Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  The Widdow Ranter or, the History of Bacon in Virginia was the first play to be set in British colonial America, but no one could fail to see that the Virginia of the 1670s spoke to the England of 1688. Reverting to Behn’s old genre of tragicomedy, now suited to the troubled times of change, The Widdow Ranter included a tragic vision of basically good men led astray and a comic one of vulgar men empowered during the absence of a strong governor. In early Restoration tragedy, men such as Behn’s hero Bacon would have been placed exotically in Renaissance Spain or pre-Columbian America, but, here, he was in a mismanaged colony; he was thus forced from being a glowingly simple hero, destroyed by social forces in the manner of Dryden’s early heroes, into becoming a commentary on a complex reality that sullied and diminished as well as destroyed him. In this context, masculine heroism came under closer scrutiny than ever before in Behn’s works.

  The Nathaniel Bacon of history was an English settler of good family from East Anglia who, having been imprudent, was equipped by his father to travel to Virginia to recoup his fortune. Temporarily leaving his wife in England, he arrived in America, bought land in Henrico County and, as a man of substance, became a councillor. The trouble he suffered on his plantation from marauders, as well as his own insubordinate spirit, soon led him into conflict with the Governor, whom he felt to be too lenient on the Indians (Native Americans). Failing to galvanise the administration, he attacked these natives himself and his spirited actions attracted other frustrated and plundered planters. Soon he was at the head of a troop in rebellion against the colonial government.

  Much of Bacon’s language invoked the old Commonwealth: he spoke of ‘Libertyes’ and ‘the cause of the oppressed’. So his uprising could appear the first American revolt or, nearer to home, an echo of the Monmouth Rebellion. At the same time, however, he took a high patrician tone, castigating the administrators of Virginia as men of ‘vile birth’ and no education who had let the arts and sciences stagnate. Such men were ‘spounges’ which had ‘suckt up the Publique Treasure’. This elitist emphasis was the basis of Behn’s portrait of Bacon as her usual noble hero, a man of birth and breeding in contrast to other vulgarian Virginians.

  The historical Bacon and the Governor both declared themselves doing the King’s will, but, when Whitehall heard of the rebellion, it swiftly sided with established authority. The King issued a proclamation ‘for the Suppressing a Rebellion lately raised within the Plantation of Virginia’. In the midst of the unrest, Bacon simply died: ‘Hee lay sick... of the Bloody Flux, and... accompanyed with a Lousey Disease; so that the swarmes of Vermyn that bred in his Body he could not destroy but by throwing his shirt into the Fire as often as he shifted himself. Hee dyed much dissatisfied in minde...’.3 Some murmured that he was made worse by excessive brandy-drinking. Clearly straight history would not do for drama.

  For her play, Behn disposed of the Governor, so allowing the heroic Bacon to oppose only ill-born Virginians and be the nearest thing to royal authority in the colony.4 Her work could then end happily, anticipating the true Governor’s arrival. Bacon would be vanquished, but so would the base-born councillors whose absurd authority derived from the debased law; the excuse for Bacon would be gone.5 Behn also omitted mention of the reprisals that marked the quelling of the historical Bacon rebellion. Charles II had accused the Governor of hanging ‘more men in that naked Country, than he had done for the Murther of his Father’. In Behn’s play, there was such chaos that no one managed to be hanged at all and the play concluded with multiple marriages.

  Eliminating Mrs Bacon, Behn made Bacon romantically in love with an ‘Indian Queen’—an heroic emotion mocked as affected by cynical onlookers. (The figure, a stock one of heroic romance, might just have been based on the widowed Cockacoeske, Queen of the Pamunkeys, who allegedly had a son by an English colonel and felt the dual allegiance to Native Americans and settlers given in romantic terms to Behn’s young queen. Cockacoeske, a far older and more substantial personage, fled from Bacon, however, and was more concerned with supplies, troop movements, and the control of her own goods than with romance.)6 Behn’s ‘Indian Queen’, a delicate Europeanised conception—she is as ‘timorous as a dove’ with ‘no Amazonian fire’ about her—could wear the full set of feathers Aphra Behn had brought from Surinam; presumably the prop now belonged to the United Company, which must have wanted opportunities to use it. The Restoration theatre liked mixing western ways with cultural exotica.7

  In Behn’s play, Bacon is no longer allowed to die lousily in bed like his historical counterpart. Instead, he commits Roman suicide on the battlefield, for, like the rebellious Allin of Surinam, who had tried to kill the Proprietor Lord Willoughby in the 1660s and whom Behn probably remembered when writing the play, Bacon himself is inspired by heroic Roman example. He is

  a Man indeed above the Common Rank, by Nature Generous; Brave, Resolv’d, and Daring; who studying the Lives of the Romans and great Men, that have raised themselves to the most Elevated fortunes, fancies it easy for Ambitious men, to aim at any Pitch of Glory, I’ve heard him often say, Why cannot I Conquer the Universe as well as Alexander? or like another Romulus form a new Rome, and make my self Ador’d?8

  Such ambition now belongs in the theatre. Little can be achieved in a world where the admiring man who speaks these words intends to oppose the heroic Bacon, solely because of an ‘Interest’ he has in the new governor.

  In his obsession with love in death at the expense of more political realities, Bacon resembles Monmouth. Dying by his own hand rather than by another’s, however, he feels able to utter the proper political words that James must badly have wanted from his nephew on the scaffold: ‘never let Ambition—Love—or Interest make you forget as I have done—your Duty—and Allegiance.’9 With his staunchness, heroism, and political naivety Bacon is both Monmouth and the martial King James of Behn’s Coronation Ode. Characters within the play remark on his theatricality, his heroic sense of himself on a stage. He wants to reduce war to chivalrous duels—even though his Indian opponent is merely a ‘mad hot-brained youth’—and rhetorical confrontations, even though his antagonists use words only for deceit.

  Bacon is, the onlookers suspect and some of his followers fear, in the wrong play at the wrong moment. The glamorous and glorious conception of personal power he holds resembles that of heroic drama, not late tragicomedy. He has the consciousness of the mythologised 1640s, when cavaliering was swashbuckling, or of the 1660s, when the myths were fashioned, the early jubilant years of the Restoration with their fantastic hopes of a Golden Age and incorruptible power. Bacon believes in a kind of transcendental politics, true for all times and places, a belief based on heroic myths and deeply embedded in masculine classical literature like Plutarch’s Lives, which he takes to be true. He also has faith in the integrity of language: the oath and word of honour. Renaissance tragedy, especially of Shakespeare, persistently expressed a belief that oratorical virtuosity could dominate the rudest rabble. The Restoration had abandoned the notion, but it remains dear to Bacon’s heart.

  Bacon is made more anachronistic by the other, unheroic characters in the play. In the 1670s, Behn’s rakes had been wandering Cavaliers; now they are more like economic migrants, seeking solvency rather than empire—much as George Marten and his Interregnum cronies had always done in the New World. But they do not even do this with gusto. Like The Luckey Chance, The Widdow Ranter presents men willing to sell their bodies for money but not to work at ‘business’. The newly arrived gambler, Hazard, will try for a rich marriage but, if he fails he, like Gayman, will take up a kind of prostitution: ‘A Younger Brother may pick out a Pritty Livelihood,’ says his friend. Having just arrived in the new country, he remarks to the hospitable but low-born councillors, ‘I was not bred to Merchandizing Sir, nor do intend to follow the Drudgery of Trading... I was not born to work Sir.’ He is actually prepared to fight to defend the honour of his idleness.

  The comedy of the play is mainly provided by the Virg
inian councillors, colonial versions of Behn’s City aldermen. Royalist mythology had always fastened on the low origins of anti-monarchists, as The Roundheads testified, both in the 1640s and the 1680s. Here Behn directs her social disdain to anyone who aspires to inappropriate place and fails to recognise that the gently born, even if card-sharpers and fortune-hunters, are natural rulers. The social chaos of Virginia has allowed a bankrupt farrier to become a preacher through forging his ordination papers and a tell-tale pickpocket to become a Justice of the Peace. The response of these dignitaries to any rehearsing of the scandalous truth is not the duel of a gentleman but the law of common people: they will dishonourably sue, not honourably fight. In Virginia, the law is absurd in abstract and disgraceful as administered by vulgar men. It is corrupting when confused with ethics. Without a legitimate king, England would be as bad, for it, too, would have to rely on the Law. One of the ill-bred councillors asks, ‘[I]s it fit that every impudent fellow that pretends to a little Honour, Loyalty & Courage, should serve his king and Country against the Law? no, no, Brother, these things are not to be suffer’d in a Civill Government by Law Establisht.’ Law becomes the opposite of loyalty, as democracy of honour.

  In the hilarious drinking scene of the Committee of Safety in The Roundheads, written during the Popish Plot furore, Behn had reduced non-monarchical government to a farce of vulgar self-interest. In still more tense times, she repeated the device here, as the Virginians set up court aided by a bowl of punch with ‘a great ladle or two in it’. Their first item before they move on to the domestic bickerings is to vote themselves a new larger punch bowl. Such is democracy, Behn seems to say, such the people’s ability, such the quagmire on which the apparently secure edifice of the government of a realm is built. As one onlooker remarks, ‘The Country’s well, were but the People so.’ Despite all the political perceptiveness which her creation of Bacon implied, Behn could still not look beyond a single figure, the royally sanctioned Governor, for any political resolution. Only this man will properly separate Native Americans and English, base-from well-born, and show who is master.10

  Chaotic Virginia is also home to the tobacco-smoking, buffalo-eating widow Ranter, who shares the title of the play with Bacon and, with her exploits in martial cross-dressing, burlesques him. She has the spirit, almost crudeness, that Behn’s pure young heroines can no longer afford. The Ranters had been a radical sect in the Interregnum, but, by the late Restoration, they were largely forgotten and the term was used for a roistering man or a whorish woman: Ranter is a roistering woman.11 As such, she lives high, giving gargantuan banquets to anyone of a jolly disposition, smoking and drinking in the morning, downing pints of punch through the day, riding like a man in the evening, and roundly abusing her servants like a lord. She has gained her money through inheriting from Colonel Ranter, who had bought her as an indentured servant off a ship from England, then married her, and conveniently died. She is aware that her attraction must be largely in her purse; without it, ‘I might sit still and sigh, and cry out, a Miracle! a Miracle! at sight of a Man within my doors.’12

  Ranter sees herself as a good ‘Commodity’ for a young fellow with his fortune to make. But in fact she wants Dareing, one of Bacon’s followers, an older man who is not especially attracted to her wealth, having more complex desires. Dareing is persuaded to take her rather than the younger woman he loves, only if she stays in the male dress she has donned to pursue him and proves herself in fighting: ‘I never lik’d thee half so well in Petticoats.’ Yet, the depiction is not subversive—it cannot be for, as Behn knew, if pushed to any limit, the theatrical woman in breeches simply became a rogue and a freak. She would do this in Sir Anthony Love, a startling play of the 1690s by Behn’s new play-writing friend, Thomas Southerne, who doubtless thought of Ranter when he created his heroine. She too stays in men’s clothes but goes further than any of Behn’s cross-dressed women in refusing the romantic role, choosing to give her lover to a more feminine girl.

  In the portrait of the frank, free and cheery widow, Ranter, praised as ‘good-natur’d and Generous’ and never ‘melancholy’, there may be a compliment to Madam Welldon, the dedicatee chosen by the editor in accordance with Behn’s wishes, a lady ‘Eminent for Hospitality’.13 It is hard, too, not to see in the widow an image of Aphra Behn herself. Ranter tried to make life ‘as Comical’ as possible and was irritated at belief in the stars as fate; she liked punch, and Behn was remembered for her milk punch. So with love: Ranter wanted it but asked, ‘why should I sigh and whine, and make my self an Ass, and him conceited....’14 With Behn, Ranter dominated company and promoted good cheer, but both felt stricken when not attended to and appreciated. The exaggerated picture of a libidinous Ranter which Dareing made to tease the widow reflects the exaggerated satire which credited Behn with vast sexual feats: ‘half a dozen [such women] wou’d ruine the Land,’ said Dareing of Ranter, ‘debauch all the men, and scandalize all the women.’15 Fittingly, when the play was performed posthumously, the role of Ranter was taken by the actress for whom Behn had so often written and on whose naughty reputation (as on her own) she had capitalised, Betty Currer.16 If the widow were a portrait, however, it would reflect only one aspect of Behn’s complicated personality. It could not, for example, include her intellectual and imaginative powers or the melancholy of ill-health. It would have taken account of her humour, though, for Behn would have transposed her snobbish literary self into an illiterate and rich former servant.17

  Oroonoko was probably written between the announcement of Queen Mary’s pregnancy and the birth, since it was printed by William Canning just after the Happy Birth poem, in which it was advertised for sale. Behn had long contemplated the story and had told it often in company, with a tone her writing never caught. The rehearsing meant that the writing was quick, an afterthought: on her own admission she wrote it out in ‘a few Hours’ and ‘never rested my Pen a Moment for Thought’. Charles Gildon added the detail that the room was filled with company. Behn had always had the knack of composing wherever she was; it had fuelled her scorn for those who made a palaver of writing.

  Oroonoko was both Behn’s own story, based on memories of Surinam, and a sardonic-tragic extension of the last part of Love-Letters, with its sense of corruption triumphant deep within a state. This time, the state was a definitely doomed one, since her readers knew of the later fate of Surinam, to which Behn referred in the work: its conquest by the Dutch. England itself could now fall to the Dutch. So, in this famous tale, memories of Surinam were overladen with contemporary anxieties, and the people of America—Trefry, Marten and Behn herself as narrator—stood for the increasingly powerless English loyalists of 1688, while the crude Banister and the rogue Deputy Governor Byam did duty for Burnet and William of Orange.18

  Together, Oroonoko and The Widdow Ranter clarify the little sympathy Behn felt for ordinary victims of slavery and hierarchy. Like Charles I, James II, and Bacon, Oroonoko is a martyr to unworthy popular rule. For Behn the evils of democracy which killed her heroes were so great that they diminished other possible evils. England’s colonies became places for the worst elements in society, a dumping ground for its misfits. It could, therefore, only be redeemed by aristocratic control. Had the noble Governor, the King’s vice-regent, been present in Surinam or Virginia the tragedies would not have occurred. Neither Native Americans nor slaves would have rebelled. This point was stressed to Behn’s dedicatee, Lord Maitland: if he had been able to protect Oroonoko, the latter ‘had not made so Inglorious an end’.

  With Cesario and Octavio of Love-Letters, Behn had begun to investigate absurd and tragic male heroism. In Oroonoko as in Bacon, she contemplated the admirable person deceived by himself and by worldly men, now quite unsuited to the modern age. Each has something of the swashbuckling quality of her early Cavalier rakes, but the type is no longer at ease in the world. More clearly than The Widdow Ranter, however, Oroonoko warned, celebrated and despaired of the man Behn had so long publicly supporte
d. In the story the hero, noble, sincere, heroic, and a little absurd, is no match for the cunning and brutal forces around him. While panegyric praised the royal family as if no dangers were nigh, then, Behn’s most famous short story functioned as a coded warning to King James of what might happen if he were not on his guard. Oroonoko, a richly evocative tale, is not straight allegory of course, and the fictional character of the slave prince is not simply a substitute for James, but the story is surely being informed by the impending political tragedy of an historical man. If James and his followers failed immediately to see the analogy, Behn made it clearer in the dedication: ‘Men of eminent Parts are as Exemplary as even Monarchs themselves...’ Tis by Comparison we can Judge and Chuse!’

  There were many parallels between the black slave and the ‘black’ Stuart. First, James and Oroonoko, both called Caesar, speak the heroic language of Restoration drama, which Bacon had also used. It was a language suited mainly to the theatre and to a court where the King aspired to absolute distinction from his subjects—the sort of court which the Restoration fantasised in tales of Turkish sultans and African kings. Second, Oroonoko and James both mistimed magnanimity. The Happy Birth had taken up the theme which ran through many of the political works of the Stuart period, including Behn’s, of royal mercy or forgiveness. Certainly James should have forgiven the bishops before matters got out of hand and he had to arrest and try them. Forgiveness could also be inappropriate, however, and Charles I had reputedly fallen because of his indulgent forgiveness of his enemies. In Astrea Redux, just after the Restoration, Dryden praised the ‘mildness’ that Charles II had inherited from his father, but, by Absalom and Achitophel in the Popish Plot years, he was urging the King not to be foolishly and naïvely merciful. In her Coronation Ode, Behn had wanted James to grasp the reins of the unruly horse of the people. Now in Oroonoko she shows the political folly—as well as personal grandeur—of forgiveness. With Oroonoko she is warning James of the possible defection and treachery of those he had forgiven, men such as Lord Grey, to whom he had shown extraordinary clemency, and perhaps the Earl of Sunderland himself. Moreover, forgiveness betrayed could make a man run to the other extreme. Too forgiving when he had it in his power to harm, Oroonoko turned to threatening horrific vengeance on the colonists when powerless to inflict it.