by Janet Todd
a Woman, ’cause ’tis said,
The Plays she vends she never made.
But that a Greys Inn Lawyer does ’em,
Who unto her was Friend in Bosom.
Behn might not mind being mocked for her affair with Jack Hoyle, but she objected strongly to doubts about her authorship, especially from a man who probably knew Hoyle. Radcliffe too was a Gray’s Inn lawyer.
Still reluctant to create an original play or to put her name on a printed text, Behn followed The Young King with The Revenge, an anonymous, partly revised, partly adapted version of Marston’s Jacobean play, The Dutch Courtezan, a dark City tragicomedy of a whore’s intended vengeance on her seducer and betrayer.30 The play was probably staged early in 1680 and may have ‘dishonoured’ the stage ‘many a time’ after that.31 Given some of the additions uncharacteristic of Behn, it could have been a collaboration of Behn and Betterton.32
Most of the material is in the original play, with a few contemporary comments added. As in The Feign’d Curtizans, popular anti-popery is ridiculed: a robbed tradesman immediately cries that the thief is a ‘Jesuit in disguise, sent from beyond Sea to ruine honest Citizens’, while his female accomplice must be ‘some Priest in Petticoats’. Later, hearing tall tales of ‘Giants in Scarlet, with Triple Crowns on their heads’, he fears ‘the Nation will be over-run with Poperie indeed’.
The Revenge would have to be classed as revision with cuts and interpolations if there had not been some fundamental changes, mainly to adapt parts to the Duke’s Company actors: the thin and wiry Jevon played someone whom Marston had called thick and stub-bearded, while, most significantly, Elizabeth Barry, famous for the pathos she had just magnificently displayed in Otway’s The Orphan, was playing the seduced Corina. Consequently Corina was transformed from a comic Dutch whore speaking broken English into a pathetic fallen woman with every justification for revenge on her seducer.33 In the flurry of marriages with which this play, but not Marston’s, ends, Corina’s achievement of the absurd Sir John must be part of a happy conclusion. Certainly it is better than the torture and ‘severest prison’ that Marston’s Dutch whore faces.34 However motivated by theatrical needs (and at odds with Marston’s moral about lust for a whore being quite distinct from love of a wife), the changes make The Revenge a fascinating slice of literary history. A Jacobean work has bypassed the Restoration mode that Behn had made her own and approached eighteenth-century sentimental drama, in which wrong-doing is explained and humble whores humiliated and forgiven.
The Revenge was performed in the first part of 1680 and seems to have proved quite popular, with Williams as the hero and the scandalous Charlotte Butler playing the virtuous heroine.35 Emily Price played the cunning foil. The play was published anonymously without prologue or epilogue to give any inkling of the author, and, like The Debauchee and The Counterfeit Bridegroom, was never acknowledged. The ascription, surer than that of the other two anonymous plays, rests with the collector and recorder Narcissus Luttrell, who was so convinced it was Behn’s that he bound it in a volume with other ‘Comedies’ of ‘Ann Behn’.
For some time now Aphra Behn’s health had been poor. If the Elisabeth Johnson in the burial register of St Bride’s for 10 April 1679 is Behn’s mother, dying aged sixty-five, then Behn would recently have lost her nearest relative. Such a close death may have prompted thoughts of her own. She was now suffering from aches and pains in her limbs and back which depressed her spirit. So it may have been at this juncture that she tried to follow the austere regime of her acquaintance and fellow traveller to the Caribbean, Thomas Tryon. Believing that all physical ills of man were due to self-indulgence, Tryon attributed the Fall to the killing and eating of animals, and he condemned meat, tobacco and alcohol.36 Later, when his Way to Healthy Long Life, and Happiness came out, Behn wrote a commendation assimilating his doctrine of health to her vision of the Golden Age, ‘When the whole race was Vigorous and Strong... When Christal Streams, and every plenteous Wood / Afforded harmless drink, and wholsom food’. Since the passing of these idyllic days, humanity had become enfeebled by ingesting poison and ruining the body, then trying to restore it with bad medicines: ‘Till sinking Nature cloy’d with full supplys / O’er-charg’d grows fainter, Languishes and dies’. Tryon was for Behn a ‘saving Angel’, however mocked by others: ‘Let Fools and Mad-men thy great work condemn, / I’ve tri’d thy Method, and adore thy Theme.’ It would be interesting to know for how long she avoided alcohol.
In July 1680, further grief was added to poor health when Behn heard the news that the Earl of Rochester had died at the age of thirty-three. He had left London in April already very ill. Opinions differ on his ailments, but they included kidney stones and neurosyphilis. His affair with Elizabeth Barry had been decidedly ended, although he had still written bitter letters to her from time to time, and he had been reconciled with his long-suffering wife and pious mother in the country. Soon there were rumours of a conversion to Anglican piety, and the indefatigable cleric Gilbert Burnet was summoned to the deathbed to dispute theology. As a loud critic of courtly corruption Burnet was keen to make as much mileage as possible out of the event and he quickly published his account of the dying rake Rochester, the conversion, and his own part in it: ‘All the town is full of his great penitence,’ Burnet could soon crow.37
Behn lamented the death, but pointedly ignored the conversion. When the King had heard of it, he had doubted and dispatched an emissary to Oxfordshire to find out the truth; he was told that Rochester had gone mad, a condition that fitted the occasional course of syphilis. Perhaps Behn subscribed to this view or at least assumed that a man racked with pain and anticipating a gruesome death could not well weigh the evidence of Anglicanism.
Yet Burnet’s full account must have had some truth in it which she wished not to see: she preferred the atheistical author to the penitent. Nat Lee, who had been mocked by Rochester and had moved over to his enemy Mulgrave, took a similarly robust line in The Princess of Cleves, where Rochester became the ‘Spirit of Wit’ who ‘had such an Art of guilding his Failures, that it was hard not to love his Faults’. But Lee went further in seeing the conversion as trickery: ‘He well Repents that will not Sin, yet can, / But Death-bed Sorrow rarely shews the Man.’38 Mulgrave agreed; he had always been jealous of Rochester’s publicity coups, and now saw him bringing one off even in death.
Given Rochester’s huge poetic talent and learning, Behn decided to mourn the Earl in a formal pastoral elegy. She was used to writing poems of praise and it is difficult to cull out opinion from the conventional phrases, but she evidently saw in Rochester one of the greatest poets of his age. Her refusal to accept the Burnet version of the end—her Rochester ‘ne’re shall rise from Deaths eternal Night’—suggests just how much she had been affected by the philosophy implied in his poetry, as well as by the pastoral vision that avoided any notion of an afterlife.
Behn did not see Rochester as he had seen himself in the conversations with Burnet, as wasting his life and talents, but as splendid, eternally young and noble. She was always moved by physical beauty which she called ‘godlike’; tall, lean and self-assured, Rochester had been simply inimitable. Later Robert Wolseley, his friend, wrote ‘Sure there has not lived in many ages (if ever) so extraordinary, and, I think I may add, so useful a person as most Englishmen know my Lord to have been... for as he was both the delight and the wonder of men, the love and the dotage of women, so he was a continual curb to impertinence and the public censor of folly.’ In Behn’s words,
He was but lent this duller World t’improve
In all the charms of Poetry, and Love;
Both were his gift, which freely he bestow’d,
And like a God, dealt to the wond’ring Crowd.
Scorning the little Vanity of Fame,
Spight of himself attain’d a Glorious name.
It was the testimony of a professional woman to a glittering amateur man. For Rochester, social and political power had been
so easy to grasp. Born aristocratic and male, there was little for which he needed to strive. He could afford satire with a ‘Sting’, indulge his ‘dear instructing Rage’, dabble in loyal and opposition politics, and, having flesh so easily to hand, grow disgusted with it in poems of transcendental longing. Behn’s elegy made nothing of the ambiguities of the libertine caught in The Rover which the drunken, violent as well as charming and witty Rochester embodied. It was not the moment for complexity.39 She expressed only appreciation and perhaps some satisfaction that she, a commoner, was writing an elegy to an earl.
Some remained disdainful of the outpouring. In his Essay upon Poetry, the Earl of Mulgrave criticised women elegists in particular, and may have had Behn in mind when he said ‘harmonious numbers’ were not enough: thought and genre should be in absolute unison. ‘Trifles’ approved in the moment would not stand the test of time. If he were referring to Behn, he was wrong, for her elegy was reprinted in the eighteenth-century collected edition of Rochester’s works.40
Others commended her poem, including those who were shocked by her more risqué verse. Among these was Rochester’s half-niece, the unhappily married Anne Wharton.41 She herself was a poet, encouraged by the elderly Cavalier, Edmund Waller, to think ‘some worth’ in her ‘dull Rhymes’. Having read the elegy, she was clearly not offended by Behn’s attitude to the conversion. Although she herself was moved by Rochester’s exemplary death, in her own elegy she too went against the notion of a vicious man made suddenly good by religion when she saw Rochester’s earlier influence tending to wisdom and civilisation.
Anne Wharton used verse to address the older, more distinguished Aphra Behn, who forced ‘an Homage from each Generous Heart’. As Behn’s social superior, she felt she might hazard a criticism also. Behn should, she advised, ‘Scorn meaner Themes, declining low desire, / And bid your Muse maintain a Vestal Fire’. That way Behn would have Sappho’s ‘Wit, without her Shame’.42
However qualified the ‘Condescension’—and she was attuned to its niceties—Behn was pleased to receive it and she replied in another poem, entitled ‘To Mrs. W. On her Excellent Verses (Writ in Praise of some I had made on the Earl of Rochester) Written in a Fit of Sickness’. In this she negotiated the social (and poetic) distance by praising Anne Wharton through the undeniably great Rochester, whose ‘Mighty Soul’ was revived in his niece. Waller had anticipated the conceit when he claimed that Rochester continued to live in Anne Wharton. Happily Wharton adored her uncle, and was not offended by the manoeuvre. The title of the poem suggests that Rochester’s death had contributed to Behn’s ill health.
Within it Behn referred to ‘the Silent Hours’ of grief, the ‘Weary Nights, and Melancholy Days; / When no Kind Power my Pain Reliev’d’, which gave an hallucinatory quality to her vision of the coalesced Rochester-Wharton. The conjunction of sickness, pain and grief had led to depression, that psychosomatic state which, despite her gaiety and vitality, often haunted Behn:
Sad as the Grave I sat by Glimmering Light,
Such as attends Departing Souls by Night.
Pensive as absent Lovers left alone...
So dull I was....
She was not, however, too ‘dull’ to take up the criticism made by Anne Wharton. As an ‘image’ of Rochester, Wharton had a right to correct Behn, who had been taught by him, but Rochester was unlikely to have condemned desire or urged a ‘Vestal Fire’. The ‘loose Neglect’ Behn admitted to having corrected under Rochester’s influence was a matter of style, not content.
Anne Wharton relished the correspondence with so famous a literary woman as Behn, but Gilbert Burnet was now in a commanding position with the family, and, when she sent him a copy of Behn’s verse response, he did not approve. Deeply conservative on women, he castigated anyone who did not follow the modest feminine path, and he rebuked the young Wharton for writing in praise of such a person:
Some of Mrs Behn’s songs are very tender; but she is so abominably vile a woman, and rallies not only all Religion but all vertue in so odious and obscene a manner, that I am... heartily sorry she had writ any thing in your commendation.... The praises of such as she is are...great reproaches.
A few days later he returned to the attack:
I am very much pleased with your verses to Mrs Behn; but there are some errours in women, that are never to be forgiven to that degree, as to allow those of a severe vertue to hold any correspondence with them. And so many grosse obscenities as fell from her come under that qualification, if I can judge aright.43
The same advice came from another pious friend, William Attwood. Wharton should flee so contaminated a person as Behn, with her ‘loose Desires’ and hedonistic teaching, and emulate the chaste Katherine Philips instead:
When counterfeit Astraea’s lustful Rage
Joyns to Debauch the too Effem’nate Age;
Draws an Embroider’d Curtain over Sin,
And jilts with Promises of Bliss within:
’Tis time for you with all your Wealth of Thought,
Forth from your lov’d Retirement to be brought....
You best can tell the Charms of vertuous Joy;
Despising Venus with her Wanton Boy.44
In fact poor Anne Wharton, ill perhaps with venereal disease contracted as a child, did not have much time to associate with either Venus or Behn. Over the next years she lived mainly in the country in Buckinghamshire, and died at the early age of twenty-six. Behn printed her own reply to Wharton in her first collection of poetry in 1684, and, in her Miscellany, published after Wharton’s death, anonymously reprinted Wharton’s poem called ‘Despair’.45 Oddly, she did not reprint the poem Wharton had written to her; perhaps the family or Burnet obstructed the publication.46
The year 1680, so depressing politically and personally, ended with another blow. After months in the Tower, Behn’s old acquaintance Lord Stafford, now nearly seventy, was finally tried before the Lords for his part in the largely fictitious Popish Plot. The political climate was less hysterical than it had been a few months before, but the recent Accession Day had none the less featured effigies of L’Estrange and Mrs Cellier along with the usual popish bugbears. Behn had not known Stafford well, but her travelling companion from Antwerp, Sir Bernard Gascoigne, had spoken highly of him. His wife and several children were devoted to him, although his kin were not; as Evelyn tartly remarked: ‘Lord Stafford was not a man beloved, especially by his own family.’47
The events of the early part of the trial Behn probably had directly from Sir Bernard Gascoigne. He was in court watching in disbelief as Lord Stafford was gradually caught in the noose. With only his daughter’s notes to help him in his defence against a charge of treason, Stafford had to combat deafness, a heavy cold, and natural irascibility. Sir Bernard was not there for the later part, however; he had been spotted, and a cry had gone up to eject the Catholic.
Stafford was found guilty, though Evelyn declared of Titus Oates’s perjured evidence: ‘Such a man’s Testimonie should not be taken against the life of a Dog.’48 His relatives had been divided on the verdict, the Earl of Arundel voting against death, the Earl of Sunderland for it.49 The sentence was conventionally gruesome: ‘you must be drawn upon a Hurdle to the Place of Execution; When you come there, you must be Hang’d up by the Neck, but not till you are dead; for you must be cut down alive; your Privy Members must be cut off, and your Bowels ript up before your face, and thrown into the Fire; then your Head must be severed from your Body, and your Body divided into four Quarters; and these must be at the disposal of the King.’ The City authorities wanted to carry out this barbaric ritual, but accepted Charles’s intervention, and Stafford was allowed to die as befitted a nobleman, by the axe only. Even Burnet had to admit ‘Lord Stafford behaved himself during the whole time, and at the receiving of his sentence, with much more constancy than was expected of him.’50
He was executed on 29 December on a special scaffold erected on Tower Hill. So popular was the spectacle that people rente
d out space at even distant windows for a guinea a head.51 Stafford read out a prepared statement showing that he had used the time since his sentence in proper Catholic contrition, despite being badgered by Burnet to change his faith to Anglicanism. One of the anxieties was that the convicted would not confess at the last, or might even declare their innocence on the scaffold. Although in a Catholic’s case this was explained by absolution and lack of a proper Protestant sense of guilt, it still worried many that Stafford claimed ignorance of any Catholic plot: ‘I have always held that Christianity and the truth is never to be brought in with blood.’ In the words of the diarist Roger Morrice, he ‘very peremptorily with the greatest asseveration, and in the most plain words, denyd the guilt he was charged with, and avowd his inocency even to his very thoughts...’.52
Although Burnet considered that Stafford died ‘without any shew of fear or disorder’, he also asserted that the Viscount ‘vanished soon out of men’s thoughts’. This was Whig optimism. Shortly afterwards, Stafford’s ghost, like Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey’s, was apparently haunting informers. Reports of such activity indicated that he lingered on in popular memory as the sufferer of an unjust death.
Sickened at this latest display of lunatic anti-popery, Behn was at least pleased that Stafford, the only aristocratic Catholic martyr of the Plot, died a ‘glorious death’. ‘Here Noble Stafford fell, on Death’s great Stage, / A Victim to the Lawless Peoples Rage,’ she wrote. Echoing the redemptive Christ himself, Stafford
Calm as a Dove, receiv’d a shameful Death,
To undeceive the World, resign’d his Breath;
And like a God, dy’d to redeem Our Faith.
As for his killers,
At Golgotha they glut the’r Insatiate Eyes
With Scenes of Blood, and Humane Sacrifice,