by Janet Todd
17. For example, Behn moved the scene where the Queen persuades her old flame, the Cardinal, to abandon her son to a position where it can be interrupted by a messenger from Philip, who dashes in to urge the Cardinal to bring up his forces and save the day.
18. As usual, Behn abandoned supernatural devices. She also omitted a comic duo and old King Philip and combined peripheral characters, retaining only one comic soldier. She filled the court with courtiers and added a banqueting scene. She also clarified motivation: Osmin, Abdelazer’s creature, is in her play characterised as weary of his subjection to a tyrant and he is given the role of warning Philip, in place of the two ‘lowsy friars’ of Lusts Dominion.
19. Politics is implied in lines added to the original play when Abdelazer speaks about the need to exclude Philip, now declared a bastard, despite his popularity: ‘That dangerous Popular Spirit must be laid, / Or Spain must languish under Civil Swords.’ Something is also made of the theme of political revenge. But Abdelazer’s triumph, destroying almost the entire male part of the Spanish royal family, is so extreme it is difficult to see it as political comment. There are, however, one or two references to recent events in the play. In the last act when Abdelazer describes himself ‘Raging as Midnight flames let loose in Citie... will ruine where it lights’, the audience probably remembered the Great Fire of London a decade before. When Philip looked at Abdelazer, seeing not just black destruction but ‘Plagues’ to poison the world, the reference had a resonance now lost. There may even have been a reference to the Antwerp society that had so struck Behn in 1666: the Queen speaks of the spies she has round her son, as they had been round Phillander in The Forc’d Marriage. It is a detail not in Lusts Dominion.
20. See Jessica Munns, Restoration Politics and Drama: The Plays of Thomas Otway, 1675–1683 (Newark, Del., 1995).
21. In other plays, women are given heroic drives and find their will their appetite. In Settle’s Empress of Morocco, for example, the heroine combines the ruthlessness of Abdelazer with the lack of family feelings of the Queen. Women are, however, considered to have an essentially feminine nature and even Settle’s character has, like Lady Macbeth, to denature herself—‘Nature, be gone’—as she prepares to kill her son. The man acts according to nature when he follows his appetite, the woman has to be denatured. Also, despite her villainy, the Queen follows Cloris of The Amorous Prince in making the feminine point, that love exists most happily in the pastoral world without honour and rank, ‘In shadie Groves... / Free from the noise, and danger of the Great’. The Queen knows the political value of femininity, as she manipulates other powerful men with her ‘sighs, and feigned tears’.
22. Behn may well have thought of a vehicle for Mary Lee while writing. Lee had just been acclaimed as Mariamne in The Empress of Morocco and the Queen of Spain in Otway’s Don Carlos, which again featured the winning combination of herself and Betterton.
23. Alfred Harbage, rev. by S. Schoenbaum, Annals of English Drama, 975–1700 (London, 1964) puts the first production of Abdelazer in about April, with Otway’s play coming after on 8 June. The next edition of 1693 took the prologue, ‘Gallants, you have so long been absent hence’, from Covent Garden Drolery.
24. See Montague Summers, ed., The Works of Aphra Behn (London, 1915), vol. 11, p. 431. The device of the child was also used by Otway in Don Carlos.
25. This is the first Behn play for which there is any financial information. See Judith Milhous, ‘The Duke’s Company’s Profits, 1675–1677’, Theatre Notebook, 32, 1978, pp. 76–88.
26. Abdelazer had two editions in Behn’s lifetime, a probable revival in 1693 and a certain one in 1695, when it was staged at Drury Lane. By then it had lost its appeal and, despite a new prologue by Colley Cibber and splendid music by Henry Purcell, it did not please. Heroic tragedies had continued, but the taste for unremitting villainy without sentiment had gone.
27. The name Emily is not sure. A Mrs Price was working at the Duke’s Theatre from 1676 to 1682, playing secondary parts. Thus Montague Summers speculates that this may have been the daughter of the actor-dancer Joseph Price, who died in 1673, a supposition born out by Price’s familiarity with the theatre and theatre gossip. A later actress called Elizabeth Price is sometimes confused with Emily, but Elizabeth started at the United Company only in 1685 or 1686; she was famous for being seduced by Etherege and by her efforts to have herself accepted as Countess of Banbury. The possible connection of Mrs Price and Warcup is made by Galbraith M. Crump in Poems on Affairs of State, vol. 4 (New Haven, 1968). Captain Warcup’s first name may be Edmund like the judge in the Popish Plot or, as Wilson speculates in Court Satires, Lenthal, p. 159.
28. ‘Verses design’d by Mrs. A Behn, to be sent to a fair Lady’ was published in Miscellany Poems upon Several Occasions (1692) with a dedication by Charles Gildon, and the other two, ‘To Mrs. Price’ and ‘Song: ’Tis not your saying that you love...’, by Samuel Briscoe in Familiar Letters of Love, Gallantry, and Several Occasions (1718), together with Tom Brown’s spurious posthumous works. See Works, vol. 1, nos 93 and 97.
29. Dorchester seems likely because of the confluence of rivers. There is, however, a very tenuous link between Behn and Glympton in Oxfordshire through her involvement in the manuscript ‘Astrea’s Booke’ which bore the Busby bookplate; the family lived at Glympton. Since Lenthal Warcup, the man tentatively labelled Emily Price’s father, was from Oxford, it is conceivable that Emily Price and Behn had both been near Oxford together for a while. This is the more likely if one speculates that the Duke’s Company may have been visiting Oxford. The London Stage records only visits of the King’s Company in summer 1674, however.
30. The letter appears with the two poems in Familiar Letters of Love, Gallantry, and Several Occasions. Briscoe is known to have published spurious letters of Charles Sedley and the Duke of Buckingham, and the Behn work may also be so, but I have included mention of it because it may have genuine passages or be some pointer to what contemporaries believed to be her emotional life. The remarks about the attacks on the plagiarism of Abdelazer seem typical of Behn, who always defended her borrowings. At the same time Briscoe might have taken them from Gildon, who had revised Langbaine as The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatic Poets in 1698; in this there was much attention to Behn’s plagiarisms.
Chapter 15
1. These letters were published without a superscription in Familiar Letters: Written by the Right Honourable John Late Earl of Rochester... with Letters Written by the Most Ingenious Mr. Thomas Otway (1697). The recipient was given as Barry only in 1713 after her death. Tom Brown’s involvement does not inspire entire confidence in the genuineness of the letters.
2. As the strongest and most assertive actress of the period, Elizabeth Barry was constantly mocked and called a whore. Tom Brown’s opinion is characteristic: ‘should you ly with her all Night, She would not know you the next Morning, unless you had another five Pound at her Service.’
3. Rochester, Letters, p. 174. Nell Gwyn urged Savile to write to Rochester.
4. Rochester, Letters, p. 172.
5. Rochester, Letters, p. 180.
6. The birth delighted satirists: Rochester was described as fathering ‘a cheddar child as his own brood, / And had he lived to Hesty’s fifteen year, / He’d fucked his girl t’have been a grandfather’ (‘Satire on Bent[in]g’ from March 1689, in Court Satires of the Restoration by John Harold Wilson (Columbus, Ohio, 1976), p. 115. Despite the ‘cheddar’ cheese remark there seems little doubt the baby was Rochester’s. Rochester did not leave her anything though he did leave £40 per year for a love child called Elizabeth Clerke, while his niece Anne Wharton at her death in 1685 left the large sum of £3000 to Hesther. Whether or not Rochester followed through with his threat to take Hesther, Barry was certainly looking after the girl later and there is some evidence she became a devoted mother. She would thus have needed a good deal of money, and some of the mercenariness of which she was accused might have derived from
this need.
7. Six years younger than Behn, Rochester was far more formally educated and he knew the classics intimately. It may have been with his help that Behn began to imitate and put into verse some of the translated classical texts of Horace. Rochester may also have introduced her to the form of the pastoral dialogue which she used for ‘Dialogue for an Entertainment at Court, between Damon and Sylvia’ and for her adaptation of Randolph’s Amyntas as The Wavering Nymph, a pastoral play which seems not to have been printed.
8. Boscobel Tracts, ed. J. Hughes (London, 1830), p. 151.
9. Preface by Robert Wolseley to Valentinian (London, 1684).
10. Rochester, Letters, p. 127.
11. The playwrights themselves were equally quarrelsome. Shadwell and Otway, for example, had begun as friends, then savagely fallen out. Otway also quarrelled with Elkanah Settle.
12. Rochester, Letters, p. 165.
13. The poem was published in Behn’s collection in 1684 entitled ‘Song To Pesibles Tune’, Works, no. 33.
14. In the late 1670s Rochester, Blount and other rakish wits formed themselves into an atheist conventicle in mockery of Dissenting conventicles. The word ‘atheist’ could indicate a doubt of orthodox Christianity, rarely a denial of any immaterial being. Often it was simply used for a wicked person. If it ever did more than exist to shock good citizens, the group would have leaned towards scepticism and the line of thought that stretched from Lucretius and the ancients to Hobbes. Behn could well have been of the company.
15. Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1991).
16. Rochester, Poems, p. 13.
17. ‘Memoirs of the Earl of Rochester’, in The Poetical Works of the Earls of Rochester, Roscommon, and Dorset, 2 vols (London, 1757), p. iv.
18. Works of Nathaniel Lee, ed. Thomas B. Stroup and Arthur L. Cooke (New Brunswick, 1954), p. 564.
19. The seventeenth century had introduced the clitoris into medical textbooks, cf. the 1668 translation of Bartholin’s Anatomy, where it is called the ‘chief seat of delight in carnal copulation’, and Thomas Gibson’s The Anatomy of Human Bodies Epitomised (1682).
20. The poem comically falls into the tradition in which female voraciousness or any concern for a woman’s pleasure causes failure in the man. Examples could come from many times and places, from the Arabian Nights or Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing or the contemporary Learn to Lye Warm by Arnot Bagot (London, 1672).
21. See Jessica Munns, ‘“But to the Touch were soft”: pleasure, power, and impotence in “The Disappointment” and “The Golden Age”’, Aphra Behn Studies, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 178–96.
22. The copytexts of this edition did not originate from Rochester’s family. Of the 61 poems, only 34 are by Rochester.
23. In A Review of the State of the English Nation III, no. 131, 2 November 1706, Defoe casually alluded to Behn as Rochester’s mistress, but there is no known supporting evidence.
24. Nat Lee, On the Death of Mrs. Behn (London, 1689).
25. See Elizabeth Walsh and Richard Jeffries, ‘The Excellent Mrs. Mary Beale’ (Inner London Education Authority, 1975) and E. Walsh, ‘Mary Beale, Paintress’, Connoisseur, 131, 1953, pp. 3–8. Montague Summers describes the portraits of Behn in The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 1, lxiii. The ‘Beale’ portrait was ascribed to Mary Beale only in 1822 when J. Fittler engraved it after a drawing by Uwins, labelling it ‘Aphra Behn. From a Picture by Mary Beale in the collection of His Grace the Duke of Buckingham. Drawn by T. Uwins. Engraved by J. Fittler’. It was produced for Stowe’s Effigies Poetae in 1824 but subsequently found its way into the 1702 edition of Behn’s Plays published by Tonson. The original portrait was bought in 1848 by J. S. Caldwell, a literary antiquarian, in whose family it remained until Captain G. H. Heath-Caldwell sold it to Miss M. V. Wakefield-Richmond, who presented it to St Hilda’s College, Oxford, in 1989.
26. The notion comes from Ned Ward’s London Spy (1698; London, 1955), p. 119, where the narrator describes the deserted Dorset Garden open to pillage by those who would sell the pictures of the poets ‘to some upholsterer for Roman Emperors’. The mention of Wright is in Walpole Society. Vertue Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 43. The ‘Lely’ portrait was later owned by Philip H. Howard of Corby Castle, who lent it to the South Kensington National Portrait Exhibition in 1866. It is now owned by Arthur Schlechter of New York, whose ancestor bought it through Colnaghi’s in May 1888. There is no mention of Wright in Behn’s life—unless the scrawl in Colepeper’s ‘Adversaria’ can be read so, in which case Wright would be her brother-in-law. The speculation seems unlikely.
27. ‘Lely on animated Canvas stole / The sleepy Eye that spoke the melting soul’, Alexander Pope, ‘1st Epistle of the 2nd Book of Horace’, 11. 149–50.
28. A possible candidate is the sketch made on 21 May 1873 by Sir George Scharf, first director of the National Portrait Gallery. It was taken from an oval painting of about 2 feet square, now not known (T.S.B. XIX, p. 4) and was intended for the trustees who were considering acquiring the painting from Edward Parsons. The Scharf sketch is consistent with the Lely (and later Riley) image although it gives its subject a fuller and more pursed mouth and fuller and darker hair, part hanging over her right shoulder. The hair is described as intensely rich brown, where Lely’s sitter has lighter, more reddish hair; unlike in the Lely and Riley pictures, it has no ornaments. Scharf declared the painting had brown shadow and greenish tints and was ‘in the style of Closterman’. Closterman was the assistant of Riley and so the portrait Scharf saw might have been a version of the Riley one, but it could also be the missing Greenhill.
29. Works, vol. 1, no. 15. Behn’s lines were used for the epitaph on Greenhill’s tomb.
30. See Henry Reynolds’ translation of 1628 which omitted the phrase ‘that which pleases is permitted’, Aminta Englisht, ed. C. Davidson (Fennimore, Wisc., 1972), p. 67, n. 26.
31. Often Dryden treated the Golden Age in a quite different way. In his translation of Virgil’s fourth eclogue in his Miscellany Poems he uses imagery of the Golden Age and peace, already employed in Astrea Redux. Here the Golden Age, although it erases kings and priests as well as discord, still stands for the status quo against civil strife and Whiggish liberty.
32. See, for example, Nathaniel Johnston, The Excellency of Monarchical Government, Especially of the English Monarchy... (London, 1686). His radical opinion that all are totally subject to the prince led to a kind of sex equality outside the Golden Age, when he asks why, if the King is not allowed to be absolute, anyone, including ‘Women and Children, Madmen and Fools’, should be excluded from authority.
33. Works, vol. 1, no. 12.
34. ‘The Female Laureat’, Dyce MS, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
35. Thomas Carte, An History of the Life of James, Duke of Ormond (1736; Oxford, 1851), vol. IV, p. 526.
36. Behn had little contact with Ireland, but she may have been brought to know those who had through a fellow dramatist (and political agitator) Henry Nevil Payne. Payne had made trouble there in a previous administration or, in the words of a scurrilous account (1680), ‘spawn’d abundance of Poyson, whence venemous Beasts have grown in such plenty, that St. Patrick’s Miracle [casting snakes out of Ireland] is become a mere Fiction’. Behn was probably commissioned to write her poem, or she might have offered it to a witty and self-indulgent man of the sort she liked, expecting a suitable response.
37. Elizabeth Taylor’s progress sounds rather like that of Lady Fancy in Behn’s later play Sir Patient Fancy.
38. In The New Atalantis, ed. Ros Ballaster (London, 1991), Delarivier Manley called ‘Olinda’, who may be Elizabeth Taylor, ‘the wittiest lady of the age... She had... the face of a wit, much sprightliness and but little beauty’, p. 260 and n. 512.
39. ‘A Satyr Ignis Ignibus extinguitur’, Dyce MS, Victoria and Albert Museum.
40. Ephelia’s beloved appears to have been a J. G. and the affair to have followed the much traced
road: the man loves, the woman returns love, conceals nothing, he loses interest, she increases hers. Another object might have been the ‘Philocles’ of Behn’s ‘Cabal’, the temporary beloved of Elizabeth Barry. Ephelia tried to tie him to her in one of those intense platonic relationships that Katherine Philips was so famous for depicting in her poetry: ‘In a strict League, together we’l combine. / And Friendship’s bright Example shine. / We will forget the Difference of Sex,’ Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-century Women’s Verse, eds G. Greer, S. Hastings, J. Medoff and M. Sanson (London, 1988), p. 283. As with Behn, however, so with Ephelia, there are problems in assuming amorous autobiography from a series of texts that play with conventional roles.
41. The main speculation comes from ‘A Familiar Epistle to Julian’, where ‘Poor George’s Muse’ hoarsely ‘sang Ephelia’s Lamentation’. The Ephelia poems may refer to Mulgrave’s affair with Mall Kirke, a Maid of Honour to Mary, Duchess of York, or to that with Carey Frazier, a Maid of Honour to Queen Catherine, and an occasional, rather implausible claimant for the identity of Ephelia. Alternatively, many hands might be at work in the poems, including Behn’s. One possible allusion to Ephelia comes from a commendatory poem to Behn’s Lycidus (1688) which describes ‘Sappho’ as ‘weak and poor’ and wearing ‘At second hand... russet Laurels’. This is, however, a late reference if Ephelia did in fact die in the early 1680s and any dubious female poet tended to be called Sappho. The adaptation of Ephelia’s poem ‘The Twin Flame’, by Monmouth attests to her fame through MS circulation. See Sajed Chowdhury, ‘A Newly Discovered Manuscript Adaptation of Ephelia’s “The Twin Flame”,’ ‘Archives, circulation...’, June 29, 2016. For further discussion, see Poems by Ephelia, facsimile, ed. Maureen E. Mulvihill (New York, 1993) and Germaine Greer’s response in TLS, 25 June 1993, pp. 7–8 and Women’s Writing, vol. 2, no. 3, 1995, pp. 309–11.