Aphra Behn: A Secret Life
Page 49
In portraying Silvia in all three parts of Love-Letters, Behn reveals how she herself was enthralled by aristocratic freedom, that certainty of caste that allows even a woman to act outrageously, to follow an un-bourgeois route of excess or intemperance.22 Having married beneath her, Silvia might have declined from a free aristocrat into an ordinary wife, but she refuses to accept the status, just as she refuses to marry Octavio despite obvious inducements. The aristocratic Philander’s continued attraction is that he cannot be a husband.
As La Nuche of The Second Part of The Rover showed, Behn was as curious about perversity as about excess. Although the narrator comments that Silvia baulks ‘at nothing that might carry on an Interest, which she resolved should be the business of her future life’, this is simply not the truth. Jilting Octavio, she flees with Philander, disliking him even as she goes, hating him as she sees her jewels sold to pay for his needs. The woman who was passionate in Part I, rational and controlling in Part II, becomes sexually self-destructive in Part III.
Silvia’s analogue in perversity is the ‘Countess’ of the closing pages of Part III, heiress of a widow whom Behn may have helped portray in The Debauchee, one who could only love when abused.23 The Countess frankly gives her terms for seduction as 500 pistoles. Going to her as a potential customer and lover, Alonzo suddenly finds her maid more appealing, and he exchanges 50 pistoles for the unexpected virginity. The Countess happens on this betrayal, and in the moment of voyeurism and degradation of desiring a man after her maid, she is fired by Alonzo for the first time. But he, like Philander, is not fond of a willing woman, and is unimpressed when she waives her fee: ‘she caress’d me with all imaginable fondness; was ready to Eat my Lips, instead of kissing them, and [was] much more forward than I wish’d.’24
For Silvia, the only relationship left at the end of the novel is with Brilljard, the ambiguous servant-husband-master, the man who can pimp to her transvestite punk:
She continues her Mans Habit, and he supplyed the place of Valet, dress’d her and undress’d her, shifted her Linen every day; nor did he take all these Freedoms, without advancing a little farther upon occasion and opportunity, which was the hire she gave him to serve her more Lucky Amours; the Fine she paid to live free, and at ease. She tells him her adventure, which tho it were Daggers to his Heart, was however the only way to keep her his own; for he knew her Spirit was too violent to be restrained by any means.25
For many years Behn had investigated the phenomenon of the male rake. She admired Rochester who had mythologised himself as promiscuous, drunken, violent, misogynous and frivolous, and she had been aware in him of the heady mixture of apparent rebellion and actual power: the man who treated women in a libertine way was the same man who was at the apex of the patriarchal system and demanded a chaste wife and legitimate heir. In her plays, Behn had gone some way to providing a rakish woman, especially in the women married to old men but desiring young lovers: Lady Fancy in Sir Patient Fancy and Mirtilla in The Younger Brother were obvious examples. Outside marriage but within society, however, such a woman was always a prize for the rakish man, who inevitably mitigated her rakishness. The male rake momentarily pretended that men and women were equal, but the commonsensical woman knew they were not.
A woman could not really conquer sexually, for the Restoration accepted that the sexual act ended a woman’s power over a libertine. In the end, although she felt no love for him at all, Philander was the only man Silvia ‘feared’: Philander feared no one. She could, then, sexually dominate only a non-libertine man, but this man would be too womanish in his emotions to keep her desire raised. Ringing the changes in gender and class, the pseudo-tie of Silvia and Brilljard, pimp and punk, was the one relationship that either could bear without boredom or perverse pain. It ended Behn’s fullest answer to her question of whether there could be a female rake. Set within culture and society, this swordless being had only sex and her monstrosity to gain the power she desired. Transgressing the social bonds and the norms, she became a parasite, beyond the pale, while the male rake remained deep within it, for ‘Custom has favoured [men] with an Allowance to commit any Vice.’ As Silvia proved, it was the nearest such a woman could come to autonomy.
In this repeated analysis there was probably some self-reference. Despite being lampooned for lewdness, Behn saw herself controlling emotions to which she would like to have given rein and compromising to live within her society, however lax. Like Silvia, she too was spendthrift, hating to ‘hoard’ herself or her money. In her heroine, Behn perhaps fantasised what might have been had she been born in another rank, had less verbal skill and less dependent emotion. In the portrait of the perverse relationship of Silvia and Philander, there may, also, be some distant comment on Behn’s own lifelong connection with Hoyle, the bisexual man for whom she could never have been enough. Perhaps she no longer had any pressing sexual passion for him and other men were no doubt occupying her mind. Yet Hoyle may still have influenced her emotional life and the relationship may have kept her ultimately from being respectable. Certainly there are analogies between Love-Letters and the letters from the 1670s. Silvia puts up with just such contrary behaviour from Philander as Behn seemed to have done from Hoyle: each is driven to ‘the very brink of Despair’ before the man casually makes a peace, for which each is pathetically grateful. Meanwhile, Philander accents his power by drawing up ‘Articles of Agreement, as should wholly subdue [Silvia] to him...’, controlling her public expression. If the letters can be credited, the lawyer Hoyle, too, had worried about Behn’s public face and insisted on articles of obedience.
Inevitably Hoyle was much in Behn’s mind at the time, for it was early in the year of the publication of Part III of Love-Letters that he was finally arrested for repeated buggery in his Temple chambers with the young Benjamin Bourne—he who had as a boy probably run messages between Hoyle and Behn. With Bourne, now about seventeen and apprenticed to a poulterer, Hoyle admitted to ‘sev’all indecent acts’ but, probably bribed by Hoyle, the youth later retracted his main charges, and an ignoramus verdict was brought in. Satirists, however, found Hoyle guilty and he entered the Earl of Dorset’s satiric catalogue of ‘Our Most Eminent Ninnies’ together with his ‘he-mistress’. Bulstrode Whitelocke was more forthright: Hoyle was ‘an Atheist, a Sodomite professed, a corrupter of youth, & a Blasphemer of Christ’.
By now Behn may have been borrowing money which she could not easily repay. A part of her debt could be honoured in a dedication and it may have been for this reason—as well as the guarding of her anonymity—that she addressed Part II of Love-Letters to the relatively obscure Lemuel Kingdon, paymaster-general of the forces in Ireland.26 She seemed to be alluding to her prodigality with borrowed money when she claimed: ‘I never was of a nature to hord any good to my particular use... there is an unspeakable pow’r and pleasure in obliging....’ She had known Kingdon for some time, since she had sent a copy of the first Part to him in Ireland, although he was back in London before the publication of the second. Kingdon was neither simply a purse nor yet an amorous object like Condon, but more of a friend: ‘I think you born to put the ill natur’d world in to good Humour,’ she wrote.
Generous friends could only do so much and the theatre, however attenuated, must have remained in Behn’s mind her best potential provider. So she set about writing the kind of farce that should appeal to the court. The King liked Italian commedia dell’arte, now assimilated into French culture, with its stock characters of Harlequin and Scaramouch, its hobby horses and pantomimic tricks. Indeed it had become so associated with the court that Otway has a snobbish character urge in a play, ‘But dear Mr. Malagene, won’t you let us see you act a little something of Harlequin? I’le swear you do it so naturally, it makes me think I am at the Louvre or Whitehall all the time.’27 It was a taste that appalled Dryden, who crustily complained that ‘Th’Italian Merry-Andrews... quite Debauch’d the Stage with lewd Grimace.’28 He particularly disapproved of Ravenscroft, who had
become the major exponent and apologist: ‘Great Wits refrain this writing, ’cause ’tis low, / They oftner write to please themselves than you.’29
Behn was increasingly attracted to the stylised comedy of the commedia, and under its influence she had learnt to give her comics more freedom. Where in The Dutch Lover she had berated the comic actor for unscheduled fooling, five years later she had introduced commedia characters into The Second Part of The Rover, giving them the encouragingly freeing direction, ‘Harlequin meets him in the dark, and plays tricks with him.’
The commedia improvisations were rarely transcribed. In 1684, however, the French scenario for a production, Arlequin Empereur dans la Lune by Fatouville, was printed. Behn decided to adapt it for the English stage and call it The Emperor of the Moon. With his scepticism and interest in amateur science, the King would relish mockery of the more bizarre beliefs of some ‘scientists’, of alchemy and rosicrucianism, for example. The work was intended to be light, frothy and funny, a mixture of comic verbal play and absurd transformations. Behn was optimistic of success.
At about the same time, she also began a sequel to her popular Island of Love. Here she was in some difficulty, for, unlike Tallemant, she had killed off her heroine and dismissed the hero. The solution was to elevate the cynical recipient of Lysander’s earlier romantic verse-letter, Lycidus, into the main character. As for a heroine to contrast with the faithful Aminta, it was easy to find a name: Silvia. As Behn had moved from the romance of Part I of Love-Letters to the intrigues of Part II, from the light Rover to the darker Second Part, so she began to follow The Island of Love with a sequel that replaced passion with amours.
Then, both play and translation were interrupted by startling news.
The King (and with him the court) had grown wearily voluptuous. As he pondered the ‘unexpressable luxury, & prophanesse’ of a royal Sunday, the disapproving Evelyn caught the elegiac decadence:
the King sitting & toying with his Concubines Portsmouth, Cleaveland, & Mazarine: &c: A French boy singing love songs, in that glorious Gallery, whilst about 20 of the greate Courtiers & other dissolute persons were at Basset round a large table, a bank of at least 2000 in Gold before them, upon which two Gent: that were with me made reflexions with astonishment, it being a sceane of uttmost vanity; and surely as they thought would never have an End: Six days after was all in the dust.30
On 2 February, the King woke with convulsions. Prayers were offered throughout the kingdom for his recovery, while his doctors prevented it by purgings, bleedings, head shavings, and a general military attitude to doctoring. Even Dryden commented on the ‘malice’ and ‘pious rigor’ of the royal physicians. For someone so often compared with a goat, it was perhaps fitting that one remedy should entail the King’s swallowing of a stone taken from the stomach of a rare goat.
Despite a rallying, Charles died on 6 February. Possibly he expired with piety like his famous subject, Rochester, since he was urged into the Catholic last rites by James and the Duchess of Portsmouth. He certainly died with courtesy, apologising to his long-suffering Queen, recommending his mistresses to James’s care, and blessing his bastards—apart from the absent Monmouth. The moment so dreaded by the nation had come: the succession of a Catholic king.
Behn’s political stature had risen over the last months and she felt nearer to the court than she had ever been. Her plays were put on there and she had made a public stand of commitment to the Tory Royalist cause and personally to James, Duke of York. In the view of some people, excluding the satirist Robert Gould, the bawdy she-playwright had been subsumed into the professional propagandist. The King’s death seemed a moment of breakthrough. For the first time Behn would publicly join the ranks of the poets who hymned the court in the hope, usually vain, of receiving some largesse or favour. However thickly surrounded by other poetasters and minor versifying courtiers, she relished the significance. Her growing sense of the importance of poets as bulwarks of an elite of monarch and aristocracy accompanied her increasing sense of herself not just as an entertainer but also as a writer with political and philosophical opinions to express. The role of panegyrist allowed a female agency that was not sexual and seductive alone, as she had implied in the past. The mockery of satirists like Gould had simply added to her sense that she could, in some way, indeed be the ‘Female Laureat’.
Behn’s first big public performance was her elegy for Charles II. One of a large group that included Dryden’s long Threnodia Augustalis, her poem might have been commissioned by a nobleman such as the Duke of Norfolk or by James himself. Unlike Dryden’s, it was probably not paid for in advance.31
Court poets were used to making each detail grist to their mill. If the sun shone on a royal show, the heavens were blessing it; if it were cloudy and raining or even stormy, this also became a sign from the gods. The usage was at its most baroque in Behn’s ode on Charles II, in which the events between his falling ill and his dying, much discussed in a nation that was quick to suspect poison and foul play, became biblical. When, reeling from his appalling treatments, the King managed to rally for a few days, this rallying became the equivalent of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.
Behn’s ode on Charles II’s death was not the best of her state poems, but it had the most urgent political purpose. Its ending was concerned less with Charles than with the succession of James, so that the work became an enactment of the orderly and desired transfer of legitimate political power from one brother to another. Both Dryden and Behn were eager to tie the brothers together to counter the rumours of poison and to outweigh the more emotive and dangerous bond of father and son, Charles and the illegitimate Monmouth. Both poets made Charles and James into something resembling lovers, a kind of David and Jonathan pair of ‘Dear Partner[s]’ who must become pseudo father and son in succession. Inevitably, the marriage tie of King and his barren Queen was downplayed.
Although many, including the chief minister Sunderland, had fantasised a world without James, suddenly it was full of him. Yet, though he assumed the throne with surprising ease, many were less convinced of James’s abilities than Behn. A hostile report drawn up for Shaftesbury indicated the danger: ‘He is every way a perfect Stuart, and hath the advantage of his brother only that he hath ambition and thoughts of something he hath not, which gives him industry and address even beyond his natural parts.... His religion suits well with his temper; heady, violent and bloody, who easily believes the rashest and worst counsels to be the most sincere and hearty.’32 The huge difference in character between the royal brothers was commonly expressed, as it was in Behn’s poem, through Moses and Joshua, the lawgiver and the soldier. James as Joshua worried many who feared a period of war, as well as a regime of inflexibility and vigour. Behn, however, whose public commitment to James was absolute, hymned these qualities in her hero; where Dryden identified himself with Charles, she had already moved towards his successor. No doubt, like Sunderland on a grander scale, she believed she too might benefit from declared loyalty to unfettered royal power; none the less, it is strange that such an adaptable, flexible woman should have supported so famously unadaptable a man.
Having made her political point in the elegy on Charles, Behn sat down to write a second public ode, this time to the widowed queen, Catherine of Braganza, for whom she was as free with Christian images as she had been for her royal spouse. She began by apologising for ignoring the Queen and continued with startling honesty about her motive: ‘Griefs have self-interest too.’ In other words, Behn had first to write poems for those most likely to pay: her sponsor in the elegy had presumably asked for concentration on the new king.
The final and longest of Behn’s public political odes celebrated the coronation, which took place on 23 April: Pindarick Poem On the Happy Coronation Of His most Sacred Majesty James II, nearly eight hundred lines of baroque extravaganza in praise of her ‘Godlike Patron’ James and his wife, Mary of Modena. For it, Behn invoked her Muse and the powers of the spheres:
Ye little Gods that tun’d the Spheres,
That wanton’d, sung, and smil’d and play’d,
When the first World was by your Numbers made
And Danc’d to order by your Sacred Ayrs!
Such Heavenly Notes as Souls Divine can warm,
Such wond’rous touches as wou’d move
And teach the Blest to Sing and Love!
And even the Anger of a GOD wou’d Charm!
Like the other poems in the series, Behn’s seized on every possible favourable detail, while ignoring what more hostile writers would stress: that the crown nearly fell off James’s head and that one of the poles of his canopy broke, both ominous to the less committed. There is no admission of selectiveness, however: the Stuart grandeur inspired only truth-telling. It was Behn’s old dream of Golden Age transparency, when people ‘tell us what you mean, by what ye say’.
The form she chose was suitable for her subject: James liked degree, precedence and controlled spectacle, and the coronation was carefully planned. So was the poem, which versified the published order of the ceremonial and provided a roll call of processing aristocrats. These were men and women who, Behn hints, might want her eulogistic services in the future, as well as deserving them here: ‘Each would a noble Song require.’
The peers at the coronation would mostly betray James and their oath three years later when they defected to his Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange, but, for the moment, all was loyalty. If there were some irony in the depiction of the Duchess of Norfolk, ‘the Generous, Gay and Great, / To whom each Muse officiously resorts’—considering what satirists were writing about this famously adulterous lady—there was none in the portrait of her equally lampooned husband, ‘NORFOLK! the greatest Subject’, a man beloved at home and adored abroad. He was ‘True to his King, his Honour, and his Word’. Also, he was Behn’s ‘Patron Lord’, the equivalent of the Roman Maecenas, celebrated sponsor of Virgil and Horace under the Emperor Augustus. Presumably the Duke—or Earl of Arundel as he then was—had paid handsomely for the City-Heiress dedication.