by Janet Todd
What have ye got ye Conscientious Knaves,
With all your Fancy’d Power, and Bully Braves?
With all your Standing to’t; your Zealous Furies;
Your Lawless Tongues, and Arbitrary Juries?
Your Burlesque Oaths, when one Green-Ribbon-Brother
In Conscience will be Perjur’d for another?
Your Plots, Cabals; Your Treats, Association,
Ye shame, Ye very Nusance of the Nation,
What have ye got but one poor Word? Such Tools
Were Knaves before; to which you’ve added Fools.
The epilogue spoken by Lady Slingsby, as the tragedienne Mary Lee had now become, was equally pointed. Tarpeia, the character she played, had been innocent once; she had grown treacherous through love:
Love! like Ambition, makes us Rebels too:
And of all Treasons, mine was most accurst;
Rebelling ’gainst a King and Father first.
A Sin, which Heav’n nor Man can e’re forgive;
Nor could I Act it with the face to live.
Not even death can expiate ‘a Treason gainst the King and State’.9 The reference to Monmouth was clear.
But, in fact, the King could forgive; consequently these uncompromising words were unappreciated. Although Charles’s ‘pleasure is to be dissatisfied and angry with the Duke of Monmouth, yet he is not willing that others should abuse him...’. The True Protestant Mercury of 16 August 1682 described what followed:
Thursday last being Acted a Play called The Tragedy of Romulus at the Dukes Theature [sic] and the Epilogue spoken by the Lady Slingsbey and written by Mrs Behr [sic] which reflected on the D. of Monmouth the Lord Chamberlain has ordered them both into custody to answer that affront fo the same.10
How Behn got off is unknown. Possibly she echoed Mrs Cellier, who pleaded her sex when accused of libel: ‘If I was a foolish vain Woman, and did seem to speak some vain words... which I did not understand the Consequences of, I hope a word vainly spoke by me, shall not be brought against me to convict me of a Crime.’11 Although an enemy gloated that ‘Sappho with her wondrous empty shew / [Of] Torie faith, yet shan’t unpunished go,’ quite possibly Behn was never taken into custody.12 The Lord Chamberlain was, after all, her old associate, Lord Arlington, whose daughter she had just fulsomely flattered in her dedication to the Duke of Grafton, and she herself was an accepted Tory propagandist. No more was heard of the matter.
Behn’s forthright condemnation of Monmouth probably had the advantage of bringing her to the attention of his enemies, such as Rochester’s old sparring partner and Dryden’s patron, the trimming Earl of Mulgrave. Recently Mulgrave had published anonymously his Essay on Poetry, a powerful literary analysis of verse in his age which, in contrast to any remarks Behn made about poetry, looked forward to the eighteenth-century aesthetic and expressive views rather than to the more political and social ones of his own time. It also attacked some prized contemporaries, including the dead Earl of Rochester, but Behn knew that her idol was strong enough to withstand any assault. On Monmouth’s disgrace, Mulgrave had received many of his preferments—while Monmouth had apparently taken over Mulgrave’s former mistress, Lady Henrietta Wentworth. Now, in November 1682, Mulgrave followed Monmouth into disgrace, as Luttrell records:
The earl of Mulgrave is fallen into his majesties displeasure (by pretending courtship, as is said, to the lady Ann, daughter to his royall highnesse), and is forbid comeing to Whitehall and St. James, and hath all his places taken from him.13
James’s daughter, the young Princess Anne, was third-in-line to the throne, so Mulgrave’s offence was heinous.
At this awkward juncture, Mulgrave seems to have turned to the professional poet, Aphra Behn, to provide him with a poem as a peace offering to the princess and to the court. This was not an uncommon act, even for a poet as skilled as Mulgrave, and Dryden himself was occasionally supplied with appropriate verses by jobbing poets.14 For Behn, it was a useful commission from a man whose style she declared she admired, and for him she wrote verses as if composed by the Roman poet Ovid to the granddaughter of the Emperor Augustus, his beloved Julia. Ovid had been banished from Rome for Julia’s sake, as Mulgrave was from the English court for Princess Anne’s.
Male ambition, political or sexual, was a disturbing, truly Promethean force, and Behn did not entirely deflate it by giving her ‘Ovid’ the stereotypical language of female complaint, of the sort she had used for Oenone. The famous Mulgrave pride remained: languishments and tears were ‘Artillery which I ne’r sent in vain’, but there was also a genuine sense of pain, not only for baulked love, but for ruined selfesteem: physical suffering was preferable to psychological, wounds to the scorn of the court.15
Whatever the subtlety of the picture, many readers saw only crude compromise and unholy alliance between the vain Earl and the lewd poet.16 It again incensed Robert Gould, jealously watching Behn’s sideways movement towards the court and the great. Truly the shameless pair deserved each other, he sneered: ‘sure Heav’n never Joyn’d a happier Pair: / He kind, as Lovely! you, as good as Fair!’17
The libertinism that marked so many of Behn’s recent plays had been influenced by the classically educated men she had come to know and admire, especially Jack Hoyle and the Earl of Rochester. Like many other intelligent women, she had bewailed her exclusion from the classics. Now, however, more and more works were being ‘English’d... this Age being pretty kind to us females in such assistance’.18 But, although several people, including Rochester and Dryden, had attempted part of the great philosophical poem, De Rerum Natura, by the Roman Lucretius, no one had yet made the whole accessible to those unlearned in Latin.19 So it was with excitement that Behn received a copy of a complete translation, along with a request to write a poetic commendation for the second edition. She gladly agreed.
The work was by a young man from Wadham College, Oxford, Thomas Creech. Since one of the commendations warned him against the theatre, Behn may have encountered him there, but it is more likely that Tonson both commissioned the commendation and later introduced her to Creech. In her poem, she shows no personal acquaintance with the author whom she addresses as the ‘unknown Daphnis’.20
Creech knew he was dealing with dangerous matter, even after two thousand years, for Lucretius had taught the classical doctrine, that all things and all living beings were combinations of atoms. ‘The rise of Things, how curious Nature joyns / The various Seed, and in one Mass combines / The jarring Principles.’21 All being corporeal, piety was exploded and death could be faced, as it was in Lucretius, without comfort or discomfort. Divinity, if any divinity there were,
live[s] in Peace,
In undisturb’d and everlasting ease,
Not care for Us, from fears and dangers free,
Sufficient to His own felicity.
Nought here below, nought in our power He needs,
Nere smiles at good, nere frowns at wicked deeds.
Institutional religion became ‘Tyranny’ and ‘holy Cheats’.
This was shocking in a Christian country and all the translators were anxious not to be associated with the author they were busily publicising. Dryden declared that his time with Lucretius confirmed his Christianity and Behn’s foster-brother, Thomas Colepeper, studied Lucretian atomism only to pronounce it frivolous. Like these, Creech, a lugubrious and apprehensive young man, felt obliged to apologise for his work, and his friend Nahum Tate helped him by praising his purging of Lucretius’ poison. Scenting Tory embarrassment, however, Matthew Prior roundly mocked the young man for hypocrisy: ‘The Wits confirm’d his Labours with renown, / And swore the early Atheist for their own.’22
Behn saw De Rerum Natura very differently from Dryden and Creech: as a powerful and triumphant assertion of rationalism and materialism using the atom theory. Released by Lucretian philosophy, Reason in her baroque vision has a libidinal, liberating quality playing like Cupid over all including faith:
It Peirces,
Conquers, and Compells
Beyond poor Feeble Faith’s dull Oracles,
Faith the despairing Souls content,
Faith the Last Shift of Routed Argument.23
She knew the religious implications of what she was saying and that this deification of reason sounded remarkably Hobbist. The Anglican position was that reason could lead up to the mysteries of faith, but never equal or supersede them: the famous opening lines of Dryden’s Religio Laici, published some months later, makes the orthodox point: ‘pale grows Reason at Religions sight.’ That Behn was approaching what the seventeenth century termed ‘atheism’ and was growing known for her free-thinking is apparent from a later comic verse epistle by a Tory curate, also an acquaintance of Creech’s, who flattered her by admitting that, under her influence, he might ‘e’n believe the World was made by Chance, / The Product of unthinking Atoms dance’.24
Behn may not so thoroughly have understood the possible political implications of Lucretius. Dryden opposed him partly because he associated his message with rebellion: the circumscribing of power in God led to the circumscribing of it in the King. Behn so disliked clerical power, however, that she took every opportunity of mocking priests and their law, a position more common among radical thinkers and republicans like Hoyle than among Royalists, who tended to understand the need of an established church to support an established king. Behn seems to have felt she could be daring in religion without impinging on politics, so that destabilising the Christian God did not necessarily destabilise Charles II. Hobbes, who saw religion as the arm of the state, could have put her right.25
Behn came closer to Dryden in her admiration of Lucretius on sex. Indeed, Dryden called De Rerum Natura ‘the truest and most Philosophical account both of the Disease and Remedy, which I ever found in any Author’ and, in his own translation, he added some of Lucretius’ explicit description of sexual intercourse omitted by Creech.26 Given the common cultural assumption of active, vital male form and passive, cold female matter, Behn must have smiled to encounter the feminine Venus as the primary energy within the universe. Although he was man-centred, when it came to individual human beings Lucretius did acknowledge female desire.
In Lucretius’ analysis, sexual union, always wanted, was always momentary, therefore always disappointing and embittering. The sexual urge was irrational and anarchic, and the ‘secret wound’ was the insatiability of desire. Even orgasm did not entirely satisfy, as ‘the loose airy pleasure slips away.’ Behn had revealed a frank attitude to sexual matters when she wrote ‘The Disappointment’; in Lucretius, she met a materialist and explicit description of what underlay disappointment and desire.
She was excited and wrote of her enthusiasm in her commendatory poem for Creech. First, however, she thanked the young man for his work. Comically using the Lucretian atomic theory, she portrayed herself as composed of slow-moving particles, so that her mind was all concerned with love and ‘Womanish Tenderness’. She could not rise to Creech’s ‘Strong Manly Verse’. None the less, she wished to declare her debt to Creech—greater than any man’s, for he had rescued her from the ‘ignorance of the female sex’:
Thou by this Translation dost advance
Our Knowledge from the State of Ignorance;
And Equallst Us to Man.
In the epistle to The Dutch Lover, Behn seemed to mock male classical learning, but, in fact, her butt had been the pedantic and affected characters learning could create. Here she suggested the value of classical knowledge for sensible, inquiring people of either sex. Women’s exclusion had been based on custom, not nature.
Behn made her feminist point lightly, for the assurance of her poetry and her stance of public compliment now rendered any presumed inferiority conventional: nobody, it was implied, was very much superior to her, man or woman. Indeed, as Robert Gould feared, poetry was already conferring a kind of status independent of gender. Where, in Lucretius, savage man had been tamed by love, fire and clothing, in Behn’s work poetry (and by implication the poet) performed this function. Whatever she might comically and conventionally say about her poetic inferiority to Creech, she was proving at the very moment of writing her own poetic status.
As in her verses to the little known Anne Wharton, here again Behn tended to slide off from praise of the unfamiliar into consideration of the analogous but truly great and known. She extolled Wadham College, the ‘Sacred Nursery’, for begetting not only Creech, but also ‘the soft, the Lovely, Gay and Great’ Rochester, as well as a man she seems increasingly to have known in this period, Thomas Sprat, ‘Loyal Champion of the Church and Crown’ and biographer of Cowley, one of Behn’s first poetic loves. Through Sprat Behn managed a swipe at Gilbert Burnet, whose criticism of her she may have known and who was famously at odds with Sprat. Both men had preached political sermons on the same day, Sprat appealing to the King, Burnet successfully wooing the Commons; Behn referred to the event when she portrayed Sprat as ‘above the thanks of the mad senate-house’.
She finished her poem and sent it off to Creech in January 1683. He received it with dismay. The reference to ‘poor Faith’s dull Oracles’ was too much; obviously Behn understood nothing of his delicate position as a fellow of a university where orthodoxy was nominally required or of his hopes of taking holy orders and receiving a secure college living. He did not have much opportunity to register his unease, for it is about this time that Behn seems to have left the country.
Late in 1683 Behn claimed that she had been ‘at Paris last Spring’ and the claim is supported by the fact that, from this time onwards, she became assured in her knowledge of French culture and language, as well as more contemptuous of French people.27 When she had written Sir Patient Fancy in 1678, she had implied that she knew little French, but, from 1684, she translated French at top speed, using authors hardly known in England. She knowledgeably discussed the differences between the two languages, commented on the hazards of translation, and wrote authoritatively of the importance of drama to a state, a topic much debated in Paris in the 1680s. Either she was lying earlier, or she had, about this time, a sojourn in France or Flanders that gave her new competence.
Perhaps she went on another spying mission or took part in some undercover activity. If so, her employer might have been the present Secretary of State, Robert Spencer, second Earl of Sunderland.28 Sunderland was a protégé of Arlington and nephew of Shaftesbury. As she might have remembered, he had also been an inmate of the Sidney nursery in the Interregnum, when his mother, Dorothy Sidney, had lodged at Penshurst. Since those early days, Sunderland had become a slippery politician; some thought him Machiavellian and cunning, others simply opportunistic and selfish. A satire of 1680 makes him a ‘Cringing Cheat’, a ‘Silver Eel’ who has ‘wrigl’d thro’ the Mud to Fortunes Wheel / Slipt into place improperly by Fate’.29 With misgivings Rochester had watched his rise through court intrigue, especially with the King’s French mistress, Louise, Duchess of Portsmouth, seeing him as one who ‘wold bribe us without Pence, / Deceive us without Common Sense / And without Pow’r enslave’.30 Evelyn, who greatly admired Sunderland’s wife, disapproved the Earl’s extreme ‘Court ambition’.31 Behn cannot have approved his voting for Stafford’s death, but she could not afford political grudges. The Earl was close to the stage, an acquaintance and patron of Dryden, Otway, and Betterton, and, if she met him, her Kentish connections would have made a link, though he was well above her sphere socially.
Sunderland had been Secretary of State from the late 1670s and would be so with one gap until 1688. The gap came from his flirtation with the Exclusionists—according to Evelyn he thought that they would win, not that they were right—but he retrieved Charles II’s favour in 1683. From then on he intended publicly to cleave to royalty, but keep all options open, whether embodied in Monmouth, the Prince of Orange or Louis XIV. It is just conceivable that Behn was required to find out something of these options in France or generally bring back ‘Intelligence’.32 Behn may also have had her
own agenda for her travels. Gould mentioned gout and Wycherley pox, and she herself had described indifferent health in the early 1680s. Paris was a centre of medical knowledge and several noblemen went there to find cures for their venereal complaints. Behn, too, may have journeyed in hope of some relief from her ailments.
In Paris, Behn might have touched the fringes of grand and respectable society, less handicapped than in England by the notoriety of her bawdy plays. So she could encounter the ‘précieuses’, intellectual women who held salons in which relations between the sexes were regulated by intricate codes. One of the hostesses was Mlle de Scudéry, the famous writer of French romance; Behn had probably read her when young, although her references are mainly to de Scudéry’s fellow romancist, La Calprenède; she had more recently met her in Molière’s mockery in Les Précieuses ridicules and Les Femmes savantes, used for her own False Count and Sir Patient Fancy. The heyday of the female salons had been the early seventeenth century, when aristocratic women had presided and politics been much discussed. Now salon conversation was mainly literary, philosophical, and gallant, and many of the salonistes were not of the highest rank. Hence they had become fair game for Molière.
Three charming and sociable men who mingled with the précieuses, Tallemant, Fontenelle and de Bonnecorse, may have encountered Aphra Behn during a stay in Paris. The first, the Abbé Paul Tallemant, a gallant, courtly cleric, had, when still in his teens in 1663, published Voyage de L’Isle d’Amour, which charted the psychological course of love through allegory. The Abbé was famously good company, the soul of parties and known for his quick wit; so Behn must have been surprised to find so little displayed in the Voyage. The second, the witty, popular and sceptical Bernard de Fontenelle, nephew of the tragedian Corneille, was a young man in his twenties, already a journalist and playwright. Behn and he held rather different political views, since Fontenelle opposed absolutism—although the distinction was mainly due to the difference between France and England, for they thoroughly agreed in their elitism and scorn for the mob.33 Like Tallemant, Fontenelle had a grounding in religious controversy but, where Tallemant studied doctrine to defend Catholicism, Fontenelle studied to destabilise it and was robustly anticlerical. Third, Balthazar Bonnecorse from Marseilles, had, nearly twenty years earlier while consul in Cairo, written an allegorical love work in prose and poetry called La Montre (The Watch), which de Scudéry’s brother persuaded him to publish. It had done well and de Bonnecorse had enjoyed a modest fame. Later, however, it grew notorious through an attack from the famous critic and poet, Nicolas Boileau who, despite a later admission that he had not read it, labelled it trivial and wordy.34 The attack stung the author, but it gave La Montre renewed currency. All three men and their works would be useful to Behn in the future.