by Janet Todd
42. Gould, Satyrical Epistle (1691). If she is the author of the prologue to the single play ascribed to her, ‘The Pair-Royal of Coxcombs’, acted only at a dancing-school, Ephelia tried to separate herself from the professionals, declaring she composed only to amuse her friends, that women’s work was too lowly to expect male attention, and that any faults should be laid to her sex. Behn was long past this sort of thing. Ephelia clearly admired Behn, whose career allowed Ephelia to claim that a woman writing a play was not common, ‘though it be not rare’.
43. Rochester, Poems, p. 83.
44. The Poetess A Satyr (London, 1707) p. 3.
Chapter 16
1. Rochester’s letters almost seem to deny the ascription of ‘Session of the Poets’ but it remains significant that they do not quite do so.
2. Burnet, History of His Own Time, vol. II, p. 290. The opponent was the Earl of Shaftesbury. Paula Backscheider thinks the ‘black Ace’ may be a reference to Oroonoko, whose story Behn may already have been telling. See Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore, 1993), p. 93. Behn herself as ‘Astrea’ may have appeared as judge rather than judged in ‘A Supplement to the Session of the Ladyes’, Dyce MS, which featured such ladies as the scandalous Countess of Sussex, daughter of Charles II and Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland. It is appropriate that, at the end, Astrea gives Adonis to ‘wrinkl’d brow’d Venus’.
3. Just possibly there is another allusion to Behn in ‘In defence of Satyr’, sometimes attributed to Sir Car Scrope. This praises the theatre of Shakespeare, Jonson and Fletcher for satirising people and damning the age by ridiculing vice. Now the lust for money, place, fame and women is so great that the stage has no impact and there is no purpose for the moral Muse in drama. Considering Behn’s expressed opinion at this time, that the stage is merely for amusement and has no moral role, there may be an oblique allusion to her in the following lines: ‘The World’s a Wood, in which all loose their way, / Though by a diff’rent Path, each goes Astray.’
4. The fop as a stock character appeared in the 1660s, with James Howard’s The English Monsieur (1663) and Robert Howard’s tragicomedy The Surprisal (1662). He had only slowly caught on. To some extent the depiction was influenced by the French dramatist, Molière.
5. This scene is based on Wilkins’s degradation of his hero Scarborow, who falls a great deal further than Bellmour. In Venice Preserv’d (1682) Otway will, with his brothel scene, make a devastating comment on erotic politics.
6. Behn does, however, add remarks about the inadvisability of cousin marriages. Perhaps she remembered the disastrous union of Isabella Sidney and Lord Strangford.
7. In The First English Actresses (Cambridge, 1992) Elizabeth Howe considers this role likely since Currer had just played the similar one of Betty Frisque in Crowne’s The Country Wit.
8. ‘A Satyr on the Players’ makes Currer a prostitute who is advised to return to Ireland since her going-rate in London has fallen so low.
9. The Town-Fopp was reprinted in 1699 and may have been played in the season of 1698–9. Probably its reprinting owed more to the sudden fame of Behn, attendant on the success of Southerne’s Oroonoko, than to its merits. At the same time a new type of tragicomedy was coming into fashion in the late 1690s and The Town-Fopp might just have been more appropriate for the end of the seventeenth century than it was for the libertine 1670s.
10. A Comparison Between the Two Stages, p. 11.
11. The ascription to Behn rests primarily on an anonymous seventeenth-century addition to a copy of the play in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, once owned by John Philip Kemble: ‘Altered by Mrs. Behn from R. Brome’s Mad Couple Well-Match’. Montague Summers did not include the play in his edition of 1915 but considered ‘it is no doubt from her’. In The Debauchee names resemble those in Brome and the two plays are far closer than anything Behn acknowledged, which may be one reason why it remained anonymous. See Richard Brome, Five New Playes (London, 1653).
12. The prologue was signed E. R. which some critics have supposed to be Rochester, but Ravenscroft seems more likely.
13. According to The London Stage, in about May 1677 a play called A Midnight Intrigue was acted which might be an early version of the later Behn play, The Feign’d Curtizans, but there is no copy surviving. There seems, however, no compelling reason for the identification and Behn herself warned against ascribing works to her when, in the preface to The Luckey Chance, she claimed she had been charged ‘with all the Plays that have ever been offensive; though I wish with all their Faults I had been the Author of some of those they have honour’d me with’. For a discussion of A Midnight’s Intrigue, see Mary Ann O’Donnell, Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography, New York, 1986, p. 46.
14. In Some Account of the English Stage, John Genest attributes The Counterfeit Bridegroom to Behn. It has also been attributed to Betterton, although Judith Milhous points out that the cast list does not include him and he was not in the habit of adapting plays in which he did not act, ‘Thomas Betterton’s Playwriting’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, vol. 77, Summer 1974, p. 375.
15. Behn probably worked from a copy Killigrew gave her. The one in Columbia University Library may well have been Behn’s since her name is on each of the title pages. A few marks indicate an attentive reader.
16. See Jacques Georges de Chauffepié, Nouveau dictionnaire historique et critique, 4 vols (Amsterdam, 1750–6), vol. I, pp. 187–93. The recollection comes through the actor John Bowman.
17. Contemporary gossip associated the hero with the Duke of Monmouth because he was loved by two women. Edward Ravenscroft made his hero of The Careless Lovers regard virtue and reputation as ‘Bugg-Words’ for women and told the audience, ‘I can no more endure a Wife, than a standing Dish of Meat.’ Some people remained uneasy at the Restoration theatrical rake. When the morality of his Evening’s Love (1668) had been queried, Dryden justified the creation of debauched but attractive heroes by the fact that he married them off at the end. He did not ‘make... vicious persons happy, but only as Heaven makes sinners so; that is, by reclaiming them from vice. For so ’tis to be suppos’d they are, when they resolve to marry.’
18. PRO Sp 44/5, ‘Warrent Book’.
19. There might be an allusion to the present in the loyal Cavalier mercenaries, the guileless Belvile and Willmore. Throughout the Interregnum and Restoration, English men served in regiments abroad—as Scot and Bampfield had done when Behn was in Antwerp. In 1668, Charles II tried to bring them under royal control, insisting they be kept together in regiments which would be available to the King if necessary. In the 1670s the opposition saw these forces as a Royalist army abroad outside Parliament’s control. Later some troops in France were recalled, then disbanded without support, see Thomas Otway’s The Souldiers Fortune (1680).
20. Killigrew had written many pieces before the Restoration, but only four had ever been publicly staged.
21. Greer argues that Killigrew’s claim that Thomaso was written in Madrid was ‘almost certainly false’ (Slip-Shod Sybils, p. 206). The description may be calling on Venice, which Killigrew certainly visited.
22. Blunt is a stock comic figure like Haunce in The Dutch Lover. Lucetta is the name of the character in the original Thomaso but Behn may have taken the name ‘Blunt’ from an early play of Robert Howard, The Committee (1662). Howard’s Blunt is a Royalist who has lost his estates, where Behn’s is more politically ambiguous since he seems to have remained rich.
23. In general, Behn broke up the expository speeches, keeping the substance but adding drama. For example, in the first Act where the situation of Angellica has to be conveyed, Thomaso has the following speech by one man:
Know then, since the Generals death she is exposed to sale; Her price and Picture hangs upon the door, where she sits in publick view drest like Aurora, and breaks like the day from her window; She is now the subject of all the Love and Envy of the Town; ’t
is sport to hear the Men sigh for, and the Women rail at her. And if Don Pedro be a Lover still, there is no need of Fayries, old Women, or Confessors, to deliver or return a Message; Now ’tis but so much a Moneth, and you are Patron; four dayes and nights in the week are yours.
In The Rover this becomes the interchange:
FREDERICK: ’Tis pretty to see with how much Love the Men regard her, and how much Envy the Women.
WILLMORE: What Gallants has she?
BELVILLE: None, she’s expos’d to Sale, and Four days in the Week she’s yours—for so much a Month.
24. At the end of Thomaso Part II the hero rounds on the prostitute, labelling her ‘a common Whore’.
25. See, for example, Dryden’s Tyrannick Love (1669) and Amboyna (1672), and Nahum Tate’s version of King Lear (1681). It has to be remembered that all is representation and suggestion and no rape is actually enacted on the Restoration stage. Also, the physiological views of the time involved women very thoroughly in the sex act, holding, for example, that impregnation implied consent, since it could not occur without pleasure.
26. William Wycherley, The Gentleman Dancing Master (1672).
27. In her cross-dressing, Hellena echoes Hillaria of Ravenscroft’s The Careless Lovers. Both go on a ‘frolic’ and are spurred to action through hearing themselves being scorned by their intended lovers. In breeches Hellena defeats Angellica, imparting information that makes her a more desirable match and so destroys the romance on which her rival sets such store.
28. ‘On Three Late Marriages’, BL Harleian MS 6913, p. 345. A good actress would get about 30 to 40 shillings though Barry seems to have managed 50 shillings. Thomas Betterton received £5.
29. Milhous, ‘Duke’s Company’s Profits’, p. 81.
30. For her two acknowledged plays of 1677, Abdelazer and The Town-Fopp, Behn had used the publishers Magnes and Bentley. But with The Rover, probably fearing the charges of plagiarism and wanting to keep her authorship secret, she chose again John Amery with whom she was not publicly associated and who had brought out only the anonymous Debauchee. Like his associate Thomas Dring, whom Behn had used for her second play The Amorous Prince, Amery was, among other things, a publisher of law books and probably known to her lawyer friends.
31. If she had had any hand in the updating of The Debauchee, Behn may recently have read The Novella since it followed A Mad Couple well Match’d in the 1653 edition of Brome.
32. In the epistle to The Dutch Lover, Behn declared she had not ‘hung a sign’ out for pedantic seriousness but for ‘comedy’. In the eighteenth century, the writer and critic Richard Steele made identification more literal. Using The Rover as an example, he remarked that ‘the Men-Authors draw themselves in their Chief Characters, and the Women-Writers may be allowed the same Liberty,’ Spectator, 51, 28 April 1711.
33. Possibly Amery let the secret out, which might explain why, although he had done a careful job with the printing of The Rover, Behn did not use him again.
34. The phrase is from Samuel Johnson’s life of Otway, Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), vol. I, p. 242.
35. Unfortunately James’s daughter, later Queen Mary II, did not feel the same about The Rover. In November 1690, the United Company had decided to celebrate William III’s first birthday as king with a performance of The Rover accompanied by a consort of music. Colley Cibber, the actor and critic, was present. He praised Mountfort, Smith’s successor as Willmore, but was hard on the author of the play:
The agreeable was so natural to him, that even in that dissolute Character of The Rover he seem’d to wash off the Guilt from Vice, and gave it Charms and Merit. For tho’ it may be a Reproach to the Poet to draw such Characters not only unpunish’d but rewarded, the Actor may still be allow’d his due Praise in his excellent Performance. And this is a Distinction which, when this Comedy was acted at Whitehall, King William’s Queen Mary was pleas’d to make in favour of Monfort, notwithstanding her Disapprobation of the Play. An Apology (1740).
Chapter 17
1. Rochester, Letters, p. 134.
2. William, a ‘prince of many virtues’ (Sir William Temple), was a posthumous child of enormous political importance as the inheritor of the Orange dignities. Through the following years the marriage of William and Mary would prove surprisingly close and the pair became a force to be reckoned with.
3. Henry IV Part II, the ‘Induction’, ll. 18–19.
4. Prologue to Theodosius (1680).
5. Works, vol. 3, p. 213.
6. Caesar Borgia (1679) and Lucius Junius Brutus (1680).
7. John Wilcox in The Relation of Molière to Restoration Comedy (New York, 1938) wrote that the play was ‘a very interesting example of the manufacture of an amusing, thoroughly British farce from one of Molière’s great comedies of character’, p. 146. Claire Bowditch persuasively suggested Wright’s translation as Behn’s source in a paper given at the Aphra Behn conference, University of Huelva, 5–7 October 2016..
8. In particular, Behn must have been reading or have recently seen Volpone. There was a reference to it in Blunt’s threat of revenge on women in The Rover, while in Act V of Sir Patient Fancy, Wittmore quotes the opening lines, ‘Good morning to the day; and next my gold; / Open the shrine that I may see my saint.’
9. Works, vol. 6, pp. 34 and 50.
10. Les Femmes savantes was adapted in 1693 by Thomas Wright who was, in the early eighteenth century, reputed to own the portrait of Behn by Lely.
11. In Lady Knowell, there may be some comment on the famous bluestocking, the scientific and literary Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who had recently died. Dorothy Osborne thought her quite demented; Behn never wrote directly about her.
12. Appropriately Sir Credulous is persuaded to act out a dumb ambassador in signs, while his watch becomes a ‘Hieroglyphick’.
13. There was much satire on the puritanical Sir Patience Ward, including one by a lady who was arraigned for her remarks. It is just possible that this was Aphra Behn, though the stance sounds rather different.
14. In Sir Patient, the Puritan habit of assigning a cause to all accidents is pronounced: he intends to blame his impending death on a visit of Lady Knowell, ‘if I die I’ll swear she’s my Murderer.’ The ‘ignorant Rabble’ believe that all ills are due to the malice of foreigners.
15. Sir Patient claims his daughter ‘understands more Wickedness than had she been bred in a profane Nunnery, a Court or a Play-house’.
16. Works, vol. 6, p. 9.
17. Works, vol. 6, p. 48.
18. In the dominating, unfaithful, but unadventurous and unscheming Wittmore, Behn may be putting something of John Hoyle. When Wittmore has to assume an identity, he chooses to be the son of a Parliamentarian from Yorkshire; Hoyle’s father had been a Yorkshire alderman.
19. In this play wit too is a disguising of language and, in the end, the deceit of the Tory does not seem so different from that of the Whig. On the one hand Sir Patient, fearing his daughter Isabella’s reputation ‘ruined’, immediately translates ruin into the need for a double marriage portion. On the other, Lodwick is called a man of ‘honour’ only after he has falsely copulated with Lady Fancy but hidden it from the world.
20. There is a description of the exchanging of bodies in beds in the comic Antwerp letters ascribed to Behn, but there the result had been a foiling of improper desires, a bringing together of husband and wife. The same effect occurred in The Debauchee, where husband and wife, seducer and seducee, are joined.
21. Works, vol. 6, pp. 75 and 76.
22. Pope Joan was also regarded as the originator of female insubordination, as the satiric The Parliament of Women: Or, A Compleat History Of the Proceedings and Debates, Of a particular Junto, of Ladies and Gentlewomen, With a design to alter the Government of the World (1684) makes clear. In December 1679, the anonymous History of Pope Joan; or, a Discovery of the Debaucheries and Villanies of the Popish Faction was acted at a school in Cann
on Street and, in May of the following year, Settle put on his violent The Female Prelate, or the History of the life and Death of Pope Joan at the King’s Theatre. It is possible that there is also a reference to a poet called ‘Joan’, perhaps ‘Ephelia’.
23. Using a picture of Nell Gwyn speaking the epilogue to Sir Patient Fancy, Angeline Goreau posits Gwyn’s involvement in Behn’s play; see Reconstructing Aphra, pp. 134–5. In The Playhouse of Pepys (1935), Montague Summers reprints the picture and notes that it was first published in 1779. He rightly considers it an imaginary portrait. Since the same name is given for the actress of Lady Knowell as for the speaker of the epilogue, it seems most likely that this actress also spoke the epilogue.
24. Works, vol. 6, p. 79.
25. Cf. Sylvia’s Complaint of her Sex’s Unhappiness (London 1688): ‘They fear their empire would decay; / For they know women heretofore / Gained victories, and envied laurels wore.’ This text refers to the usual female icons, Amazons, Joan of Arc, Sappho and the various heroines of romance.
26. Betty Currer had also acted in The Counterfeit Bridegroom, which may in part be by Behn, although it was never openly acknowledged.
27. Ormonde HMC, New Series 1906, IV, 90; Henri Forneron, Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth (London, 1887), pp. 197–8. The Duchess of Mazarine, one of the nieces of Cardinal Mazarin, had been regarded as too good to be offered as a wife for Charles II in exile. But now, as a woman running from an allegedly tyrannical husband, she was pleased to become the King’s mistress and to receive a pension from him.