by Janet Todd
Why on earth would she stand out by being exceptionally bawdy? she reasonably asked. ‘I must want common Sense, and all Degrees of good Manners’ to go about purposely to offend an audience. She had, after all, repeatedly declared her prime aim to please.
Having been so long in the theatre, Behn knew her subject: ‘Had I a Day or two’s time...I would sum up all your Beloved Plays, and all the Things in them that are past with such Silence by; because written by Men: such Masculine Strokes in me, must not be allow’d.’ And she ran through a tradition of stage bawdy that included the great Dryden, Ravenscroft, Crowne and Etherege, as well as the approved early writers, Beaumont and Fletcher. Then followed the most moving of her statements:
All I ask, is the Priviledge for my Masculine Part the Poet in me, (if any such you will allow me) to tread in those successful Paths my Predecessors have so long thriv’d in, to take those Measures that both the Ancient and Modern Writers have set me, and by which they have pleas’d the World so well. If I must not, because of my Sex, have this Freedom, but that you will usurp all to your selves; I lay down my Quill, and you shall hear no more of me, no not so much as to make Comparisons, because I will be kinder to my Brothers of the Pen, than they have been to a defenceless Woman; for I am not content to write for a Third day only. I value Fame as much as if I had been born a Hero; and if you rob me of that, I can retire from the ungrateful World, and scorn its fickle Favours.32
It was good ringing stuff, emotional and unstable, similar to the final letters from Antwerp many years ago, when Behn had played on her sex and asserted her autonomy, been at once defenceless, defensive and authoritative. Now she wanted ‘Fame’ in the masculine term of glory, not the feminine one of goodness, chastity and modesty; yet she also wanted to play at being a ‘defenceless Woman’. She both accepted the gender divide of the time that made wit and poetry mainly masculine in the context of what a man was and could do, and mocked it when she declared that she, a woman, wanted to be a man, a hero, and display her ‘Masculine Part’. Only with this hermaphroditic manoeuvre would she be treated fairly.33
Undoubtedly Behn was right. She was criticised more heavily because she was a woman writing. What she never acknowledged, however, was that times were thoroughly changing for everyone. There was a backlash against the frank, sexy Restoration woman and—against the male rake and libertine as well: both were moving towards their new eighteenth-century place as temptress and villain.34 Morality was more and more wanted in art, if not necessarily in life. Behn had provided some, but not enough for those still scandalised by the tone of Charles II’s reign. Bawdry attracted of course, but was falling foul of the critics more seriously than before. Admitting that ‘few Poets...are left,’ she must have noticed that her theatre generation was passing. Yet, it was easier to blame the common fate on her sex.
The preface to The Luckey Chance repeated Behn’s defences of The Dutch Lover and Sir Patient Fancy, but it differs from them in one respect: she no longer insisted that comedy was trivial and that she wrote it only for money. This was the central point of her dedication of the play to Laurence Hyde. In the past, she had argued that comedy was inconsequential and contemporary, so there was no reason a woman could not write it. Since it did not aim to teach, no claims need be made. Now, after her experience with the Popish Plot, Behn had arrived at the old opinion of Sir William Davenant in the Interregnum and become aware of the power of drama, which joined poetry as a form of statecraft. Plays were ‘secret Instructions to the People, in things that ’tis impossible to insinuate into them any other Way’. The times were much in need of instruction, now that the Tory triumphalism of Charles II’s last years had ceased and James’s Catholic policies were upsetting the nation.
Brutal and unstable though it was, Behn had a very real fear of the end of the period of Restoration. The society in which she had moved and which allowed the sort of verbal cross-dressing now shocking the public had always been fragile. It had consisted in a small coterie of people sure of gender and rank and thus able playfully to destabilise both; for a few years it had been close to a source of power in the court and associated with aristocracy. If its critics in the nation at large did not see it as the best location for an intellectual woman to flourish in, Behn herself found it a nurturing and bracing space; it allowed her to play parts and speak speech quite forbidden outside.
She had probably addressed Laurence Hyde before this dedication, since she declares, ‘You have an Art to please when you deny; and something in your Look and Voice has an Air so greatly good, it recompences even for Disappointment.’ As ‘great Persons’ in classical times and the French Cardinal Richelieu in modern had patronised drama, so should English politicians like Hyde. Perhaps he might have done so but, for once, Behn’s timing was wrong. She had described Hyde, second son of the dead Chancellor Clarendon, now created Earl of Rochester and President of the Privy Council, as ‘above that Envy which reigns in Courts’, his loyalty imposing ‘Silence upon Malice it self’. Hyde was not, however, above malice and envy, and he was suffering from his royal brother-in-law’s efforts to convert him to Catholicism. Lacking the deviousness of the Earl of Sunderland, he was unable to string James along with hints and promises. Disliked and undermined, he was dropped by the King and soon left court. Sincere Protestants were becoming thin on the ground.
Behn continued to need money—probably there had been other debts besides that to Zachary Baggs. Her health, always precarious but seemingly improved through 1684 and 1685, took a turn for the worse towards the end of 1686. No doubt she consulted expensive physicians, including Dr Bellon, who, according to ‘Astrea’s Booke’, lived ‘next doore to the Gold Bottle in Salisbury Streete neare Salysbury house in the Strand’. He probably charged a good deal since he was a noted doctor and wrote on medical matters.35
Behn’s symptoms recorded in her stray remarks and in lampoons make it uncertain what was wrong. Her limbs were aching and sometimes she had trouble walking and writing. She may have had a form of arthritis or sciatica or she may have suffered from what the satirist Robert Gould accused her of, gout, the symptoms of which were pain in legs or arms or hands, the sort that Behn lamented. It was not immediately fatal, but could cause death as it travelled to the heart. If this were the problem, she could have started it as long ago as Surinam, where gout was reportedly endemic.36 Or she may, like so many men and women of the time, have had some long-standing venereal complaint, which revealed itself in the slow distorting of the limbs and in pain very like arthritis. Both Wycherley, who knew and respected her, and Gould, who probably did neither, declared that she was ‘clap’d’. Some years later the woman of letters, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was reminded by a nobleman that several ‘remarkable poetesses & scribblers’ had ‘given very unfortunate favours to their Friends’, in other words, infected them with venereal disease. In the list is ‘Mrs Been’, a lady ‘famous indeed in [her] generation’. This is the stuff of misogynous satire, but there may be some truth in it. The disease was remarkably common.
Whatever the matter was, it was unpleasant and worsening, and lampooners made much of it:
Doth that lewd Harlot that Poetick Quean,
Fam’d through whitefryars, you know who I mean
Mend for reproof, others set up in spight
To flux, take glisters, Vomits, purge & write,
Long with a Sciatica she’s beside lame37
Her limbs distortur’d Nerves shrunk up with pain
And therefore I’ll all sharp reflections shun
Poverty, Poetry, Pox are plagues enough for one.38
It is characteristic that Behn’s next play, the one she concluded during this horrible predicament, should light-heartedly ridicule some of the fantastic medicines of the day.
The Emperor of the Moon had been interrupted by Charles II’s death and Behn knew she was finishing and presenting it two years after its moment of inception, in a worse theatrical climate. She would not, however, publicly blame th
eatrical decay on King James. Rather, it was due to the ignorant and envious public and to factional politics, which she once hoped had died with the Popish Plot: ‘the only diversion of the town now, is high dispute, and public controversies in taverns, coffeehouses, &c.’ Behn had to rival this noise more than ever, for her aim was to please the people not, as formerly, a king.
More narrative than her source play, Arlequin, The Emperor of the Moon was necessarily more coherent than its original, as Behn boasted, the French being ‘content with almost any Incoherences’. (Earlier in her life she had regarded chauvinism as a Whig infection, but her short stay in France seems to have improved her language and increased her distaste for the people. Behn was now in tune with the anti-French mood in the country.) She was not about to interrupt a lifetime’s habit and admit her debt, especially to a French work, and she allowed Arlequin to have provided only ‘a very barren and thin hint of the Plot’.39
The story of The Emperor of the Moon is one of gullibility. This had been the mark of Behn’s old City knights, although the scene here is supposedly Naples—incidentally connecting it with her other popular Neapolitan play, The Rover. Doctor Baliardo believes in a lunar world equivalent to the earth and holds to the comic rosicrucian doctrine, that only spirits should copulate with mortals. So convinced is he that he denies his daughter, Elaria, and his niece, Bellemante, their merely terrestrial lovers. Soon there are ‘stratagems a-brewing’, aided by Scaramouch and Harlequin.
The Emperor of the Moon caught the public mood in its mockery of belief in science and medicine, its contempt, so usual for Behn, of pedantic male scholarship, as well as its scorn of alchemy and astrology, increased now she and the nation knew of Monmouth’s gullibility.40 Medicine and love are comically entwined as wounds of the heart become physical and metaphysical; science and superstition merge. Telescopes and microscopes, the discoveries of Kepler and Galileo, founders of the new astronomy, are useless in the hands of fools who, with or without them, can see what they expect, in this case fantastic lunar voyages and other worlds remarkably similar to the Earth.41 As Scaramouch comments, echoing Behn on many a foolish university student, ‘this reading of books is a pernicious thing.’42 Books like telescopes can only be of value to the already sensible; otherwise they magnify stupidity.
The Emperor of the Moon is a play about theatre, transformation, and pageantry. Harlequin concludes couplets, making them appear on Bellemante’s tablet as if by magic. Scaramouch is an apothecary with a portable shop—another tribute to Rochester as Bendo here—a woman with a child, and a piece of tapestry. Disguises abound: Harlequin becomes ambassador from the moon and declares he can do whatever he wishes, even tickle himself to a laughing death.43 Baliardo’s house becomes a theatre within the theatre; dancers emerge from tapestries, revealing the theatricality of all life—indeed, when Elaria questions whether her father is mad, Bellemante shows that the theatrical circumstances of life might drive anyone so. The emphasis is on spectacle, on taking theatrical show to its limits.
In the final spectacular scene, Behn demanded ten blacked actors, two descending chariots, the embodied signs of the zodiac landing on the stage to a symphony of music, and the moon changing phases and coming on as a machine which opens to disgorge the lunar emperor to the sound of flutes. It is an operatic display, in which almost the whole cast—including Underhill as Dr Baliardo, Leigh and Jevon as Scaramouch and Harlequin, and the Mountforts and Rochester’s protégée Sarah Cooke as the romantic leads—is assembled; spectacle follows spectacle, and a real marriage occurs within a fake scene. Finally, Baliardo, chastened by his exploded belief in the spectacle’s reality, elegiacally echoes Shakespeare’s last hero Prospero and commands: ‘Burn all my Books.’44 It is a triumphant finale to a play—and, as it turned out, to Behn’s theatrical career of seventeen years.
The prologue prepared for the farcical pantomime of the play by taking stock of theatrical history—and inevitably Behn’s own, since her work spanned a good deal of the Restoration. First, it argues, there was heroic drama, heroes and gods thundering across the stage. Soon, the audience was cloyed with ‘Magnificence’, weary of a bustle about love and honour. Then came ‘humbler Comedy’, which flourished until spectators grew uncomfortable at pictures of themselves and hid behind the excuse that women should not be seeing such stuff. But it was all ‘feigned niceness’. Farce followed and people grumbled again. Nothing was left to try but something from a sixpenny raree show, like the famous speaking head which supposedly repeated what people said if they talked into its mouth.45
At this point, the prologue, spoken by the skeletal comic actor Jevon (for whom Behn had written her Harlequin, described in the play as a worn-out herring), was interrupted by this mechanical head. It rose on a twisted post from under the stage, accompanied by a booming voice. The joke was that, in Behn’s version, the head had a Scottish or northern accent quite unlike Jevon’s and was given to singing Scots songs; what with this and Jevon’s not speaking loudly enough, the theatrical ‘Cheat’ was betrayed. When this too passed, there would be only puppets left to entertain, appropriately since they echoed the woodenness of people who could not value art.46
However insulting the prologue, The Emperor of the Moon captured the spirit of the times when it was put on in March 1687, the only new theatrical work of the month. Despite Gould’s envious strictures, it avoided any bawdry and ambiguous morality and was sheer farce, the nearest England had seen to pantomime.47 For Behn, it was also the nearest she had come to the Jonsonian play with its stylised characters and tight construction. Sure of her own powers and achievement, she could afford to allow comparison of her work with that of the man with whom she had been so often berated and yet with whom, because of her name, she had been coupled. Some of her alchemical vocabulary came from Ben Jonson’s Alchemist, and the fantastical physical humour approached his, as when Scaramouch joked about the fire and metal god Vulcan turning the smith’s faeces to iron: when constipated, he could be cured with a magnet.48 With its advantages and innovations, The Emperor of the Moon became second in popularity only to The Rover, exceeding The Luckey Chance.49 Indeed it became so well known that, in 1711, the Spectator could refer familiarly to it when a player asserted he had acted ‘several Parts of Houshold-stuff with great Applause’, among them ‘one of the Men in the Hangings in the Emperor of the Moon’ (26 March 1711).
Intended formerly for King Charles himself, the dedication of the play now went unsolicited to another Charles, whom Behn seems to have known slightly, the young Marquis of Worcester, cousin of her patron, the Duke of Norfolk. She passed swiftly over the necessary eulogy of his ‘Mighty Mind’ and ‘uncommon Wit’, spending more time on his ‘Glorious Father’, the ex-Cromwellian and now staunchly Tory Duke of Beaufort, who had played an active part in quelling the Monmouth Rebellion. Perhaps she hoped for future patronage from this greater nobleman. Although writing farce, the genre Dryden and other educated men thought vulgar, Behn wanted to raise herself above the vulgar. So she insisted that her version was not ‘meant for the Numbers, who comprehend nothing beyond Show and Buffoonry’, but for such connoisseurs as the Marquis. Her paradoxical, snobbish contempt for people, combined with her clear desire for large audiences, fed on her conviction that no readers would include themselves in the ignorant crowd.50
Invoking for Worcester her old vision of strong monarchy supported by nobles supporting artists, Behn now made a symbiotic relation of nobility and creative talent that somehow avoided the horror of the plebeian market economy, encouraged the arts, and strengthened the state. Such a Utopian patronage system had resulted in the English Renaissance of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson and the flourishing of many theatres where there was now only one. Given her Whig and Protestant significance, Elizabeth I was not mentioned, but her shadow was there, rebuking James II and his poor theatrical record.
Accepting the pedagogic and civic value of plays, that art and the artist were part of the body politic, Behn now b
ecame mentor, not simply client, to the aristocracy as she had been before, reiterating the point made in the Clifton and Hyde dedications, that a flourishing nation needed a flourishing theatre. ‘[S]ome leading Spirits, so Generous, so Publick, and so Indefatigable’ must support it. Otherwise, people would find diversion in the dangerous activities of political and religious dispute, as they had in the Popish Plot and were showing every sign of doing again. Not only the young Marquis but James II should take note.
Chapter 26
Seneca Unmasqued and La Montre
‘talking all, purely to prevent a dumb Entertainment’
James II wished to re-establish Roman Catholicism through freedom of worship not coercion, believing that tolerance would inevitably lead to Catholic supremacy. Since she appreciated religious tolerance whatever its cause, Behn supported his efforts, as did Henry Nevil Payne, and the pair probably wrote government propaganda. Behn could not, however, avoid noticing that it was the aim of re-establishing Catholicism rather than religious tolerance that struck the bulk of the populace; most equated the former firmly with arbitrary government.
In the country at large, to be a Catholic was even now not especially advantageous but, around the King, it was increasingly so. In Evelyn’s sour words, ‘Romanists [were] swarming at court with greater confidence than ever had been seen in England since the Reformation’ and, to some, it appeared that a Catholic conversion was the only route to court and royal patronage. Despite success with The Emperor of the Moon, Behn still could not find the contemporary theatre a secure source of income and, along with other political poets who wished to prosper, she must have felt the kind of pressure the dying Rochester had suffered from Burnet. Dryden succumbed and was converted to Catholicism. He had been moving in the direction for some months, but the timing made his enemies rejoice.