Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  In public, Behn loudly disapproved the Whiggish political stance of the verses copied into ‘Astrea’s Booke’, which lambasted James II, Roger L’Estrange, Hortense, Duchess of Mazarine, Dryden and Sunderland, all of whom she revered or served. So the possibility exists that, in involving herself in such an enterprise—she was working on the side opposed to the one she overtly espoused—was in short as politically two-faced and cautious as a good many others. It is not known by whom Somerton was employed, but Julian certainly worked in part for the Earl of Dorset, who was called his ‘great Maecenas’. (Like Rochester and Mulgrave, Dorset both wrote for and patronised Julian.) In James’s unsatisfactory reign the disaffected nobility, including Dorset, were working hard to provide a context for the usurpation of the throne by William and Mary, using every resource possible of disinformation, spying and libel. The last is illustrated in ‘Astrea’s Booke’, which has a high proportion of verses appearing uniquely or for the first time. If this manuscript is part of Dorset’s propaganda-factory, as it might have been, Behn was working for the Whigs and her activity would fit with her composing of a graceful ‘Pastoral Pindarick’ for Dorset’s marriage in 1685, the only time she addressed the nobleman directly.20 Indeed, her remark that she had only ‘song’ to give Dorset since she was not ‘blest with Flocks or Herd’ could be a comic allusion to her activity and her necessity.

  There is, however, much against the notion that Behn was working purposely for the Whigs. In her Coronation Ode, she praised Dorset among all the noble peers apparently supporting James, but implied a rebuke when she declared ‘His looks made good to day, all he e’re spoke or Write.’ Presumably she knew of Dorset’s recent undercover activities. She herself was associated with the Tories throughout her life both by fellow Tories and by opposing Whigs. If she were prepared to work clandestinely for the latter at this point, it seems curious that she did not search out Whig patrons more than she did or make something of her past activity once it was clear in 1688 that William had come to stay. Most likely, Behn was, in Astrea’s Booke’, copying for money for anyone who was prepared to pay, attracted to the work as a satiric writer who needed to know town gossip. This interpretation is supported by the fact that, to the side of several of the poems, are comments written in her presumed hand that express anger at the contents. For example, next to lines that charge L’Estrange with abandoning the royal cause for Cromwell in the Interregnum, ‘when to Noll’s our Charleses fate gave Place / I coud abjure th’unlucky Royal Race,’ the hand wrote ‘A damnd Ly’, an exclamation repeated when it came to the line in which L’Estrange is made to admit, ‘I servd him [Cromwell] as a faithfyll spy.’ These would be unhelpful marginalia for a Whiggish employer. If the hand was Behn’s, she was doing hackwork to keep body and soul together in a time of penury and her heart, it seems, was not much in alliance with her copying fingers.

  The play Behn mortgaged to Zachary Baggs when she borrowed £6 was probably The Luckey Chance, the final in her series both of intrigue comedies starting with The Rover and of City plays beginning with The Town-Fopp and Sir Patient Fancy.21 More than these last two, it breathed the localised physical London she knew—Whitefriars with the George Tavern and the liberty of Alsatia, where debtors could hide from arrest; Lincoln’s Inn Fields, its theatre temporarily closed now, home to tramps and thieves; the Monument with its inscription (commissioned by Sir Patience Ward, a butt of Sir Patient Fancy) blaming the Fire of London firmly on the Catholics; and the swirling Thames at high tide under London Bridge. There was a sense of scribbling and speaking London too, with allusions to Snow-hill in Holborn where lampoons and ballads were printed, to Sir Roger L’Estrange’s newspaper, The London Gazette, and to bawdy cockney slang, with its mingling of sex and money: ‘hot cockles’ for vagina, ‘Sir-reverence’ for a turd, men ‘broke’ in money and women.

  Behn had probably written most of The Luckey Chance earlier, since it attacks the enemies of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis years, rather than those of James II’s reign. It was probably performed in the late Spring of 1686 in Drury Lane by the United Company and proved the last mainly original drama Behn would stage.22 Happily, it was one of her best. She knew she was fortunate to have it put on, that it was indeed a ‘Lucky Chance’ for her. As she pointed out in her prologue, the amalgamated company was relying mainly on old plays to which it now had complete access, and living playwrights were experiencing ‘Dearth and Famine’ or at least ‘small’ credit. Behn, however, had authority in the theatre and she was not only produced but enabled to hire the best musicians for her work: John Bowman, an actor and singer who had joined the Duke’s Company as a boy in 1673, sang a fine song, probably by Robert Wolseley, her old collaborator on Valentinian; music came from the court musician, John Blow.23

  The Luckey Chance echoes and varies Sir Patient Fancy, rather as The Second Part of The Rover does the first, but it may also have called on the scandal of Behn’s poet friend, Elizabeth Wythens, née Taylor, who, it was said, had married Judge Wythens while still loving Sir Thomas Colepeper. After the marriage in Westminster Abbey, Elizabeth left her husband and moved in with her lover, who sued Wythens for financial support of the children she brought with her. After the judge’s death in 1704, Elizabeth married Colepeper. Some such arrangement and implied progression seems anticipated in The Luckey Chance.

  The play takes up the Restoration theme, famously realised in Wycherley’s Pinchwife in The Country Wife, and already treated by Behn in Sir Patient Fancy and The False Count, of an older man demanding exclusive possession of a young wife whom he owns only through money. Sir Feeble declares his marriage will be lawful ‘when I’ve had Livery and Seisin of her Body’, the legal terminology rendering her person his paid-for commodity. Characterised by the conventions of Tory plays, the old City knights are frequently impotent—a fact stressed, as in Sir Patient Fancy, by the old man’s habit of undressing his baby wife. They are uxorious with their awful infantile talk of ‘little white Foots’, and ‘little round Bubbies’, superstitious and avaricious. As usual, the comic chaos is the fault of such old men who have overstepped the limits of their power, not of the young bloods who want to rob them of it.

  Ravenscroft had realised the changing morality in the theatre and declared of his last play, ‘No double sense shall now your thoughts beguile, / Make Lady Blush, nor Ogling Gallant Smile.’24 Judged beside Sir Patient Fancy, The Luckey Chance seems a conscious effort on Behn’s part to avoid the usual ‘sottish Censures’ by pleasing the public with more conventional morality. So she created a slightly more respectable, more constricted world than formerly, one in which the chaste heroines have greater virtue than Lady Fancy and even than Hellena or Ariadne of the two Rovers. Each keeps her virginity (or chastity) until she disposes of it to the correct man, but the earlier heroines did not prate about it: here Leticia declares her guide religion, while Julia, Lady Fulbank, insists she will not wear her beauties ‘in a dishonest Bosom’. In The Rover and The False Count no pity was spared for old men who lost their women, but Leticia is surprisingly tender about Sir Feeble, who has tried to possess her—‘it grieves me to consider how the poor old Man is frighted’—while Lady Fulbank rejects her husband only when she learns he has gambled her away.

  The young men, too, are less daring, less libertine. Still separated from the City, they are no longer of the court and more of the town, and they have none of the Cavalier glamour of Willmour and Belvile. Gayman, whose other name is rightly Wasteall, is driven to real experienced poverty by his amour and, in his schizophrenic life of town wit and pauper, must have called on Behn’s knowledge of the shifty Tom Brown, as well as poor Otway. Nor is the contrast between them and the City elderly as great as before, and the impression is close to that of The Younger Brother, where the hero, whose ‘Parts [were] not form’d for dirty Business’, yet appears before his father ‘Drest like a Prentice’, his fine clothes and equipage kept outside the City. Bellmour fears to appear openly until he can legally do
so and Bredwel, afraid to ‘steal a City-Heiress’, is happy to have the woman without her money. But there is much harshness too. Willmore had clothed himself with money from sex, but Gayman sets up as a straightforward male prostitute and his sordidness is unglossed: ‘She pays and I’ll endeavour to be civil.’ He goes where he believes some ugly old woman has seen his face, shape and youth and ‘thinks it’s worth her Hire’ and he is prepared to ‘moil on in the damn’d dirty Road’, drudging through the night to look gay by day.25 It is an interesting gender reversal. Gayman is no better than Angellica Bianca and, fittingly, he does not, at least within the play, get the woman he wants in marriage.

  The contrasts that have underpinned Behn’s earlier plays are no longer absolute. The old knight treats his wife as a commodity and a moveable good, but, in gambling for her and offering Sir Cautious £300 for a night’s use of Lady Fulbank—whatever his motive—so does her lover. Although the play finds the elderly frantically trying to hold on to their wits, their gold and their women, the generosity with which they finally offer to release the young women brings characters together in a way quite foreign to the bitter rakish ending of Sir Patient Fancy: ‘I find Sir Feeble we were a Couple of old Fools indeed, to think at our age to cozen two lusty young Fellows of their Mistresses,’ says Sir Cautious.

  Love for young or old coalesces in being imaginary. The old fantasise pleasures they cannot take, but so do the young. Gayman ruins himself to make a rich self-image with which to court Lady Fulbank, who in fact does not want his money, having already married for it herself and being prepared to use it for his benefit. Each has had a faulty image of the other, just as Sir Feeble and his child wife, Leticia, have. To possess Lady Fulbank, Gayman is prepared to court his stinking landlady and act as a male whore. When he actually achieves what he desires, a night with his beloved, he does not know her and calls her ‘a Canvas Bag of wooden Ladles’.26

  Later, when Gayman has won sex with her, Lady Fulbank believes herself to be sleeping with her husband ‘in cold imagination’ and begins by ‘shyly’ turning away, ‘faintly resign’d’—until ‘excess of Love betray’d the Cheat’. Gayman’s happy involvement in the second transaction, organised by the husband rather than the wife, indicates that he is more comfortable bargaining with a man for a woman than in allowing the woman the autonomy and power Lady Fulbank takes. There are echoes of The False Count, where an old husband is persuaded to donate his wife to another, but that play was a less ambiguous depiction, with more willingness assumed in the lady.

  Early in the play, Julia Fulbank had offered herself to Gayman when her husband died, mockingly seeing herself as a property leased to the one, but temporarily occupied by the other—much as the Cavalier lady had done in The Roundheads. Yet, when her husband offers her the same bargain after Gayman has taken the imagery to its conclusion and bought her, Julia recoils. Having slept with two men against her will, she now stands on her ‘Freedom and my Humour’. In the language she herself chooses, Gayman has made her a ‘Prostitute’ and ‘Adulteress’, and she seems as likely to cleave—although not in bed—to the old Sir Cautious, who has learnt sense, as she is to her lover.

  Yet, it is not all independence and spirit, for in the end what freedom could Lady Fulbank have without falling outside society like Silvia? Her wit makes her seem to dominate both Gayman and Sir Cautious, who do not match her verbally, but each has more control of her than she of them. Her last speeches claim that the assignation she had arranged with Gayman was terminated as pre-arranged without consummation; yet, when Gayman tells of the scene, he does not stress that no sex occurred, as it would be to his advantage to do. The audience cannot know whether or not the encounter was innocent. The future, too, remains unclear. Lady Fulbank taunts Gayman for describing her as a ‘Canvas Bag of wooden Ladles’, but the taunt has a teasing rather than an angry ring. As usual with Behn, the stance of women towards men is not simple and unambiguous. Physical attraction cuts across political feminism.

  In several works of this time, reality and fiction intermingle: Lady Fulbank’s situation is as far as possible from the independent and ageing Behn’s and yet Behn seems to have given her something of her own public image. The mark of self-revelation is often an allusion to talkativeness and dominating wit. Lady Fulbank is accused of loving ‘to pass for the Wit of the Company, by talking all and loud’. Behn often accused other women of playing the modest feminine game, especially in the theatre: Lady Fulbank assures her husband she cannot ‘simper, look demure...Cry fie, and out upon the naughty Women, / Because they please themselves—and so wou’d I’. She boasts, ‘I value not the Censures of the Croud’ and declares,

  We cannot help our Inclinations, Sir,

  No more than Time, or Light from coming on—

  But I can keep my Virtue....

  Behn, too, often declared her contempt for the ‘Croud’.27

  This time the ‘Croud’ or ‘the Generality of the Town’ did not ‘censure’ Behn’s play. The actors had done her proud, with Nokes, Leigh and Jevon playing the comic citizens, and Elizabeth Barry doing the female lead; the coming comedienne, Susannah Percival (soon to be Mountfort), made her Behn debut as the second heroine, Diana. Over fifty now, Betterton still felt himself equal to the amorous part of the hero. Probably the milk punch—to which John Bowman claimed he was introduced by Behn—flowed when she collected her third night’s earnings, minus, one may assume, Zachary Baggs’s £6.28

  Yet there were the carpers. After the first performance, following custom, the witty part of the male audience repaired to an upstairs room of Will’s coffee house, ‘the merriest place in the world’ to discuss the play.29 As a woman, Behn was excluded—a fact that was doubly irritating to her on this night, for she heard that

  a Wit of the Town, a Friend of mine at Wills Coffee House...cry’d [the Play] down as much as in him lay, who before had read it and assured me he never saw a prettier Comedy. So complaisant one pestilent Wit will be to another, and in the full Cry make his Noise too.30

  Something similar had seemingly happened with the now-dead Otway over Abdelazer, so she was used to men’s treachery through their desire to run with the witty herd. Yet, it was annoying when such comment threatened the reception of a money-making play. Since Dryden usually presided on the first-floor room at Will’s, this may be a reference to him, but a ‘Wit of the Town’ does not sound like the Laureate.31

  Behn learnt that her work was criticised for being bawdy. It was the old story, but she was hurt since she had tried to make her material more moral. She had given the play to some noble ladies to read before she put it on, and neither they nor Sir Roger L’Estrange, who licensed it, nor Killigrew’s son Charles, now Master of the Revels, had found it indecent. Other ladies of quality saw it more than once and commended it. The elevated list of supporters helped to bolster her self-image, of a woman whose ‘Conversation [was] not at all addicted to... Indecencys’.

  As in the past, Behn tried to persuade someone to tell her exactly what was amiss with the work, but all she could discover was that people were upset that Anthony Leigh opened his nightgown when he came from the bride chamber. If he did so, she sniffed, it was a ‘Jest of his own making’. (Unfortunately the text belies her, for she had indeed written Sir Feeble, Leigh’s character, as a flasher, but his age and predicament make the scene comic. She may of course have added the direction after she discovered the source of the criticism, thus simultaneously grumbling at and taking advantage of the notoriety.)

  Behn always found men stripped or in undress funny, but it was often the place where she fell foul of modest opinion. It was as if no one quite wanted to comment on her other related fixation: impotence. Blunt’s scene in his drawers later contributed to the removal of The Rover from the eighteenth-century stage. There was no reason why a woman should not write of such topics as male undress any more than men, but the fact remained that they had not done so in the past and would not do so again for a very long time. Behn’s
insistence that she be allowed to play gender games and speak as one of the lads always landed her in trouble, which in turn made her furious. Expressed and public irascibility she also associated with men or unconventional women—as Silvia of Love-Letters attested.

  Since she could not hold forth at Will’s herself, Behn stopped the printing of The Luckey Chance to dash out a preface. She was irritated at attacks on her play, convinced they were due entirely to her sex. Although she was not quite, as with the failed Dutch Lover, in the situation Mulgrave mocked in his Essay upon Poetry, where playwrights ‘rail at th’Age they cannot please’, she did reiterate her old point from the 1670s, that she was merely following the conventions of the sort of comedy she wrote. While she might expand, transgress a little perhaps, she could not differ substantially from other playwrights:

  I make a Challenge to any Person of common Sense and Reason... any unprejudic’d Person that knows not the Author, to read any of my Comedys and compare ’em with others of this Age, and if they find one Word that can offend the chastest Ear, I will submit to all their peevish Cavills.