Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  28. In fact men were equally attacked for bawdry, but the main attacks on Behn’s friends Otway and Ravenscroft came just after Sir Patient Fancy, when they staged Friendship in Fashion, The Souldiers Fortune and The London Cuckolds. In the epistle dedicatory to The Souldiers Fortune, Otway quotes a ‘Lady’ exclaiming of his play ‘’tis so filthy, so bawdy, no modest Woman ought to be seen at it.’

  29. Robert Gould, Love Giv’n O’re, in Satires on Women, Augustan Reprints (Los Angeles, 1976).

  30. Epistle dedicatory to The Souldiers Fortune (1681).

  Chapter 18

  1. Burnet held a common view that Catholics had a prior allegiance to the Pope in Rome and could not be good subjects and citizens.

  2. Love-Letters, Works, vol. 2, p. 264.

  3. Titus Oates’s own account was published on Parliament’s order as A True Narrative of the Horrid Plot and Conspiracy of the Popish Party against the Life of His Sacred Majesty, the Government and the Protestant Religion.

  4. For a modern discussion of the murder, see Stephen Knight, The Killing of Justice Godfrey (London, 1984).

  5. See A True Narrative and Discovery Of several very Remarkable Passages Relating to the Horrid Popish Plot (1679).

  6. Rochester, Letters, p. 220.

  7. Works, vol. 1, no. 66.

  8. See Intrigues of the Popish Plot laid open (1685) by William Smith.

  9. Rochester, Letters, p. 200.

  10. Lampoons described Mazarine’s ladies, including Sussex, as ‘Whores of honour’. According to one, the second daughter of Lord Willoughby brought ‘Mazarin to bed’. This might mean that she acted as a midwife or possibly a lover. See Court Satires of the Restoration, ed. John Harold Wilson (Columbus, 1976), p. 27.

  11. Prologue to The Feign’d Curtizans, Works, vol. 6. Dryden elaborated on the point in his dedication of The Kind Keeper: ‘The Great Plot of the Nation, like one of Pharaoh’s lean Kine, has devour’d its younger Brethren of the Stage.’

  12. Behn may have written ‘Tory doggerell’ anonymously. Ephelia published verses on the Popish Plot in the middle of the Titus Oates furore.

  13. Works, vol. 1, no. 82.

  14. On the other side, Shadwell turned Timon of Athens to Whig use.

  15. The Feign’d Curtizans was licensed for printing on 27 March.

  16. Works, vol. 6, p. 103.

  17. Works, vol. 6, p. 103. Cornelia and Galliard talk often in trading terms. Her body is sound goods which will ‘not lie long upon my hands’, while he is ‘as staple a commodity as any’s in the nation’. Marriage is an adventure whose participants ‘are fools, and the returning cargo, that dead commodity called a Wife’.

  18. The final woman of the trio of ‘courtesans’ is Laura Lucretia who simply has a horror of being a wife, ‘That unconcern’d domestick Necessary, / Who rarely brings a Heart, or takes it soon away’. Laura not only doubles as La Silvianetta but also, for a heady moment, as a sort of young androgynous nobleman. She enjoys the resulting eroticism when she is taken by Galliard for a young ‘boy’: ‘Pressing my willing Bosom to his Breast, / Kissing my Cheek, calling me lovely Youth’. The homosexual theme may be continued in the trickster Petro who claims he will set up with a small harlot of his own. Possibly he is contemplating pimping for a real whore or he may be considering becoming a male prostitute himself.

  19. Behn enjoyed the word ‘conventicle’, a Dissenting meeting place, which allowed the derivative ‘Conventicling’ in the prologue to The False Count. The words and play also informed the name Tickletext.

  20. See Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1990).

  21. Works, vol. 6, pp. 131–2.

  22. Works, vol. 6, p. 89.

  23. Since the prologue was spoken by Currer, the confession that her own principles of religion were the same as the cully’s in the play, that is Protestant, should refer to her rather than the playwright, but it may do for both. The extra ambiguity comes from the fact that the ‘cully’, Sir Signal Buffoon, is too stupid to have any real principles at all.

  24. ‘The Dutchess of Mazarine understands poysoning, as well as her Sister; and a little Vial, when the King comes there, will do it,’ one plotter is alleged to have said. See The Examination of Edward Fitz-Harris, Relating to the Popish Plot (March 1681).

  25. See Thomas Duffett, The Spanish Rogue (1673). Nell Gwyn did appeal to women poets, however, and at about the same time ‘Ephelia’ wrote a panegyric praising not only Nell’s beauty and honour but also her ‘wealth’. Since Nell Gwyn was having money troubles at the time, albeit on a grand scale, this cannot have been a very welcome tribute.

  26. For a contrary view of the dedication as parodic, see Deborah Payne, ‘“And Poets shall by Patron-Princes Live”: Aphra Behn and Patronage’, in Mary Ann Schofield and Cecilia Macheski eds, Curtain Calls: British and American Women Writers and the Theater 1688–1820 (Athens, Ohio, 1991), pp. 105–19.

  27. Johnson’s main attack is on Dryden in his ‘Dryden’ in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets. Elsewhere Johnson classed Behn with the despised D’Urfey as a playwright. In his ‘Prologue for the Opening of Drury Lane’, he wrote, ‘Perhaps if skill could distant times explore, / New Behns, new D’Urfeys, yet remain in store.’

  Chapter 19

  1. ‘Upon these and other Excellent Works of the Incomparable Astrea’ in Poems upon Several Occasions (1684).

  2. Payne was said to have a daughter who ‘was like to turn Whore’, a lady who later received the King’s bounty; so his courtly ties may have been close.

  3. Willard Thorp, ‘Henry Nevil Payne, Dramatist and Jacobite Conspirator’, The Parrott Presentation Volume, ed. Hardin Craig (Princeton, 1935), p. 363.

  4. Burnet, History of His Own Time, vol. II, p. 234.

  5. Cellier had been genuinely shocked by the heinous treatment of Catholics in prison—she claimed to have seen a woman in labour tortured and a man forced to drink his own urine—and she had become the main dispenser of Catholic largesse from the lords in the Tower.

  6. Malice Defeated, p. 45, and The Matchless Picaro; A Short Essay of the Fortune and Virtues of Seignior Don Tomaso Ganderfieldo, alias Francisco De Corombona. Burnet called Dangerfield a ‘profligate liar’, History of His Own Time, vol. II, p. 234. See also Maurice Petherick, Restoration Rogues (London, 1951).

  7. Mr. Tho. Dangerfeilds [sic] Particular Narrative of the Late Popish Design (London, 1679), p. 12.

  8. See R. Mansell, An Exact and True Narrative of the Late Popish Intrigue to Form a Plot and Then to cast the Guilt and Odium Thereof Upon the Protestants (London, 1680).

  9. Works, vol. 3, pp. 4–5.

  10. The ‘fine’ man was disguised in a Turkish turban, and readers of the roguish autobiography Don Tomazo would have noted that Dangerfield also wore a turban. It is mentioned that the name in the story is a pseudonym; Dangerfield went by many names, including Willoughby.

  11. Part of Dangerfield’s reputation for roguery comes from the highly entertaining picaresque novella, Don Tomazo, purporting to be by Dangerfield and detailing his long involved life of counterfeiting and trickery. Given that he was still trying to establish himself as a witness and informer, for example in such accounts as Mr. Tho. Dangerfeilds Particular Narrative, this exposé may have been written by one of his many denigrators rather than by himself, although he was a persistent self-fashioner.

  12. Father John Warner, History of English Persecution of Catholics and the Presbyterian Plot, ed. T. A. Birrell (London, 1953).

  13. See the satiric pamphlet entitled Mistris Celier’s Lamentation For the loss of her Liberty (1681) in which she compares her sufferings to those of Job: ‘I have been gaold and pillory’d and tost and tumbl’d so as never poor woman in Travel was.’

  14. Quoted in Harold Love, Scribal Publication, p. 258.

  15. It is also implied that the people’s fear of Orsames’ absolutism is superstitious non-s
ense. James, if he became king, would prove as royally as Orsames is assumed to do. One line of The Young King seems to sum up the experience of kingship of the late 1670s rather than the fictional romantic kingship Behn had imagined in the early 1660s: when Orsames, having had one taste of the wonders of kingship and been then told it was a dream, asks in his real restoration what would happen if this too should prove a dream, he is answered: ‘Sir, Dreams of Kings are much less pleasant.’

  16. The implied criticism of Charles II would have been in tune with public opinion, since many people assumed the exile implied the King’s abandonment of his brother.

  17. It remains true that the girl brought up as a boy has less trouble in adapting to life as a woman than the boy brought up passively has in becoming a man.

  18. Absalom and Achitophel, ll. 47–8, John Dryden, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford, 1987).

  19. Works, vol. 7, pp. 136 and 142.

  20. Other political comments suggest the 1660s. Possibly experience of Surinam urged Behn into depictions of a warm pastoral world which appears a kind of healing female space beside the bustle of the court. In The Young King the pastoral Urania and Lyces lament Restoration corruption where ‘Oaths are like Garlands made of finest Flowers / Wither as soon as finish’d’.

  21. Works, vol. 7, pp. 85–6.

  22. Works, vol. 7, pp. 150–1. Unusually, Behn printed the play three years after the performance. The dedicatee, Philaster, remains obscure but I have speculated with Sharon Valiant on its being Philip, Lord L’Isle, made Earl of Leicester in 1677. Now nearing sixty, he had largely eschewed politics since the Restoration, loving ‘to be at ease and not to talk of anything that related to State affairs and politics’ (Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury and Elgin. Written by himself, London, 1890). L’Isle had settled into a mansion at Sheen near Richmond in Surrey, which he made the centre of a literary circle. There he entertained Wycherley and Dryden and became a friend of Rochester and Savile. He was known as a patron and, in the 1690s, Dryden dedicated Don Sebastian to him. Behn may have hoped for something handsome.

  23. If the request had come fairly early on, Behn’s excitement might have been expressed in The Feign’d Curtizans, where the two heroines are reading Ovid. Of course Behn may have begun translating independently and have been approached by Dryden when he learnt of the fact.

  24. The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, p. i. Greer notes that Anne Wharton, the poet, used the name Sappho as a term of opprobrium, Slip-Shod Sybils, p. 139.

  25. Her other ‘translations’ also differed. See, for example, her version of ‘Lydia, bella puella candida’ compared with that of other Restoration poets. Sara Heller Mendelson makes a useful comparison of Behn with Charles Cotton, see The Mental World of Stuart Women, pp. 155–6.

  26. Preface, Pindarique Odes (London, 1656). See also Poems: Miscellanies, The Mistress, Pindarique Odes, Davideis, Verses Written on Several Occasions, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge, 1905) and David Trotter, The Poetry of Abraham Cowley (London, 1979). Dryden also mocked literalists and he seems to denigrate Pindar for being somehow untranslatable.

  27. For a discussion of Behn’s translation see Elizabeth Spearing, ‘The Politics of Translation’, Aphra Behn Studies, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 154–77.

  28. In the 1681 edition Dryden moved the ‘Argument’ that had prefaced Behn’s translation over to Cooper’s. See ‘Upon these and other Excellent Works of the Incomparable Astrea’ in Poems on Several Occasions (1684).

  29. Wits Paraphras’d: Or, Paraphrase upon Paraphrase. In Burlesque on the Several Late Translators of Ovid’s Epistles (1680); ‘A Satyr on modern Translators’ in Poems on Affairs of State for the Year 1620 to the Year 1707 (London, 1716), vol. IV, p. 96.

  30. Behn probably read The Dutch Courtesan long before she revised it, since its influence may be seen in several of her plays including The Rover and The Feign’d Curtizans.

  31. This dating was suggested by Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume in ‘Dating Play Premières from Publication Data, 1660–1700’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 22 (1974), p. 391. The quotation concerns The Vintner Trick’d, a version of The Revenge in A Comparison Between the Two Stages (1702), p. 11.

  32. The Revenge has been given to both Behn and Betterton. In An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691) Langbaine claimed it had been ascribed to Behn, an ascription left by Gildon when he revised Langbaine. The author of The Comparison Between the Two Stages assigned the play to Betterton but Judith Milhous argues against his authorship in ‘Thomas Betterton’s Playwriting’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 77, Summer 1974, pp. 375–92. The Revenge was not included in the editions of Behn’s plays of 1702, 1716 and 1724 and Montague Summers omitted it from his edition of 1915.

  33. Corina can also blame the bawd Mrs Dunwell, who was implicated in her seduction.

  34. The other additions concern the ‘low’ characters. Instead of being merely a trickster like Cocledemoy, Trickewell is here a decayed squire, given justification for his hounding of Dashit by Dashit’s earlier ‘cosenin’ him of ‘an Estate of some two hundred a year’. Real lowlife is added in the episode right at the end of the play with the loyal Nan, who is trying to be hanged along with her highwayman husband, so that the two can share a coffin. Its mocking comment on marriage, especially the predatory one of the Dashits, as well as its burlesque of female loyalty, may be valid but is misplaced here, since it slows down the play which should be winding down to its multiple marriages.

  35. Charlotte Butler, daughter of a ‘decayed knight’, according to Cibber, was much mocked for her love life: ‘Fam’d Butler’s Wiles are now so common grown / That by each Feather’d Cully she is known... / ...if She’s hungry, faith I must be blunt / Sh’l for a Dish of Cutlets shew her C--t.’

  36. In this, Tryon’s opinion was not entirely out of the way since the humoral version of medicine did suggest that people largely caused their own problems. Tryon also favoured a strict regulated life in which there was no reading of plays and romances and in which women would go abroad veiled. Behn probably ignored these parts of the doctrine but may have tried abstinence from meat and alcohol for a while.

  37. See Some passages in the Life and Death of the Right Honourable John Earl of Rochester (1680). Although Burnet was summoned in late June, he did not actually go to Rochester until late July and was not present at the deathbed. The conversion was reputedly brought about by the chaplain to Rochester’s mother, Robert Parsons. See Christopher Hill, Writing and Revolution in 17th Century England (Brighton, 1985), p. 310.

  38. The Princess of Cleves (performed 1681–2). A character who may be associated with Rochester aims to convince ‘the World of the Ingenuity of my Repentance’.

  39. For an elegy that started in the same pastoral mode but ended very differently, see Flatman. He described Rochester as ‘the noblest of th’ Arcadian Swains; / Strephon the Bold, the Witty, and the Gay’, but he then ended by warning the reader to ‘Live not like Strephon, but like Strephon die’. See Poems and Songs, 4th edn (1686), pp. 173–4.

  40. The Poetical Works Of the Earls of Rochester, Roscommon, and Dorset, 2 vols (London, 1757), p. lxvi.

  41. Wharton was the second daughter of Rochester’s half-brother, the son of Sir Henry Lee. Rochester’s mother became her legal guardian and brought her up at Rochester’s home at Adderbury in Oxfordshire. See Greer, Slip-Shod Sybils, pp. 214–44.

  42. A Collection of Poems by Several Hands (London, 1693). This was the second edition of a collection first published in 1672. The poem must have been sent in manuscript to Behn.

  43. Letters between J. G. [James Granger], and many of the most eminent literary men of his time, ed. J. P. Malcolm (London, 1805).

  44. ‘To Mrs Wharton’ in The Idea of Christian Love... To which are added some Copies of VERSES from that Excellent Poetess Mrs. Wharton, with others to her (London, 1688). The identification of the author as Attwood was made by Susan Hastings.

  45. Miscellany
, Being A Collection of Poems By Several Hands (London, 1685), p. 201.

  46. After Wharton’s death a caveat was entered in the Stationers’ Register against publishing her poems and plays.

  47. Evelyn, Diary, 7 December 1680.

  48. For Evelyn’s lengthy account of Stafford’s trial, see Diary, vol. IV, pp. 225–34.

  49. Having temporarily lost the King’s favour through his stand over Exclusion, Sunderland was probably thinking more of himself than of any relative.

  50. Burnet, History of His Own Time, vol. 11, p. 264.

  51. See The Protestant Domestic Intelligencer, no. 83, 28 December 1680.

  52. Morrice, ‘Entring Booke’, p. 287. For an account of Stafford as a candidate for beatification see S.N.D., Sir William Howard Viscount Stafford (London, 1929).

  53. Works, vol. 1, no. 82.

  54. In the recent Accession Day procession the image of Christ had been desecrated by a furious Protestant mob; L’Estrange described it hurled ‘in Triumph to the Flames; and the Multitude Hoiting about it, and throwing Stones at it’. So too Behn portrayed ‘The Lord of Life, his Image rudely torn, / To Flames was by the Common-Hangman born,’ an action that resulted from the crude mindset of Puritans like Tickletext of The Feign’d Curtizans. See Observator, no. 189; Behn, Works, vol. 1, no. 81.

  Chapter 20

  1. Laura Lucretia in The Feign’d Curtizans struggles against an arranged marriage only to find herself fast within it.

  2. William Smith repeated his success as Willmore—though Betterton, for once overshadowed, dropped from the cast.

  3. Susan J. Owen reads Willmore more harshly. She sees the guise of mountebank as appropriate and argues that he hates the women he desires; his wit, she believes, fails to excuse all. See ‘Sexual politics and party polities’, Aphra Behn Studies (1996), pp. 15–29.

  4. The stories about Rochester seem attested to in Doctor Bendo’s Bill and The Famous Pathologist, or The Noble Mountebank by T. Alcock and J. Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, but the tales of counterfeiting tend to be more evident after his death than before. It would, then, be appropriate for Behn to use this aspect in a play celebrating the Rochester myth after, rather than before, his death when the first Rover was performed.