by Janet Todd
9. This and the previous derogatory remarks come from ‘A Satyr on the Players’, BL Harley MS 7317. Nokes played transvestite parts such as the nurse in Romeo and Juliet and in Otway’s Caius Marius.
10. Dryden wrote lines in his partly authored play, Sir Martin Mar-all, or The Feign’d Innocence (1667), ‘purposely for the Mouth of Mr Nokes’.
11. See The Tory-Poets: A Satyr (London, 1682).
12. Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian, ed. Robert W. Lowe, 2 vols (1889; New York, 1966), vol. I, pp. 154–5.
13. If Behn had indeed helped Killigrew with Thomaso before the Restoration, she might have been introduced to Betterton as a potential adapter and collaborator, or simply as a clear transcriber. In 1669–70, Betterton was making The Amorous Widow: or, The Wanton Wife, A Comedy out of Molière’s George Dandin and Thomas Corneille’s Le Baron d’Albikrac. In A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personel in London, 1660–1800 (Carbondale, Ill., 1973), vol. II, Philip H. Highfill, Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans speculate that Behn may have helped Betterton with the adaptation and it would, in view of her future, be an apt title with which to make her debut. Ascription is difficult with Betterton because his adaptations were not published until many years later but there seems no reason to associate The Amorous Widow with Behn. It is a lively, sophisticated early sex comedy, set specifically in London, mocking age and aged desire and promoting fashion and youth; it is quite different from and more modern than the style of Behn’s early tragicomedies. In addition, the dialogue is rather more long-winded than Behn’s, even in her early plays, and more aphoristic.
14. The Genuine Works in Verse and Prose, Of the Right Honourable George Granville (London, 1732), p. 122.
15. Interestingly, there is similar instability in Frances Boothby’s Marcelia (London, 1670), which accepts Stuart theory in making an absolute separation of subjects and princes: ‘The King is by that awful name secure; / Subjects are bound what they do to endure.’ Then, however, it presents the King as courting an engaged woman in possible reference to one of the many amours of the actual Stuart King, Charles II.
16. Works, vol. 5, p. 76.
17. Others have the same knowledge—Philander instructs his sister on how to use her feminine charms on their father by hanging on his cheek and mingling talk with kisses—but they do not quite deconstruct femininity with this knowledge.
18. Works, vol. 5, p. 25.
19. Charles Gildon’s Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton (London, 1710).
20. Preface to Don Sebastian, King of Portugal (London, 1690). Cuts were restored in the printed text.
21. After Behn’s death women playwrights were certainly involved in rehearsals. The dramatists Catherine Trotter and Mary Pix were mocked in The Female Wits (1697) for their roles in staging a play.
22. The Female Tatler, 1709–10, no. 41, ed. Fidelis Morgan (London, 1992), p. 94.
23. The Otway incident need not necessarily have happened at the first performance.
24. ‘Session of the Poets’ (1676).
25. On the whole, in these years theatre-managers were trusted to be careful over content, since Charles II had put authority into their hands.
26. In the 1670s house charges were about £25 a night. See Judith Milhous, ‘The Duke’s Company’s Profits, 1675–1677’, Theatre Notebook, 32, 1978, pp. 76–88.
27. The Laws of Poetry (London, 1721), pp. 37–8. See Roswell Gray Ham, Otway and Lee: Biography from a Baroque Age (New Haven, 1931), p. 61.
28. The secrecy of Behn’s professional life is enforced by the fact that on 31 May 1670, the avid theatregoer, Samuel Pepys, fearing for the safety of his eyes, stopped writing his Diary. Behn had still four months to go until her debut. It is interesting to speculate what he would have written. He would probably have appreciated Behn’s sense of theatre and her endeavour to make her plays various, although he might not have accepted her general tenor: he had more of an admiration for Ben Jonson than she had, and he thought her much admired Othello ‘a mean thing’ when he read it on a boat, though he had earlier ‘esteemeed [it] a mighty good play’. But, in the end, it is impossible to guess Pepys’s reaction: the difference between his being ‘mightily pleased’ and ‘mightily dissatisfied’ depended on his mood, ladies in the audience, and his sense of other people’s opinion, as well as on the playwright’s dramatic skill and the production.
Chapter 12
1. See the dedication to The Spanish Friar (1680).
2. The Printing Act of 1662 ensured that copyright resided in the Stationers’ Company rather than the author, but the author was now free to sell the initial work, unlike in the years before the Interregnum.
3. Osborne, Letters, pp. 82 and 218.
4. Elkanah Settle complained of the difficulty of getting a play text published in his dedicatory epistle to The Empress of Morocco (1673).
5. Though political affiliation is certainly not absolute among publishers, Magnes appears to be largely in the Royalist camp, but, since he died in 1679, he did not have to take sides when party factions became intensified. He also published French works usually in translation, including Brémond’s Hattigé, which Behn seems later to have read.
6. Behn expressed this fear in the dedication to The Young King, Works, vol. 6.
7. The second edition made some much needed emendations, for example Falatio is happily renamed Falatius and Erminia marries the ‘General’ Alcippus rather than the ‘Genetall’.
8. The play was matched only by her posthumous play, The Widdow Ranter, and almost by The Feign’d Curtizans; see endnotes to these plays in vols 6 and 7 of Works.
9. For further information about Behn’s dramatic sources, see the head notes to the plays in Works, vols 5–7. It is curious that, in her 1662 Plays, Margaret Cavendish, boasting of the originality of her works, declared she avoided precisely the sources of Behn’s early plays, French romance and Spanish prose: ‘I ne’r took Plot... from Romance, nor from Don Quixot, / As others have, for to assist their Wit, / But I upon my own Foundation writ.’
10. Works, vol. 5, p. 109.
11. See the 1724 edition, Plays Written by the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn.
12. Thomas Dring acted as bookseller for several famous literary authors, such as Wycherley, Dryden, Milton and Mlle de Scudéry. This meant that he financed the publication and was responsible for marketing as well. The Amorous Prince was entered in the Term Catalogue for Trinity, 10 July.
13. D. E. L. Crane, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham’s ‘The Rehearsal’ (Durham, 1976), p. 64.
14. Tragicomedy was not a form Behn could easily abandon and she returned to it at the end of her life when perhaps it best summed up her experiences.
15. Dorset was actually Lord Buckhurst at this point, but I have anticipated his later title to avoid confusion.
16. Works, vol. 1, no. 1.
17. ‘A Pindaric By The Honourable Edward Howard, To Mrs. B. Occasioned By a Copy she made on his Play, called The New Eutopia.’ It was published in Behn’s Miscellany of 1685.
18. For another view of the authorship, see Paul Hammond in ‘The Prologue and epilogue to Dryden’s Marriage A-la-Mode’, PBSA, 81, 1987, no. 8. James Anderson Winn has noted that Dryden himself was fairly indifferent to collecting and reprinting his shorter poems, see note to p. 379 of ‘When Beauty Fires the Blood’: Love and the Arts in the Age of Dryden (Ann Arbor, 1992).
19. Works, vol. 1, no. 2.
20. George Etherege, The Man of Mode (1676).
21. A Comparison Between the Two Stages (1702; Princeton, 1942), p. 17.
22. [Edmund Hickeringill] The Mushroom: or, A Satyr In Answer to a Satyre against Sedition. Called The Medal. The satire points out ‘Poets and Beauty play no After-Game’ (London, 1682).
Chapter 13
1. See the will, signed 1677, of John Hoyle, 8 July 1692, PRO:Prob/11/410.
2. Satirists put Barry’s birthd
ate at just after Behn’s, in 1643. See the satire on Barry, Mall Hinton and Charlotte Butler, in BL Harleian MS 6913, p. 345. In ‘A Pastoral to Mr. Stafford’ Behn refers to herself as too young for her Antwerp mission when, if born in 1640, she would have been twenty-five. Works, vol. 1, no. 64.
3. Hoyle’s learning can be gauged from his eclectic library, which included many learned tomes, as well as such works as Le Putanisme d’Amsterdam avec figures. No books by Behn were found in it at his death. Hoyle was perhaps one or two years younger than Behn since he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in May 1658 and Gray’s Inn nearly two years later.
4. The suicide became notorious and featured in many anti-government poems, for example, ‘On the Happy Memory of Alderman Hoyle that hang’d himself’, where ‘A wounded soul close coupled with the sense / Of sin, pays home its proper recompense.’
5. Attitudes towards homosexuality and bisexuality seem fairly relaxed in Behn’s circles, despite the capital statutes against sodomy. R. Trumbach has argued that this was the last generation in which the typical representative was a sodomite ‘with his whore on one arm and his boy on the other’ rather than the more worrying member of an effeminate and homosexual subculture which began to grow up in the late 1690s, ‘Sodomitical Assaults, Gender Role, and Sexual Development in Eighteenth Century London’, The Pursuit of Sodomy, eds K. Gerard and G. Hokma (New York, 1989), pp. 408–9.
6. The diary trails off with Boys in a fever, from which he might have died, although Blome in Britannica lists a Jeffrey Boys of Gray’s Inn in 1683. Clearly there were other flirtations for Behn as well. In ‘The Sence of a Letter sent me, made into Verse, To a New Tune’, she describes receiving a letter with the kind of male threat she did not like; she turned it into verse for The Amorous Prince. Perhaps she constructed the lover out of male attitudes or the man may have stood out for the clarity of his threat. In the final stanza he blamed the woman for provoking and not satisfying him: if women did not act as men wished, men would ‘grow to abhor, what we now do admire’. When she republished the verses thirteen years later (see Works, vol. 1, no. 22), Behn was more aware of absurdity than menace and she changed the last stanza to make the luckless lover slink off.
7. Works, vol. 1, no. 43.
8. When the Duke’s Company went to Dorset Garden, the King’s Company under Killigrew had the mortification of having to move into their rivals’ vacated premises.
9. Behn was less pleased to hear in the hero’s mouth the opinion ‘Wit and Beauty seldome go together in a Woman,’ while the quarrel of the two whores who discuss the precise stages of a woman’s sartorial disintegration through second-hand gowns and black cloth and plain linen to ‘Strip’t Semar’, which no wit can redeem, must have struck near the bone. It was not long since Behn had faced prison for debt.
10. Meanwhile Marcel is persuaded not to kill his fallen sister since he has sought to visit the same fate on his beloved: ‘I either must my shameful Love resign, / Or my more brave and just Revenge decline.’
11. Works, vol. 5, p. 177.
12. Works, vol. 5, p. 194.
13. Some of Behn’s techniques were still old-fashioned, e.g. the overuse of asides so mocked in The Rehearsal, but she avoided the clumsy eavesdropping of The Amorous Prince and relied more on gesture: Euphemia’s mock swoon to reveal her beauty is carefully choreographed. Behn had developed a sense of the importance of costume and was eager to control what the characters wore.
14. Both Angel and Jevon, who joined the Company in the 1673–4 season, were known to dislike seriousness and to develop their own buffoonery, as Downes suggested.
15. Very few playwrights assumed Behn’s cynicism and so they opened themselves to the kind of criticism that Jeremy Collier was already levelling at them in the early 1670s (see MS Va 312 Folger), when he countered their notion that evil and ‘concupiscence’ were displayed to reform the audience. Behn accepted with Collier that drama did not represent ‘dull Christian marriage’, and that people sought comedy ‘out of jollity of heart’. Indeed she manages to sound quite like the censoring divine when she writes that ‘Playes were certainly intended for the exercising of men’s passions not their understandings.’ Her defiant stand was of course an advertisement for her wares—the plays she wrote ought to be amusing. But it also sprang from her irritation at the pretensions of men. She always bewailed the formal education she had not received, but at times, as here, Behn’s annoyance at the discrimination was tempered by her sense that men might indeed be learned without being sensible, frank or wise.
16. Shadwell had such overweening confidence that he declared of his adaptations, ‘without vanity...Molière’s part has not suffered in his hand’ and, of his version of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, that he himself had made it into a true play.
17. John Eachard, The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion Enquired into (London, 1670), p. 12.
18. Eachard, pp. 4–5. After 1660, as grammar schools for boys began to diversify into a new curriculum, the upper gentry insisted on sending their sons to schools which preserved the old regime with its union of harsh discipline and the classics. See M. V. Wallbank, ‘Eighteenth-century Public Schools and the Education of the Governing Elite’, History of Education, 8, 1979.
19. Behn also relished Eachard’s criticism of the clergy although she did not follow him in attributing much of their scandalous backsliding to their poverty. Mendelson believes that Behn was the author of a comedy called The Woman Turn’d Bully written about this time and performed in 1675, which shows both learning and a mockery of learning. There is no conclusive evidence either way. On the one hand there are in the play more Latin quotations and tags than Behn usually allowed, which suggests a lawyer-author, and, on the other, Behn was known as a friend of lawyers and there is mention of ‘the Nunnery at Ghent’. There is also an entry of a boisterous widow who, like the later widow Ranter, smokes publicly. Most likely the play was a collaboration.
20. Evelyn, Diary, ed. William Bray (London, 1852), IV, pp. 21–2.
21. Here of course Shadwell might be making the best of a bad job, since the Duke’s Company still did not excel in comediennes.
22. Prologue to Ben Jonson’s The Silent Woman.
23. Rochester, Letters, p. 182.
24. Works, vol. 1, no. 31.
Chapter 14
1. These concerts were advertised in the London Gazette, the first announcement appearing on 26 December 1672. After 1675 the concerts took place in Covent Garden and after 1678 near St Clement’s Church in the Strand.
2. For a description of Banister’s concerts, see Alan Luhring, ‘The Music of John Banister’ (Diss., Stanford University, 1966).
3. It is slightly more likely to have been Henry Purcell’s brother since Henry’s voice began to break in 1673. Although he probably sang in commercial productions after that time, Henry Purcell became mainly an instrumentalist. See Maureen Duffy, Henry Purcell (London, 1994).
4. Works, vol. 1, no. 60.
5. The letter was printed in 1718 by Tom Brown in Familiar Letters of Love, Gallantry, And several Occasions. If not by Behn, it seems likely that it was written to provide a titillating context for a re-publication of her poem, ‘The Disappointment’. Charles Gildon and Brown were both composers of other people’s letters, see The Post Boy Robb’d of his Mail (1692) and Miscellaneous Letters and Essays (1694).
6. See P. A. Hopkins, ‘Aphra Behn and John Hoyle: A Contemporary Mention, and Sir Charles Sedley’s Poem on his Death’, Notes and Queries, n.s., vol. 41, no. 2, June 1994, pp. 176–85. The eight letters were printed in 1696 in The Histories and Novels... in one Volume. They may be forgeries, used to fill up sheets in the volume and help sell Behn as a Tory wit and libertine. There is no firm evidence either way, but I believe them more likely to be genuine than otherwise. The letters are reprinted in Works, vol. 3, pp. 260–70.
7. Given the obvious jealousy expressed in the letter, it was a useless ploy to promise to
see ‘no Man till I saw your Face again’—especially since on this occasion Behn had seen Hoyle only a few hours before.
8. Works, vol. 3, p. 264.
9. Works, vol. 3, p. 268.
10. Without the knowledge that it was the last of the series, a reader could still feel the writer’s partial recovery and foretell a change from this letter. There is a postscript asking Hoyle to come to see Behn and on a day earlier than the one he had suggested, but significantly she ends with more distance than she had before mustered when she adds ‘if you can’.
11. Works, vol. 1, no. 18.
12. The poem echoes the epilogue of The Amorous Prince: ‘Love in rural triumph reigns, / As much a God amongst the Swains’, and takes up the conceit in the poem ‘Ballad on Mr.... asking why I was so sad’, where the shepherd was adorned with female trophies.
13. See B. Lewis, British Contributions to Arabic Studies (London, 1941).
14. The translation was published in 1649 and was reissued with a Caveat in 1688 expressing the popular conception of Mohammed as cunning and power hungry. For the non-blushing Moor, cf. Webster’s White Devil (1612), where Zanche says ‘I ne’er lov’d my complexion till now / Cause I may boldly say without a blush / I love you’ (Act V, Scene I, ll. 209–11).
15. Dryden also minimised the activity. In the preface to An Evening’s Love, he argued that the borrowing playwright resembled ‘a curious Gunsmith, or Watchmaker: the Iron or Silver is not his own; but they are the least part of that which gives the value; The price lyes wholly in the worksmanship’.
16. Kirkman, the biographer of Mary Carleton, published Lusts Dominion. He attributed it to Christopher Marlowe, an attribution Langbaine accepted. The play was clearly influenced by or similar to Marlowe’s works, especially The Jew of Malta (1589), which also depicted an exotic villain defeated though never subjugated in spirit. But, since there was an allusion to a tract concerning the death of the Spanish king, Philip II, which occurred after Marlowe’s death, some of the work must have been written by another person. This later writer, possibly Thomas Dekker, was also influenced by Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, where Aaron the Moor and Tamora, Queen of the Goths, are similarly outrageous. Despite the attribution to Marlowe, Lusts Dominion did not do well and Kirkman was still trying to sell his 1657 edition in 1661, when he gave the work a new title page. Usefully for Behn, it does not seem that the play was performed; so she might have hoped that most of her audience would not know it.