of authority a man could command even when saying routine things.
Mindful of the erotic charge in Ovid’s ‘tenderly passionate’ work, Dryden went on to insist: ‘of the general Character of Women which is Modesty, he has taken a most becoming care; for his amorous Expressions go no further than virtue may allow, and therefore may be read, as he intended them, by Matrons without a blush.’ Ovid was also commended for giving ‘lower’ characters such as Oenone ‘Images after a Country Life’. Whether Ovid, whose steamy life he had just delicately negotiated, was truly writing for unblushing matrons was as doubtful to Behn as the natural association of women with modesty. As for the lowering of the tone when lower-ranked characters spoke, this was something she did not follow when she wrote her section—or rather she did not regard her Oeone as ‘lower’. Instead she saw her as a theatrical amalgamation of several lamenting ladies: dropping the passive acceptance of a prophecy of Paris’s infidelity which marked Ovid’s Oenone, Behn gave her character the dishevelled hair and wild gestures of the more active Ariadne and Sappho.
Some of Ovid’s sentiments were translated into Behn’s own mode. For example, she made Oenone mock her successful rival Helen:
... Rape hides the Adult’rous Deed.
And is it thus Great Ladies keep intire
That Vertue they so boast, and you admire?
Is this a Trick of Courts, can Ravishment
Serve for poor Evasion of Consent?
Female sexuality or desire should always be frankly acknowledged—at least when one is young.
It was not a political volume, but Behn could not entirely omit politics and she socialised what in Ovid was essentially a private affair.27 So Paris merges into Monmouth and the prize for which he abandoned Oenone was less Helen of Troy than royal powe
r, that ‘fatal Pomp, that cou’d so soon divide / What Love, and all our Vows so firmly ty’d!’ Like Monmouth, Paris was seduced by old grave men who whispered to him ‘Renown, and Glory’ and promised to change his shepherd’s crook for a sceptre.
In a later edition Dryden added another version of ‘Oenone’, by John Cooper. It seems to have been no slight to Behn, however, since her version was retained and since Cooper was her old ‘Brother’ of the pen described so warmly in ‘Our Cabal’. Indeed Cooper later wrote that, had Behn been able to give her words to Oenone at the time, the nymph ‘soon her perjur’d Lover had regain’d / In spight of all the fair Seducers tears’; meanwhile Ovid would not have tried to write at all, but fallen in love with Aphra Behn instead.28
Behn hoped that Dryden’s pointed reference to her ignorance of Latin would save her from adverse comment, but it did not. True she was omitted from Matthew Stevenson’s The Wits Paraphrased, which poked most fun at Sir Car Scrope’s rendering of ‘Sappho to Phaon’. However, Behn appeared quite clearly in a later satire by Matthew Prior, which not only called her ‘blind translatress’ and ‘Female Wit’ but pointed to her ‘Lewdness’ and ‘the ruin of her Face’. Probably she was not much concerned, for the young Prior was a colleague of Shadwell’s and a Whig.29
She was more irritated by what followed. Tonson had persuaded a young Tory, Alexander Radcliffe, to counter the mockery of Wits Paraphrased with another mockery, Ovid Travestie (1681). The picture Radcliffe drew of Sappho as a woman entertainer, a ballad maker and writer sweating in her garret, her rent unpaid, may have drawn a little from Aphra Behn, and it may also have brought her to his mind. For he went on to produce a medley called The Ramble: An Anti-Heroick Poem, in which in a section called ‘News from Hell’ he allowed a truly annoying claim to be advanced. The ‘censuring Age’ damned