by Janet Todd
11. James Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae. Familiar Letters, domestic and forren (1655).
12. Lettres portuguaises seems now to have been by the Frenchman, Gabriel-Joseph de la Vergne, Vicomte de Guilleragues, but it was generally accepted in the seventeenth century as the work of a Portuguese nun, Marianna Alcoforado.
13. Apologie, ou les véritables Mémoires de madame Marie Mancini, connétable de Colonna, écrits par elle-même (Leyden, 1678). The narrator begins very like Behn in her short stories with generalisations about the libels against ‘our Sex’ and continues with her sort of derogatory remarks: ‘’Tis an ordinary fault of our Sex, not to endure to hear others commended.’ Mancini was designed a nun, very much as Behn claims she herself was in her preface to her History of the Nun.
14. Hatigé ou Les Amours de Roy de Tamaran. Nouvelle (Cologne, 1676). In English it became Hattigé: or the Amours of the King. It was dedicated to the Earl of St Albans.
15. Works, vol. 1, no. 77.
16. Works, vol. 2, p. 7.
17. Works, vol. 1, no. 73.
18. Behn apprehended the story in theatrical terms at first: while the characters fancy themselves romantically as Antony and Cleopatra in Dryden’s All for Love, Behn makes the Berkeley house, Durdans, a version of the many intrigue-play settings in which everyone spies on everyone else.
19. Works, vol. 2, p. 34.
20. The description is not far off Anne Wharton’s idealised picture of Charles II in ‘To Doctor Burnet upon his Retirement’. In Behn the figure of the King might be regarded as undercut by the fallibility of his substitute, Silvia’s father, who roves around at night soliciting the maids for favours.
21. The relationship of Monmouth and Philander is also eroticised: Monmouth writes a kind of love letter to Philander, addressing him as ‘my dear’ and declaring that the morning must ‘find you in my arms’.
22. The French writer, Madame D’Aulnoy, makes a rather different picture in her fictionalised Memoirs, written supposedly in 1675 but published in the 1690s. This created the young Lord Grey as already dominating Monmouth. But, despite being teased by Monmouth for his interest in the child Henrietta (who would have been eleven), he is no libertine and he presents himself as ‘a man entirely absorbed by his family; who still plays the lover to his wife, & whose only pleasure is the society of his father-in-law, and his mother-in-law’, Memoirs of the Court of England in 1675 by Marie Catherine Baronne D’Aulnoy, trans. Mrs. William Henry Arthur (London, 1913), p. 281.
23. Works, vol. 2, p. 45.
24. Works, vol. 2, p. 67.
25. Works, vol. 2, p. 36.
26. Works, vol. 2, p. 73.
27. Works, vol. 2, p. 59.
28. See Michael Treadwell, ‘London Trade Publishers 1675–1750’, The Library, 6th ser., 4 (1982), 99–134, and Crompton diss., pp. 56–8. Randal Taylor’s name was, however, later seen on Williamite pamphlets.
29. ‘Letter to Julian’, Summer 1684, printed in Court Satires,
30. Apparently Condon was in Ferdinando Hastings’s regiment, although he was not listed among the officers.
Chapter 23
1. CSP, Dom., 1683, p. 40.
2. Evelyn, Diary, vol. IV, p. 362.
3. ‘Advice to the Ladyes’, Dyce MS, V. & A. Museum.
4. In a manuscript recipe book in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Va 19.
5. Leigh Hunt in ‘Poetry of British Ladies’, The Companion, no. 19, 14 May 1828, mentions rumours that Behn was in love with Creech. I have found no evidence for this.
6. The account of Brown is by James Drake in The Works of Mr. Thomas Brown (London, 1715), vol. III, p. 12.
7. The phrase comes from A Comparison Between the Two Stages (1702). Brown’s Letters appear in his Works, vol. 2.
8. Works, vol. 7, p. 219.
9. John Wilkes, A General View of the Stage (London, 1762), p. 246.
10. The young Brown always had a tendency to mock older powerful women. He described the wife of the headmaster under whom he had to teach as claiming to be thirty-six when really near fifty and driven to the expedients of false hair and brandy to keep up the pretence. He also provided an unpleasant portrait of the strong-minded Elizabeth Barry. See Chapter 16, note 1.
11. Works, vol. 3, p. 71.
12. Briscoe was the publisher of Lee, Dryden, Wycherley and Congreve. See G. Greer, ‘Honest Sam Briscoe’, A Genius for Letters: Booksellers and Bookselling from the 16th to the 20th Century (Winchester, 1995), pp. 33–45.
13. ‘A Letter to the Earl of Kildare, disswading him from marrying MOLL HOWARD’, Works, vol. 1, no. 99.
14. Sir Philip Friendly refers to his lack of riches being due to his position as a younger brother. This was a theme of the Behn play that Brown’s friend Gildon published after her death, The Younger Brother, supposedly based partly on George Marten.
15. Gildon’s ventriloquising skills are evident. See The Post-boy Robb’d of his Mail, which he wrote when Behn was still alive. The various letters required different styles, some of men and some of women. Gildon went on to write stories: The Golden Spy: or a Political Journal of the British Nights Entertainments (London, 1709). Except for Oroonoko, the stories in the 1698 edition, entitled the third, have separate title pages and are separately paged, suggesting that Briscoe may originally have intended bringing them out individually. In Familiar Letters, Briscoe published four letters addressed to Philander and signed A. Behn twice and Silvia once. These may have been forgeries intended perhaps for a longer episode of Love-Letters or they may have been written by Behn when she was writing Love-Letters and then cut from the text.
16. The Cheats was published in 1684 in a new edition which might indicate a revival of the popular play, first staged in 1663.
17. The Whole Comical Works of Monsr. Scarron, trans. Thomas Brown and others, 2nd edn (London, 1703).
18. The closest of Behn’s secure work to the ‘The Unfortunate Happy Lady’ is The History of the Nun, where the heroine hears her husband is dead and responds in great grief like Philadelphia to her lover. She is punished for her response, however, since, unlike the useful Fairlaw of ‘The Unfortunate Happy Lady’, the ex-nun’s new husband does not die before the reappearance of the old husband/lover.
19. Tom Brown is less likely to have been the author of’The Dumb Virgin’, which was also printed posthumously, since he thoroughly despised Dangerfield and would not have used his name for a hero. See his ‘A Letter from Dangerfield to Fuller, the awkerd [sic] Plot Carpenter’ in which Dangerfield is two layers down in hell with Judas Iscariot, Letters from the Dead to the Living (London, 1702), p. 135. It remains possible of course that Brown or Gildon completed a story that had been in part written by Behn. This may also have been the case with ‘The Nun’, which has much in common with Behn’s earlier fictional works.
20. ‘Amusements’, Works of Brown, vol. 1, p. 4.
21. Letters from the Dead, p. 43.
22. The 1698 edition added three stories: ‘The Court of the King of Bantam’, ‘The Black Lady’ and ‘The Nun, or the Perjured Beauty’. It also added the comic letters supposedly written in Antwerp to the ‘Memoirs’. For Granville’s involvement in Behn’s posthumous works, see W. J. Cameron, ‘George Granville and the “Remaines” of Aphra Behn’, Notes and Queries, CCIV, March, 1959, pp. 88–92.
23. Works, vol. 1, no. 55.
24. Evelyn, Diary, vol. IV, p. 363.
25. Little of this ‘Doggerell’ can be discovered. Probably little has survived, although ‘The Complaint of the poor Cavaliers’ is an early example. Another is a dialogue called ‘Tea and Coffee’ from the 1680s, in which one of the voices labelled ‘A. B.’ is feminine. See Works, vol. 1, no. 54. Such dialogues as ‘Tea and Coffee’ were common by a single person, but possibly Behn and the man J. C. B.—perhaps John Cooper from the ‘Cabal’, or even her old friend Jeffrey Boys or his brother Jeremy—produced this bit of hack writing in a tavern evening. It echoes Behn in its one notion, that the sin of sham plottin
g might be expelled by holy water, a mockery less of Catholics than of those obsessed by Catholic habits.
26. ‘The Circuit of Apollo’, Selected Poems, p. 72.
27. F. N. W., another commender of Behn’s poems, was more tactful. Comparing Behn with the chaste Orinda, he claimed that the former taught ‘harmless arts of not indecent Love’ with her ‘Pleasant wit yet not obscene’.
28. In the comic letters Behn was alleged to have exchanged with Van Bruin in Antwerp, the elderly admirer is mocked for planning to ‘set out for the Island of Love’, thought to have been ‘a Tierra del Fuego’ for such a man.
29. ‘Essay on Translated Prose’, Works, vol. 4, p. 76.
30. Works, vol. 1, p. 151.
31. ‘A Ramble in Saint James’s Parke’, Poems, p. 64.
32. The poetry of The Island of Love is often distinguished in public seventeenth-century mode:
Doubt’s the worst Torment of a generous Mind,
Who ever searching what it cannot find,
Is roving still from wearied thought to thought,
And to no settled Calmness can be brought.
It is equally competent in the pastoral lyrical: the first song begins
This is the Coast of Africa,
Where all things sweetly move;
This is the Calm Atlantick Sea,
And that the Isle of Love;
To which all Mortals Tribute pay,
Old, Young, the Rich and Poor;
Kings do their awful Laws obey,
And Shepherds do Adore.
Works, vol. 1, p. 105. Inevitably with such poetry many of the passages turned up unidentified in contemporary miscellanies and manuscript collections.
33. Miscellany Poems (1704) and ‘Satyr against the Poets’, BL Harley 7317.
34. Works, vol. 7, pp. 228–9.
35. Otway’s death is obscure and there are several competing stories. Anthony à Wood says he died at an inn called the Bull on Tower Hill on 14 April 1685 (Athenae Oxoniensis, vol. 1, p. 170). In the early eighteenth century when Otway’s reputation for pathos was high, Theophilus Cibber claimed Otway choked to death on a piece of bread which he had begged (Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, to the Time of Dean Swift, London, 1753, vol. 11, p. 334) and Joseph Spence has him dying of fever after chasing the murderer of a friend (Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters, ed. E. Malone, London, 1820, p. 100). None of the accounts much fits with Gildon’s jovial ‘Lover of the Bottle’ whose last work was a drinking song (Lives and Characters of English Poets, p. 107).
36. Wilkes, A General View, p. 246.
37. Some of the poems had already been published in play texts as songs, others had appeared in Covent Garden Drolery and in other people’s miscellanies. Some had been circulating widely in copied manuscripts.
38. See Henry Curwen, History of Booksellers (London, 1873).
39. The poems give a sense of community very much including Creech. In the long poem entitled ‘Upon these and other Excellent Works of the Incomparable Astrea’, the anonymous poet praises Behn’s commendation of Creech’s Lucretius: ‘her sweeter Muse did for him more, / Than he himself or all Apollo’s sons before.’
40. ‘To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady Mrs Anne Killigrew’, John Dryden, p. 312.
41. The other female poets were of course dead, as Aphra Behn was not. It is also possible that Dryden thought for a time that Behn had written the satire on him, ‘On Dryden Renegade’, in circulation when he was writing.
42. Jacob Tonson in Ten Letters by and about him, ed. Sarah Lewis and Carol Clapp (Austen, Texas, 1948). The fact that he could risk this manoeuvre and that Behn must have approached Dryden only through Tonson suggested there was no intimacy between Behn and Dryden at this time.
43. ‘Satyr against the Poets’, BL Had 7317.
44. See ‘A Ballad on Sr: Wm: Clifton’, Dyce MS, V. & A. Museum. All the Queen’s Maids of Honour prepared to captivate Clifton.
45. Works, vol. 1, pp. 368–70. The ideal was much expressed in the early Stuart period, see E. Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990). Its loss was deplored by more people than Behn, for example Sir John Reresby, who wrote in 1687 that hospitality had been ‘much laid aside of late... which dissatisfieth the common sort of people’. He too saw it as a political problem. Others took a different view of the function of nobility and gentry, seeing them standing between the people and the imposition of arbitrary royal power. See, for example, the Whig A Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country (c.1675). This Whig nostalgia was often associated with the ‘Golden days of Queen Elizabeth’ and with a nationalistic emphasis on Englishness. See Shadwell’s The Lancashire-Witches (1681).
46. Tudor and early Stuart propaganda insisted that public service and loyalty to the monarch were the gentry’s first obligation, even over loyalty to kin and lineage. See M. James, English Politics and the Concept of Honour, Past and Present, supplements, III, 1978.
47. The poem appeared anonymously but has been ascribed to Nahum Tate. See Poems on Affairs of State... 1660–1714, vol. 11 (New Haven, 1968), p. 183. Tate never owned the work which, though Royalist, was also anti-Jesuit, a position increasingly inappropriate as the Catholic reign of James progressed. If he indeed gave so lengthy a work to Behn to publish in 1682 or 1683 when she was compiling Miscellany, it suggests considerable friendship.
48. The Late Converts Exposed: or the Reasons of Mr. Bay’s Changing his Religion... Part the Second. In fact Behn had given similar sentiments to Lysander in The Island of Love: when he tries to pray he is interrupted by earthly matters and he can think of nothing but love and Aminta, which ‘Ever out Rival Heaven!’
49. Other authors to whom Behn refers as her friends in her dedication include the dead and living: Etherege, Rochester, Dorset, Mrs Taylor, Anne Wharton, Henry Nevil Payne, Henry Crisp, and ‘a Lady of Quality’ who defined female wit as sexual availability and emptiness.
50. Works, vol. 1, no. 74.
51. In the prologue to The Luckey Chance, Behn describes a widow who chooses to pass her days ‘With a damn’d sober, self-admiring Ass, / Who thinks good usage for the Sex unfit, / And slights ye out of Sparkishness and Wit’. It sounds like another dig at ‘Alexis’.
52. ‘To Mrs. Afra Behn’, The Genuine Works, p. 59.
Chapter 24
1. Essay Upon Poetry (London, 1682). The work was brought out again in 1685 after the preface to Valentinian because Mulgrave had been ‘so unjustly reflected upon’. Mulgrave criticised Rochester for being too obscene to raise desire—he ‘pall’d the appetite he meant to raise’.
2. The phrase comes from Goodwin Wharton, ‘Autobiography’, BL Add. MSS, 26,006.
3. As a young woman in the 1660s Cooke was involved in a court scandal when the lesbian Miss Hobart, one of the Maids of Honour of the Duchess of York, became attracted to her. The affair was described semi-fictionally in the Memoirs of Count Grammont. Behn had not written for Cooke before since the latter had been acting with the King’s Company.
4. The differences can be seen in comparison between the printed text and one manuscript in the Folger (V.b. 233). For a discussion of this manuscript in relation to the BL one, see Larry Carver, ‘Rochester’s Valentinian’, Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Review, IV, 1, Summer 1989, pp. 25–38.
5. Anne Wharton may have been interested in both Behn and Barry at this time. When she died shortly afterwards she left a generous bequest to Barry’s daughter Hester.
6. Wolseley’s girth is mocked in one of the poems in ‘Astrea’s Booke’ where he is also ridiculed as Rochester’s echo and author of ‘Prefaces which tire Men to read’. For a discussion of Wolseley, see Mary Ann O’Donnell, ‘Private Jottings, Public Utterances’, in Aphra Behn Studies (1996). Anne Wharton wrote a poem to congratulate Wolseley ‘On his Preface to Valentinian’, the tone suggests to Greer that the preface was a commission. Wolseley rapturously replied. See Slip-Shod Sybils, p. 240.
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7. For Julian’s implied opinions, see ‘Julians Farewell to the Muses’, Dyce MS, V. & A. Museum, p. 482.
8. Works, vol. 7, p. 382.
9. Sir Rowland’s main buyer is Lady Youthly who wishes desperately to marry a young man. One might suspect Behn of a little self-irony here, but she prevents it by making her not the usual fifty or so, but eighty. In the stress on the predicament of a younger brother in both The Younger Brother and The Widdow Ranter, Behn might have been influenced by Tom Brown or one other of her new friends.
10. The other young women, though not as radical and honest as Mirtilla, are yet heirs of Hellena and the ‘Feign’d Curtizans’. They adopt men’s dress to avoid unwanted marriage and take stock of their money and bodies; indeed Teresia almost echoes Hellena when she declares, ‘I have Youth enough to please a Lover, and Wit enough to please my self.’ Olivia sees arranged marriage as prostitution without satisfaction and she adapts Whig rhetoric: ‘when Parents grow arbitrary, ’tis time we look into our Rights and Priviledges.’ Behn found such notions ridiculous in state politics but true enough in familial, though here they may well have been added by Gildon who admits to having reworked the play.
11. In his revision of Langbaine’s Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets (1699), Gildon boasts that, had he revised the ‘jejune style’ of the last three acts, The Younger Brother would have succeeded.
12. Works, vol. 2, p. 216. Some of the comic scenes of body-swapping resemble those in Behn’s comic Antwerp letters. This may be because the author of the ‘Memoirs’ was mining Love-Letters or Behn might later have been mining memory. Silvia swaps her maid for herself and fools a would-be lover, as Behn supposedly does with Scot/Albert. In revenge, Albert decides to gain her through rape or subterfuge, rather like Brilljard does Silvia in Love-Letters. The swapping of bodies in bed was of course a conventional theatrical and fictional device.