Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  5. See Graham Greene, Lord Rochester’s Monkey (London, 1974).

  6. See the account of Thomas Alcock, Rochester’s servant and fellow actor in the escapade, and the Memoirs of Count Grammont.

  7. The coupling Behn imagines for the latter echoes the comic letters she purportedly wrote from Antwerp, when she imagined herself with the gigantic Van Bruin begetting ‘A Race of Giants’ or something akin to ‘dancing Elephants’.

  8. The political satire remains general but more evident than in The Rover. Featherfool sums up religion in England: ‘as for that, Madam, we are English, a Nation I thank God, that stand as little upon Religion as any Nation under the Sun, unless it be in Contradiction; and at this time have so many amongst us, a Man knows not which to turn his Hand to.’ Having failed in his intrigues to become a Cavalier, Featherfool intends to return home, take the Covenant, and get rich.

  9. Possibly Behn was chiding Dryden for the anti-Catholicism of The Spanish Fryar, despite its overall Tory message.

  10. Fraser, King Charles II, pp. 400–7.

  11. See The Secret History of the Rye-House Plot; and of Monmouth’s Rebellion. Written by Ford, Lord Grey, in 1685. Now first published from a manuscript, sign’d by himself (London, 1754).

  12. Ephelia also went into print with ‘Advice to his Grace’ urging Monmouth to quit his pretensions and act dutifully as a son and subject.

  13. Thomas D’Urfey, dedication to Sir Barnaby Whigg (1682).

  14. Works, vol. 6, p. 303.

  15. Molière’s girls are made snobbish and insolent; otherwise one might sympathise with their horror at finding their courtship reduced ‘To the signing of the marriage contract’. There are also links between The False Count and Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin which had already been used by Otway in The Cheats of Scapin and by Ravenscroft in Scaramouch a Philosopher, Harlequin a Schoolboy (1677). In Les Fourberies de Scapin, Molière in turn took his device of a young man imagined kidnapped by Turks from a galley from Cyrano de Bergerac’s Le Pédant Joué (1654). Behn had the happy idea of making this into a fully enacted drama.

  16. In Molière, the foolish Madelon has a comic but true sense of the needs of fiction which Behn must have appreciated. When her father tells her it is time to marry and that a man is provided, she replies, ‘If everyone were like you a novel would soon reach its last page. A nice thing it would be if Cyrus married Mandane in the first chapter, and Aronce was married to Clelie as a matter of course!’ The reference is to Mlle de Scudéry’s romances. Don Juan and Other Plays, trans. George Graveley and Ian Maclean (Oxford, 1989), p. 7. Madelon also yearns for evenings with writers and wits, as Behn must once have done.

  17. Despite his habitual impotence, his fear of castration persuades Francisco he does not deserve a ‘young Wife’, while Isabella learns the insatiable nature of her social ambition—she abandons her ‘viscount’ in the hope of being ravished by a sultan. Father and daughter are reduced at the end to a willing cuckold and a chimneysweeper’s wife.

  18. Dedication to The Roundheads, Works, vol. 6, pp. 361–3.

  19. Isabella of The False Count derives a little from Molière’s Madelon of Les Précieuses ridicules, who struggles to teach her maid to express herself less vulgarly. The upwardly tending Lady Lambert of The Roundheads will make similar efforts with her servants.

  20. Other playwrights were making a similar point in tragedy where the entanglements of sex and power tended to fall into sado-masochism. See especially Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (1682). Behn’s political topicality included reference to Stephen College, the ‘Protestant Joiner’, recently hanged by Charles II; in The Roundheads, the ‘Joyner’ invokes the Law.

  21. See The present state of England, and The Riddle of the Roundhead. An Excellent New Ballad... The ‘game’ of 1641 was declared to be beginning all over again while Poor Robin’s Dream of the same year has people searching for ‘downright Rumpers’.

  22. One character Desbro (Colonel John Desborough), Cromwell’s brother in-law, survived the Restoration. He had not been a regicide. He was mentioned in Scot’s and Behn’s letters during her period in Antwerp.

  23. Tatham’s argument sums it up:

  Fleetwood is fool’d by LAMBERT to consent

  To th’pulling out of the RUMP PARLIAMENT;

  Which done, another GOVERNMENT they frame

  In EMBRYO, that wants MATTER for a name,

  In brief, by force, FOOLS supplant crafty men,

  The bauble exits, enter KNAVES again.

  24. In reality, the crown jewels were less reverentially treated. They were lent to actors for example and in 1671 Colonel Blood tried to steal them from the Tower: in the struggle the great pearl and diamond fell off, the former later found by a poor sweeping woman and the latter by a barber’s apprentice.

  25. Burnet, History of His Own Time, vol. 1, p. 290. Hugh Peters was the object of much mockery in the Oxford Cavalier newspaper, Mercurius Anglicanus. He advocated the killing of Charles I and was executed by Charles II in October 1660. The Tales and Jests of Mr Hugh Peters contained traditional anecdotes said to illustrate his lasciviousness.

  26. For an example of women’s role, see The Royale Virgin; Or, The Declaration of Several Maydens in and about the once Honourable City of London. Women participated very little in any political riots of the late 1670s and 1680s, although many were accused of expressing anti-Stuart sentiments and some joined food riots. The female council or Parliament of women was a satiric genre which had been much used in the Civil War period e.g. The Parliament of Ladies (1647).

  27. Cf. The Life and Death of Mistress Rump (1660) and Mistress Rump brought to bed of a Monster (1660). They were revisions of earlier works from 1648 e.g. Mistris Parliament presented in her bed.

  28. Works, vol. 6, pp. 403–4; vol. 1, no. 48.

  29. In the Interregnum and Restoration Margaret Cavendish had accepted that poets should help create a nation and support an absolute monarchy by presenting images of heroism. Behn never quite reached this position but she was coming closer to Cavendish in her realisation of the political usefulness of imaginative writing.

  30. See the dedication to Shaftesbury of Rome’s Follies (1681).

  31. Works, vol. 1, no. 20. Like Father, Like Son was a revision of Thomas Randolph’s Jealous Lovers from the 1640s. The prologue and epilogue appeared as a broadside. In the performance, the political epilogue had been spoken by Jevon and the prologue by Charlotte Butler. The latter provided yet another image for the decimation of the theatre through political conflict: it was like the poor Anglican church buffeted by sects.

  32. The play is dated with reference to the Whigs’ failure to hold a political feast on 21 April, a non-event mentioned in the prologue.

  33. In character, Sir Timothy seems closest to the alderman Sir Thomas Player. In September 1679 he had had a great crowd of followers when he addressed the Lord Mayor on the subject of the encouragement which the papist James inevitably gave to the Popish Plot. He sparked off a pamphlet war on the subject and helped to bring about the exile of the Duke of York. See An Account of the Proceedings at the Guild-hall of the City of London On Saturday, September 13. 1679. Ward, as a firm supporter of the Exclusion of the Duke of York—he had been the mover of the first Exclusion Bill—was the very type Behn publicly despised. In The City-Heiress, Sir Timothy is further trounced vicariously when his Puritan mistress, Sensure, leaps from his bed, scattering Baxter’s Protestant sermons, and mistakenly dons his robe; she is beaten by Royalists in his place.

  34. Works, vol. 7, pp. 51–2.

  35. Works, vol. 7, pp. 31 and 51.

  36. Works, vol. 7, pp. 53–4.

  37. A bizarre homoerotic relationship of uncle and nephew, based on Massinger’s The Guardian, provides this context: the older man wants the younger to stand in for him, to be forthright, lusty, and pushy like his ideal of himself. The young nephew, formally courteous when sober, becomes a rakehell when drunk, and tries to do the deeds for which hi
s leering uncle yearns. An attempted rape of Lady Galliard is part of this scenario.

  38. Tonson brought out Otway’s prologue and the epilogue separately as well. Brown was also the publisher of The Young King. For a listing of Behn’s publishers, see Crompton, ‘Forced to write for bread’, Appendix 2.

  Chapter 21

  1. Even Dryden touched on Behn’s success in his epilogue to Charles Saunders’ play, Tamerlane, in 1681.

  2. The Riley portrait is now lost, but c. 1721, the antiquarian George Vertue, records ‘an Original picture of Mrs Aphara Behn painted by Riley the same from wch. the Print is Engrav’d by White’, Walpole Society: Vertue Note Books, vol. 1, p. 43. The engraving by R. White exists in several copies of Behn’s collected works from 1698 onwards, mainly published by Samuel Briscoe. The name sometimes appears as ‘R.W. sc’, hence giving rise to the misreading of ‘R. Wise’. Another cruder engraving of the presumed Riley portrait is by B. Cole, with different cartouche and background from the White one. It was published in Plays of 1724 brought out by Mary Poulton. The same engraving was used again in Histories, Novels of 1735, labelled B. Cole sculpt. Montague Summers declares the presumed Riley engraving ‘none other than Christina of Sweden from Sebastian Bourdon’s drawing now in the Louvre’ (Works of Aphra Behn, 1915, vol. i, p. lxiii). However, Queen Christina has a very different face, with a far more prominent nose than in any of the engravings purporting to be of Behn.

  3. Poems on Affairs of State, 1660–1714, vol. 3, ed. Howard H. Schloss (New Haven, 1968), p. 34.

  4. See To the Society of the Beaux Esprits. A Pindarick Poem (London, 1687), p. 5. He had made the same sort of point in ‘A Satyr against the Play-House 1685’: ‘fair Sappho in her wanton fit / When she’d put luscious Bawdry off for Wit’, p. 174.

  5. ‘The Female Laureat’, Dyce Collections, V. & A. Museum, p. 607. In fact Behn had done less than Ravenscroft was doing at much the same time in his suggestive scenes of intended ‘panting’ in The London Cuckolds.

  6. The Poetess, a Satyr (London, 1707), p. 3.

  7. See ‘Lampoon [March, 1676]’ in Court Satires, p. 20.

  8. William Wycherley, Miscellany Poems (London, 1704), pp. 191–2.

  9. Works, vol. 1, no. 10.

  10. Newdigate Newsletter, July 1683, and the True Protestant Mercury 1683, Wednesday 16 August 1682. Dryden had fallen foul of royal opinion and the response quoted here is the King’s to The Duke of Guise. The play was forbidden. See HMC 15th Report, Appendix, pt vii, p. 108.

  11. The Tryal and Sentence of Elizabeth Cellier, p. 16.

  12. Juvenalis Redivivus (1683).

  13. Luttrell, I, 236, November 1682. Delarivier Manley alludes to the incident in The New Atalantis, p. 24: ‘Count Lofty, whose good sense was totally obscured by pride, cast his ambitious thoughts so high, as to pretend to the Princess, whilst yet she was a maid.’

  14. Some poets even used others to correct their own verses, see ‘Julian’: ‘In Verse to ease thy wretched Wants I write’.

  15. Works, vol. 1, no. 64.

  16. POAS, 1697. ‘Bajazet to Gloriana’ is a longer version of the poem. For the attribution, see Brice Harris, Letter in TLS, 9 February 1933, p. 92.

  17. ‘The Female Laureat’. Mendelson argues that Gould is in error here and that Behn actually attacks Mulgrave, see The Mental World of Stuart Women, p. 162.

  18. Mary Trye, Medicatrix, or the Woman Physician (1675).

  19. Lucy Hutchinson, the Puritan writer and biographer of her military husband, also made a partial translation.

  20. The introduction is made likely by the fact that Tonson later wrote, ‘mr Creech came to Town... I brought him to mr Dryden &... he was carried to mr waller the Poet. When mr Creech returned to Oxford he wrot to me to get mr Dryden & mr Waller to write some verses to put before the 2de Edition,’ quoted in James A. Winn, ‘Dryden’s Epistle before Creech’s Lucretius: A Study in Restoration Ghostwriting’, Philological Quarterly, 71, 1992, p. 56.

  21. Creech’s translation T. Lucretius... De Natura Rerum (Oxford, 1683), p. 3.

  22. ‘A Satyr on modern Translators’, POAS.

  23. Works, vol. 1, no. 11 (variants).

  24. Poems Upon Several Occasions (London, 1684). In Reconstructing Aphra, Goreau speculates that this curate, who does not relish his country situation—‘Providence it seems design’d t’immure / M’aspiring soul in a poor Country Cure’—was Henry Crisp since Crisp became a vicar in Catton in Yorkshire. But the poem is dated January 1685 and Crisp was not ordained and appointed until December of that year.

  25. Possibly at this time Behn may have come to know a young man Charles Blount, a deist, freethinker and former friend of Rochester in the 1670s. For him religion was simply an imposture.

  26. Creech omits material towards the close of Book IV. Dryden puts this into ‘luscious English’ in his Sylvae (1685) when he describes tongues dashing into other bodies for example. For a discussion of Dryden’s erotics see James Anderson Winn ‘When Beauty Fires the Blood’.

  27. Works, vol. 2, preface. In a dedication to a late play Behn refers to Francis Hedelin, Abbot of Aubignac, a critic of the theatre and a playwright, the sort of person she is unlikely to have read had she stayed in England.

  28. For a full discussion of Sunderland, see J. P. Kenyon, Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland 1641–1702 (London, 1958).

  29. Folger MS M.b. 12, p. 123.

  30. ‘The Young Statesmen: A Satire’, Poetical Works, p. 52.

  31. Diary, vol. IV, p. 595.

  32. Also, France was fomenting rebellion in Ireland and was suspected of sending over arms and Irish soldiers in ships masquerading in English colours; Sunderland might wish to know more. The envoy to Paris at the time was Viscount Preston, who used spies to gather information to send to London. Preston could direct Behn, while Sir Bernard Gascoigne, busily spying in France over many years, could provide names of merchants and military men to contact. See Phyllis Lachs, The Diplomatic Corps under Charles II and James II, p. 34. One other possibility is that Behn was a female courier taking Tory money to France for investment in foreign securities. The Whigs were eager to find out how this was done but, by 1683, it was noted that a series of court women, from the Duchess of Portsmouth and the Countess of Pembroke to a singer friend of Nell Gwyn’s, had travelled to France and ‘the wonder will not be great how things are managed’. See Hastings MS, II, 173–4; also Court Satires, p. 100.

  33. Fontenelle wrote his main works after Behn’s probable visit to France, but the speed with which she gained access to them later suggests an acquaintance.

  34. Boileau, Epistre IX, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris, 1966), p. 134.

  35. Behn may have been in France just long enough also to meet her critic, Gilbert Burnet, who, towards the end of the year, felt the need to travel with a friend for his ‘health’—in fact he had upset the King by criticising his libidinous life and by reportedly helping in the composition of Lord Russell’s very effective speech from the scaffold.

  36. ‘Returns of Lodgers and Inmates’, St Bride’s Parish, New Street, Corporation of London Records Office, Misc. MSS.87.4, no. 18e.

  37. George Powell, preface to The Treacherous Brother (1690).

  38. In this, Behn was in tune with the times. Although she disliked Shadwell, she may have been somewhat influenced by his attack on the rake in The Libertine, which was revived in May 1682. It was a ferocious depiction of the cruelty of the Don Juan type, placed within a religious context.

  Chapter 22

  1. In October the Gazette noted that another newspaper had erroneously printed the story that Lady Henrietta had written to her father telling him she was married. This, the Gazette declared, was false.

  2. Quoted in Kenyon (1958), p. 43.

  3. ‘The Ladies March’, Court Satires, p. 58.

  4. See London Mercury, 22–5 August 1682; 29 September-3 October 1682; Loyal Protestant and True Domestick Intelligence, 12 September; see also Benskins Domestic Intelligence and The
Observator.

  5. At the trial there was much discussion about Lady Henrietta’s lodgings. In one report the place had been improved by the addition of a warming-pan and candles. A maid who gave evidence claimed she was surprised Henrietta was a lady since, when she washed her shift, she found the hidden body part finer than the sleeves: ladies tended to make the sleeves finer than the body.

  6. A Letter to Ferguson (1684). Morrice concluded that the husband was the son of Sir William Turner, the civilian, i.e. not military or in the civil law.

  7. For the history of Grey’s plotting, see Cecil Price, Cold Caleb: The Scandalous Life of Ford Grey First Earl of Tankerville 1655–1701 (London, 1956) and K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford, 1968).

  8. Subsequently the guard was imprisoned in Grey’s place. The fate of the participants of the Rye House Plot was described in a contemporary pamphlet, ‘A True Description of the Bull-Feast’, which called Lord Grey a ‘Gray Gander who trod two Geese of the same Egg’ and then ‘fled amongst the wild Geese into the Desarts’. See also A Letter from Amsterdam (1684), which describes the escape of Grey.

  9. One slight possibility is that one of the instigators was Christopher, second Duke of Albemarle, whom Behn later celebrated. According to Narcissus Luttrell, on 31 May 1682 he had fought an inconclusive duel with Grey.

  10. If Sunderland were the commissioner, perhaps he chose Behn for the work because he knew her to be the author of a broadside called Lady Grey’s Ghost, in which Lady Grey dreams of Lady Henrietta and her Lord as a red cow and a grey bull with horns, Works, vol. 2. Lady Mary’s response is, ‘though I love red Cows Milk naturally, I had a greater Longing to stroak the Bull’, but both beasts attack her. Another dream is of herself as England seduced by Monmouth, the fool of the ‘Moble, filling them with strange Notions, Whimsies and Chimeras’. Despite the anonymity of the publication, Behn might be indicating authorship by the name of the amorous Cavalier, Willmore from her own play The Rover, clearly identified here with Rochester. It would be a good strategy to capitalise on a popular scandal and simultaneously puff this most popular play. Behn needed revivals.