Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  Where she had once scorned Jonson’s idea of ‘Edifying Plays’, Behn now saw them teaching political correctness.29 The Roundheads was not simply light-hearted amusement, but a ‘small Mirror of the late wretched Times’. So poets, including herself, were transformed from entertainers earning their shillings into ‘Prophets as of old they were’. Such an idea reinforced a line in the epilogue of The Second Part of The Rover, in which Charles became the King of Poets and his peers the poets secured ‘beneath his Laurels Shade’. Betrayal by poets was as drastic for the state as the betrayal by peers.

  As Tory propaganda, The Roundheads overtopped The Second Part of The Rover and The False Count, indulging in no comic undercutting of Cavaliers. Royalism became synonymous with virtue, and libertinism was translated into love, lust being left to the canting Puritans. The play proved deservedly popular, enlivening for the Tories a cold winter, the first of three such. It helped to dampen the effect of Shadwell’s Whig play, Lancashire-Witches, acted at Dorset Garden earlier in the year, and probably inspired Crowne to add his farcical City Politiques to the Tory attack. Behn was exultant, keen to exaggerate her political effect and make imaginary Whigs say of her play ‘what, to name us...she deserves to be swing’d’. The propaganda of which her play was a part evidently helped reinforce court power and celebrating Royalism became the order of the day. Some pieces with Parliamentary sympathies were even forced into private theatres.30

  When published, The Roundheads was made the more insulting to Monmouth by being dedicated to his half-brother, the equally illegitimate and Protestant but loyal Duke of Grafton. The son of Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland, and the husband of Lord Arlington’s daughter, Isabella, Grafton had just been made Colonel of the First Foot Guards—Behn liked to catch people on the way up. The dedication was the usual fulsome flattery and appeal to a young man ‘whom Heaven and Nature has form’d the most adorable Person in the whole Creation’. She admired pretty young men and, following convention, tended to use beauty to stand in for any good quality. None the less, this was one of her most over-the-top performances—especially since many regarded Grafton as uncouth and ill bred—and it was as well that Samuel Johnson, who so lamented her less outrageous Nell Gwyn address, did not see it. ‘[T]he Poet’s Flattery seldom reaches the Patron’s Vanity’, however, ‘and what’s too strong sea-son’d for the rest of the World, is too weak for their Palates’.

  After her success with The Roundheads, Behn may have thought she had earned the right to relax her political stridency. If so, she was wrong and her next adaptation, Like Father, Like Son, was not even published after its failure on the stage. Its prologue, however, survived and provided another reason for the failure: that, ironically, it had to compete with the Duke of York. James had returned from exile to join the King at the Newmarket races and his well-wishers had rushed to greet him, thus deserting pits and boxes:

  So we who having Plotted long to please,

  With new Parts, new Cloathes, new Face, new Dress;

  To draw in all the yielding Hearts o’th’ Town,

  His Highness comes and all our Hopes are gone.31

  Inevitably Behn turned back to overt propaganda and, in late April, came the last of her run of political plays: The City-Heiress.32 A better work than The Roundheads, it was innovative on two counts. It began Behn’s serious analysis of the danger and perversity of female desire, foreshadowed in Sir Patient Fancy and The Second Part of The Rover, while the hero’s quotation from ‘The Disappointment’—‘he saw how at her Length she lay, / He saw her rising Bosom bare; / Her loose thin Robes, through which appear / A Shape design’d for Love and Play’—initiated her habit of intermeshing works to form a single coded fictional world. This teased the reader/watcher into guessing the author’s ‘life’—or perhaps wondering what a life was apart from narratives and images.

  Borrowing bits from the pre-Interregnum playwrights, Philip Massinger and Thomas Middleton, The City-Heiress primarily followed the latter’s A Mad World, My Masters, but is not an adaptation like The Roundheads. In keeping with the times, it translated the unpleasant original characters of the early seventeenth century into the political and comic types of the 1680s. Middleton’s old uncle figure became the alderman Sir Timothy Treatall, for example. Hypocritical, greedy, Whig and Dissenting, Sir Timothy was probably a composite figure of several Whigs such as the now Lord Mayor, Sir Patience Ward, and the notoriously whoring alderman and virulent anti-papist, Sir Thomas Player. Since, however, the play followed hard on the heels of the political sensation of the theatrical season, Otway’s Venice Preserv’d, people may well have been looking for mockery of Lord Shaftesbury. (Although it is not universally agreed that Shaftesbury was represented in Otway’s character Antonio, many believed that the playwright had turned the ageing, ailing and clever Earl into a fetishistic masochist, intent on flagellation from his mistress Nicky Nacky.) Behn did not disappoint expectation and, like many others, she alluded to Shaftesbury by referring to the invented Tory episode of his seeking the elective crown of Poland: in her play Sir Timothy is fired by the ludicrous offer but then returned to his status of London alderman. His money will be restored only if he promises to support the royal brothers and stop meddling with Exclusion.33

  Despite its title, the centre of The City-Heiress is held by the poxed hero Wilding, choosing as usual between two women, and by the rich widow, Lady Galliard, who here plays the courtesan’s role. In keeping with the greater conservatism of a primarily political play, this time the rake-hero marries a virgin, but the chemistry between Wilding and the adult Lady Galliard is so great and her passion so well communicated that it is hard for the play to follow The Rover rather than The Second Part of The Rover and donate the desired man to the proper and clever heroine.

  Lady Galliard is passionate and free—she was played by Elizabeth Barry, who had just played La Nuche—and, like Angellica of The Rover, she feels love stronger than prudence and interest. Unlike Lady Fancy, she is not a libertine but remains the conventional woman reared to modesty, yet overwhelmed by sexual desire. She succumbs knowing, as many naïve girls do not, that neglect will follow. Sexual freedom in the context of the double standard is inevitably imprisoning, and Lady Galliard ends diminished by her affair with Wilding.

  Another Rover with some of the harshness of the second Willmore and the rhetorical power of the first, Wilding, played by Betterton, subjects Lady Galliard to the seductive language Behn both admired and, as a woman in society, feared to hear. Beauty should still be the reward of love, he argues,

  Not the vile Merchandize of Fortune,

  Or the cheap Drug of a Church-Ceremony.

  She’s onely infamous, who to her Bed

  For interest, takes some nauseous Clown she hates:

  And though a Joynture or a Vow in publick

  Be her price, that makes her but the dearer whore...

  All the desires of mutual Love are vertuous.

  Can Heaven or Man be angry that you please

  Your self and me, when it does wrong to none?34

  It was the sort of plea Rochester made in his heyday before he encountered Burnet. It was often the prelude to sex, then male disgust at female sex, then rejection.

  Both Lady Galliard and Wilding tiptoe round marriage. He proclaims that he ‘had the honest Reputation of lying with the Magistrates Wives’ but now he is reduced to ‘a Husband-Lover!... Thus the City She-wits are let loose upon me, and all for you, sweet Widow’. Meanwhile she exclaims against marrying a man with ‘half a dozen hungry Vices, like so many bawling Brats at your back, perpetually craving, and more chargeable to keep than twice the number of Children...’.35 Both know the truth, however, that he does not need marriage and that for her only marriage can do. Lady Galliard can truly say, ‘I understand not these new Morals.’ There is no libertine space for women who have already internalised the conventional morality and tragic progress: ‘when you are weary of me, first your Friend, / Then his, then all the World’
. Loving so intensely that she sees Wilding as ‘all / That Man can praise, or Woman can desire’, Lady Galliard pays for fulfilled desire the ‘high Price’ of her virtue. She knows the consequence:

  ... A Whore? Oh, let me think of that!

  A man’s Convenience, his leisure hours, his Bed of Ease,

  To loll and tumble on at idle times;

  The Slave, the Hackney of his lawful Lust!

  A loath’d Extinguisher of filthy flames,

  Made use of, and thrown by...

  In the end, when she gives in through pure sexual desire, Wilding crows:

  All Heaven is mine, I have it in my arms;

  Nor can ill Fortune reach me any more.

  Fate, I defie thee, and dull World, adieu.

  In Loves kind Fever let me ever ly,

  Drunk with Desire, and raving mad with Joy.36

  Despite his diseased status, he gains in stature while she is left with remorse and jealousy. It is a powerful picture of gender difference in sex and the warfare between men and women outside Arcadia. The woman may be intellectually attracted to the male libertine creed but she cannot, without the cover of marriage and the conquest of her moral upbringing, follow it and survive in society. Lady Galliard is forced to screen her fall with marriage to her would-be rapist, looking, like poor Ariadne of The Second Part of The Rover, fondly back at the man she loves.

  Otway’s complex sexual concerns seem to have entered The City-Heiress and there is even a leering and voyeuristic uncle pushing a nephew into vicarious rape.37 Fittingly, then, Otway offered Behn a prologue for Elizabeth Barry to speak. He and Nat Lee seem now to have replaced Ravenscroft in closeness; each needed the others in these impecunious times, and Otway would have been paid for his words. A ‘Person of Quality’ provided a suggestive epilogue, clearly written for the scandalous Charlotte Butler, who comically played the virgin in the play—Butler is made to refer to her whorish reputation which, she claims, will make her role hard for the audience to swallow. The play therefore began and ended in ‘petticoats’. The cast-off mistress who finally gets the Whig knight, Sir Timothy, was played by Betty Currer, so famed for her saucy mistress roles, and Sir Timothy and his friend were acted by the comic duo of Nokes and Leigh. Music was provided by Giovanni Draghi and Langbaine declared the whole performance well received. The printed version was brought out by Daniel Brown who had also published Behn’s other most political play, The Roundheads, making more careful jobs of both than Tonson had done with her earlier plays.38

  For her dedicatee for this success Behn chose carefully, another Protestant who would become very important to her: Henry Howard, Earl of Arundel, the future seventh Duke of Norfolk and son of the great patron of the Royal Society. His strategic conversion during the Popish Plot had just been rewarded and he had become Lord Lieutenant of Berkshire and Surrey. Behn appreciated him as the only Howard peer to vote for his great-uncle Stafford—‘May Heaven and Earth bless you for your pious and resolute bravery of Mind, and heroick Honesty, when you cry’d, Not Guilty’—but others regarded him as ‘a very vicious man’, a trimmer and a time-server. Probably Arundel was generous to Aphra Behn since she later referred to him as her patron.

  The dedication welcomed the revival of royal spirits. The Stuarts were popular again after ‘troublesome times, this Age of Lying, Preaching, and Swearing’. The bubble of the Popish Plot had burst: ‘The Clouds already begin to disappear, and the face of things to change, thanks to Heaven, his Majesties infinite Wisdom, and the Over-Zeal of the (falsely called) True Protestant Party.’ But heaven and royal wisdom were only part of the cause Behn knew. The Tory propaganda which she had helped create tarred the grumblings of the 1680s with the rebellion of the 1640s, making Exclusionists of whatever hue into rabid republicans. Behn wanted ‘seditious Fools and Knaves... [to] become the business and sport of Comedy, and at last the scorn of that Rabble that fondly and blindly worshipt ’em’. Certainly she had helped in the former task and she could feel proud of her part. It did not matter to her that others saw this Royalist campaign as a vicious attempt to silence dissent and freedom of expression.

  Chapter 21

  Free-thinking in Politics and Religion

  ‘Beyond poor Feeble Faith’s dull Oracles’

  Behn had reluctantly followed the times in using plays as overt propaganda and was glad of some success in the mode. With satisfaction she reflected on the popular Roundheads and The City-Heiress: of the latter she wrote, ‘It has the luck to be well received in the Town; which (not for my Vanity) pleases me, but that thereby I find Honesty in fashion again, when Loyalty is approved and Whigism becomes a Jest where’er ’tis met with.’1 Perhaps she even celebrated the moment by commissioning a portrait of herself by Lely’s successor as court painter, John Riley. A shy, diffident man, no lover of conviviality and taverns like her dead artist friend Greenhill, Riley is unlikely to have encountered Behn socially. But, unpopular with court ladies, he did paint women of her rank, including, on one occasion, a governess in the royal household. He had writers such as Edmund Waller among his sitters and to these he gave an inward, brooding quality quite distinct from Lely’s more extrovert images. The portrait of Behn, surviving now only in engravings, is serious, even sombre, but compatible with the one ascribed to Lely five or so years earlier.2

  With Behn’s success the Whig Shadwell was thoroughly vexed. Gleeful over the failure of her unpublished play, Like Father, Like Son, he was incensed at the good reception of The Roundheads and The City-Heiress, and, in The Tory Poets, A Satire, he fulminated against both works as shams. He made Otway into Behn’s pimp because he had supplied her with a prologue:

  Poetess Aphra, though she’s damn’d today,

  Tomorrow will put up another play;

  And Otway must be pimp to set her off

  Lest the enraged bully scowl, and scoff,

  And hiss, and laugh, and give not such applause

  To Th’City Heiress as The Good Old Caused.3

  Other less Whiggish poets were displeased with Behn’s efforts as well. Believing that wicked writers would ‘pluck down a Judgment on the Times’, Robert Gould was furious at the spectacle of the impudent Mrs Behn portraying rewarded rakes and cursing virgins.4 He had been uneasy as each of her plays was performed, but he positively seethed when, in The City-Heiress, he saw intercourse implied in the rumpled clothes of Wilding and the laments of the widow, Lady Galliard. With visceral horror he watched Behn moving into the political and literary centre as a ‘Female Laureat’ and lashed out at her:

  What tho’ thou brings’t (to please a vicious Age)

  A far more vicious widdow on the Stage,

  Just Reeking from a Stallions Rank Embrace,

  With Ruffled Garments, and disordered Face,

  T’acquaint the Audience with her Slimy Case?5

  It says something for Behn’s personal discretion that Gould, who probably did not know her personally, seems to have had little specific to charge concerning her sexual life, when he dismissed Dryden’s wife as a whore, Dryden as a lecher, and Otway as a drunk. The worst he could say of Behn was that she had become ‘Sapho, famous for Her Gout and Guilt’.6

  Wycherley also took this moment to comment ribaldly, if affectionately, on Behn, as one theatrical trooper to another. She could take his remarks with a pinch of salt, since he himself was being savagely lampooned as the latest gigolo of the King’s ex-mistress, Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland.7 His poem was called ‘To the Sappho of the Age, suppos’d to Ly-In of a Love-Distemper, or a Play’ and it responded to the sexiness of The City-Heiress in particular.

  Wycherley created a prostituting past for Behn, in which she had flaunted her ‘Parts’ to the town, where now she flaunted plays, and had borne children, where now she bore works: ‘Barren Wits, envy your Head’s Off-springs more, / Than Barren Women, did your Tail’s before.’ This was the first and last anyone heard of Behn’s childbearing. Wycherley also placed her with Ravenscroft in the sweating-tub for
‘Clap’:

  Now Men enjoy your Parts for Half a Crown,

  Which, for a Hundred Pound, they scarce had done...

  more Men, now you please the more...

  Who, to be Clap’d, or Clap you, round you sit,

  And tho’ they Sweat for it, will croud your Pit;

  Since lately you Lay-In, (but as they say,)

  Because, you had been Clap’d another Way;

  But, if ’tis true, that you have need to Sweat,

  Get, (if you can) at your New Play, a Seat.8

  As Shadwell could not avoid the correspondence of pimp and prologue, so Wycherley could not resist the analogies of writing and child-bearing, poetry and prostitution, claps and the clap, made resonant by a female playwright. It was hard for any woman to avoid the connection of writing and sex, almost impossible for someone like Behn, exhibiting on the public stage and apparently once kept by a man. Wycherley’s main point, however, was the steaminess of Behn’s recent popular offerings, the watching of which would serve quite as well as sweating-tubs. It was a sort of compliment.

  However naughty her plays, Behn’s new political stature meant that she was now asked to supply committed prologues and epilogues herself. Her first known commission was for Romulus and Hersilia, an anonymous Roman tragedy. The £10 or so she gained was useful, but she may also have felt attracted to the play’s Amazonian subject, reminiscent of Edward Howard’s New Utopia and her own Young King, though its heroine Tarpeia is more consistently heroic than her back-sliding Cleomena. In propagandising mood, Behn played with the Roman setting of Romulus as she had in The Feign’d Curtizans: ‘ours is a Virgin Rome, long, long before / Pious Geneva Rhetorick call’d her Whore’. In the extreme language characteristic of the belligerent Roger L’Estrange, she ridiculed the Protestant Whigs as stinking rats and weasels gnawing the royal lion’s beard, then, when he roared, skulking away. Incensed like all the Tories at Shaftesbury’s acquittal through the ‘ignoramus’ verdict of the packed Whig jury in November 1681, she asked in a series of raucous rhetorical questions: