by Janet Todd
13. See Verney pamphlets in Cambridge University Library, A Letter to Ferguson: ‘Because she is ugly grown; and ’tis our Natures / When Beauty’s gone, to think ’em nauseous Creatures.’ Henrietta was said to be ‘inrag’d’ because another woman ‘Usurps her Place and Name’.
14. Works, vol. 2, p. 186.
15. On Behn’s presentation of Silvia there may be some influence of The Whores Rhetoric (1683), an English translation or adaptation of an Italian satire of 1642. While not being especially bawdy, The Whores Rhetoric titillated and fed the erotic misogyny of the time, as well as fitting into the sexualising of politics. The text is a dialogue between the famous bawd, Madam Creswell, and Dorothea, the daughter of an impoverished Royalist. In similar fashion to Silvia, Dorothea must work her sex because of her poverty, although she is more honest about her business than Silvia, who is shocked to hear herself described as whore. Both women learn to evaluate the parts of their body, regarding them as so much stock, and both must avoid the feminine trap of falling in love: ‘The whore is not a woman’ and ‘she must mind her interest not her sport’, pp. 144–5.
16. Philander has less difficulty, since he loves Calista most thoroughly when she is dressed as a boy ‘resembling my dear Octavio’.
17. See ‘On Narcissism’ in Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth, 1985) and Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman (Ithaca, 1985).
18. After 1685 the historical Lady Henrietta Berkeley seems to have crept back to England into the bosom of her family and church. Her will names a man called Knagge, who was Grey’s chaplain. Perhaps she had become an embarrassment to Grey, who wanted her made respectable. One analogue to the fictional Silvia is the pseudo-aristocratic Mary Carleton described, like Silvia, as fat, a woman who also used sex for interest. Kirkman in The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled describes Mary Carleton taking pride in her stratagems; he claimed Carleton was so flushed with success at being able to pass herself off as whatever she wished that she simply cheated automatically ‘any body friend or foe, rich or poor, all was fish that came to net whether Salmons or Sprats’, p. 319. Other more recent scandals on which Behn might have drawn included that of the Duchess of Norfolk with a man Evelyn dismissed as ‘a Dutch gamester’; one lampoon on the event is copied into ‘Astrea’s Booke’. Like Lord Grey and Lady Henrietta (and probably Aphra Behn herself), the Norfolks in time became direct victims of fiction in ‘The Secret Letters of Amour between the duchess and mynheer’, but, suitably, not through Behn. See John Martin Robinson, The Dukes of Norfolk: A Quincentennial History (Oxford, 1982), p. 146, and S. F. K. Causton, Howard Papers (London, 1862), p. 254.
19. Works, vol. 2, p. 365.
20. The Catholic trimmings probably came from memory of Flanders and possibly of Italy, but they could have been enhanced by observation in London and Windsor, where James had re-established Catholic ritual and pomp.
21. Defoe is often accused of male insensitivity in Moll Flanders in which he creates a heroine who bears and abandons a swarm of children. Behn has a similar insouciant (and Restoration) attitude to the bearing and dropping of children. A secret-service letter ‘believes [Henrietta Berkeley] to be att least four months gone with child, she looked very thin, & is perfect trallop, in a plaine scarf 8c black hood’. Some months later her child was born in Cleve. A contemporary lampoon claims Henrietta was sick in pregnancy and ‘scap’t great danger’ at the birth. A Letter to Ferguson (13 August 1684), Verney papers, Cambridge University Library. Little of this found its way into Behn’s work.
22. To the nation the most outrageous women were King Charles’s mistresses. If there is any living inspiration for the later Silvia beyond the full-breasted and irascible Lady Henrietta, it must be an amalgamation of the royal whores as delivered in satire, with Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland, prevailing. See, too, Brémond’s Hattigé where Hattigé tires of the King and moves on to the gardener’s nephew and then the gardener. She knows her needs: ‘Infidelity has charms for those who know how to use it. I have a heart which wants to be its own master, and to love one person, and then another as it pleases’ (p. 96). Cf. Rochester’s satire ‘Lais Junior’. Other satires blamed the corruption of the realm on Cleveland and used her to foretell the downfall of the Stuarts.
23. In Behn’s plays, youth tends to want only youth, but, in The Island of Love, there was the suggestion that a pretty boy might love a woman of fifty and a blooming maid dote on an old soldier, the religious female on the libertine and the thoughtful politician on the actress: ‘rarely equal Hearts in Love you’l find, / Which makes ’em still present the God of Love as Blind,’ 11. 203–36.
24. Works, vol. 2, p. 392.
25. Works, vol. 2, p. 396.
26. Part II of Love-Letters was printed for the author, it is not known by whom, so that it was doubly anonymous. Self-publishing was expensive. Mrs Cellier had laid out 10s a ream for printing her attack on Dangerfield which she then sold to a bookseller for 18s a dozen. Behn’s book was a great deal longer. If she paid herself and waited for reimbursement from her sponsor, she was probably suffering the same fate as she had with Arlington.
27. Friendship in Fashion, A Comedy (1678).
28. Dryden’s epilogue to Ben Jonson’s The Silent Woman, played in Oxford.
29. Prologue to Scaramouch A Philosopher, Harlequin A School-Boy, Bravo, Merchant, and Magician. A Comedy After the Italian manner (1677).
30. Evelyn, Diary, vol. IV, pp. 413–14.
31. Along with several other poems on the King’s death, Behn’s work was printed for/by Henry Playford. He seems as opportunistic as the poets themselves since he was not ordinarily a publisher of literature but of music.
32. Quoted in Kenyon (1974), p. 150. The report was drawn up before March 1679.
33. The baroque Catholic imagery for Mary of Modena had precedent in Dryden who, in 1677, had dedicated his opera, The State of Innocence, to her, looking on with ‘the rapture which Anchorites find in Prayer, when a Beam of the Divinity shines upon them... they are speechless for the time that it continues, and prostrate and dead when it departs’.
34. The horse with rider was a common analogy for the people and their ruler, occurring, for example, in Samuel Morland’s ‘Brief Discourse Concerning the Nature and Reason of Intelligence’. Morland saw the English people as especially restless ‘untam’d horses’ who ‘have thrown their unskilful riders many times within these fifty years’.
35. Mary of Modena had or would have among her ladies three women poets, Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, and Anne Killigrew.
36. Behn herself published the commendatory poem in her collection Lycidus, pp. 89–94. If Behn were known to be tangentially associated with the Sidneys, the reference to Arcadia may also be making a link with Sir Philip Sidney, whose most famous work was The Arcadia.
Chapter 25
1. CSP, Dom. 1683, pp. 97–8; PRO, SP 44/64, 45.
2. See Grey’s The Secret History of the Rye-House Plot, p. 118, and Burnet, History of His Own Time, vol. III.
3. The document was primarily written by Robert Ferguson, one of the most wanted conspirators of the Rye House Plot.
4. Similar ingenuousness is revealed in Monmouth’s letter to Mary of Modena: ‘I would not desire your Majesty to doe it, if I weare not from the botom of my hart convinced how I have bine disceaved in to it, and how angry God Almighty is with me for it,’ An Account Of What Passed at the Execution of the Late Duke of Monmouth, On Wednesday the 15th of July, 1685, on Tower-Hill. Together With a Paper Signed by Himself that Morning in the Tower, in the Presence of the Lords Bishop of Ely, and Bath and Wells, Dr. Tennison, and Dr. Hooper. And Also The Copy of His Letter to His Majesty after he was taken, Dated at Ringwood in Hantshire, the 8th of July.
5. Monmouth seems to have been playing a role in the romantic melodrama of adultery, rather than the tragedy of history. He said, ‘I have had a Scandal raised upon me about a Woman, a Lady of Vertue and Honour... I have committed no Si
n with her; and that which hath passed betwixt Us, was very Honest and Innocent in the Sight of God.’ He refused to follow convention and recommend his wife and children to the King; instead he approached the end with a taciturnity both heroic and childish: ‘I have said, I will make no Speeches; I will make no Speeches; I come to dye.’
6. The same effeminate image had been imposed on Charles I, regarded as unduly influenced by his queen, Henrietta Maria.
7. Apparently Monmouth felt the axe, fearing that its bluntness betokened the gruesome fate of his predecessor in opposition, Lord Russell, who ‘he said had been struck three or four times’. See Burnet, History of His Own Time, vol. III, p. 56.
8. The Savile Correspondence, ed. W. D. Cooper (London, 1858), p. 286, written 24 April 1686.
9. Works, vol. 4, p. 347.
10. See Memoirs of Sir John Reresby. The Complete Text and a Selection from his Letters, ed. Andrew Browning (Glasgow, 1936).
11. Susannah Mountfort (originally Percival before her marriage in 1686, and Verbruggen after her second marriage in 1694) first appeared on the stage at the age of fourteen in 1681. Later, she became the leading comedienne of the United Company. Her father, Thomas Percival, a minor actor, had played in Behn’s Abdelazer and The Rover.
12. The manuscript letter is in the Folger Shakespeare Library. Years later, in an item concerning the manuscript of Purcell’s Faerie Queen in The Gazette, Zachary Baggs was mentioned as the treasurer of the Theatre Royal. Another instance of debt might be included in PRO C 4/156/48. An ‘Afra Beane, widdowe’, was defendant in a case concerning a debt to Sir William Rooke (a Royalist from Canterbury like Behn herself), brought by his son, the naval officer George Rooke. The document is undated and very damaged, so there is no means of knowing when the case was brought or if Beane is Behn, but it is a possibility. George Rooke declared that £10 had been given either to her or to Henry Thompson to use on her behalf; Afra Beane denied receiving any money.
13. Behn’s name was frequently written as ‘Bean’ and she was thinking of writing a play about a man called Bacon, The Widdow Ranter or, The History of Bacon in Virginia (1690). On the bottom of p. 226 on the last page of a poem called ‘Caesar’s Ghost’, the name of ‘A. Behn’ has been written in the hand assumed to be Behn’s; it was then crossed out, possibly because she had absentmindedly and inappropriately written her name at the end of a poem she had not authored but which she had just finished copying. The identification of the handwriting as Behn’s was made by Mary Ann O’Donnell, who provides a full discussion of ‘Astrea’s Booke’ in ‘A Verse Miscellany of Aphra Behn: Bodleian Library MS Firth c.16’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, ed. Peter Beal and Jeremy Griffiths, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1990) and ‘Private Jottings, Public Utterances: Aphra Behn’s published writings and her commonplace book’, Aphra Behn Studies, pp. 285–309.
14. ‘From Julian, late Secretary to the Muses’ in Tom Brown’s Letters from the Dead to the Living, p. 61.
15. Love, Scribal Publication, p. 268; prologue to The London Cuckolds (1682).
16. See Brice Harris, ‘Robert Julian, Secretary to the Muses’, Journal of English Literary History, 10, 1943, pp. 294–309.
17. R. Holt is listed as ‘Mr Cannings printer att St. Jones Gates’. Holt printed Behn’s The Luckey Chance, The Emperor of the Moon and The Fair Jilt.
18. See ‘The Session of Ladies’ copied out in Behn’s hand, as well as ‘Ladies of Honour’ begun in Behn’s hand but not completed; in the latter case the new hand has taken over before the libels on the Duchess of Norfolk. Other poems include Dorset’s ‘Faithful Catalogue of... Ninnies’ and ‘A New Letter to Julian’.
19. Letters from the Dead to the Living, p. 62.
20. It was probably a good idea to talk about the marriage in terms of shepherds rather than emphasise the bride, for Lady Mary Compton, daughter of the third Earl of Northampton and widow of the Earl of Falmouth, had rather a tarnished reputation: she was much lampooned for copulation with a footman.
21. The Rover was performed at court in October, so, alternatively, Behn might have been referring to this when she promised payment to Baggs. The Stationers’ Register for 8 May 1686 has the entry ‘The Disappointed Marriage, or, Ye Generous Mistris, a comedy by Madam Beane. Lycensed Aprill the 23th by R. P.’ for Edward Poole. Poole published no play of Behn’s and no play of hers exists under this title. It is possible that this is an earlier name for what became The Luckey Chance, printed by Canning in 1687. It could also be an alternative title for The Younger Brother. The dating of the first performance of The Luckey Chance is made likely through the fact that Susannah Percival is listed as playing Diana. She married Mountfort on 2 July 1686.
22. There are, however, some sources for The Luckey Chance, e.g. the lady’s plot of testing her lover comes from Shirley’s The Lady of Pleasure (1637) and much of the gentlemanly low life is indebted to Dryden’s first comedy, The Wild Gallant.
23. See Playford’s Theatre of Music in 1687, 4th edn.
24. The prologue to Dame Dobson, the Cunning Woman (1683).
25. Towards the end, there may be a perversity in Gayman’s action. He seems to know that his uncle has died and left him money—why has he been pretending poverty knowing it was now over?
26. Gayman is unimpressed with the amorous preparations: ‘What the Devil can all this mean? If there be a Woman in the Case—sure I have not liv’d so bad a Life, to gain the dull Reputation of so modest a Coxcomb, but that a Female might down with me, without all this Ceremony.’
27. There is also an intertextual allusion when Gayman, called Philander by Lady Fulbank, is accused of making lewd verses to her under the name of Cloris, the escaping heroine of Behn’s poem, ‘The Disappointment’.
28. For the milk punch, see Oldys MS note to Langbaine BL (AM) 22592, f. 37. This sounds like an uncurdled version of posset for which there were many recipes, including one copied into ‘Astrea’s Booke’. It may have used fortified wine.
29. John Dennis, Works (London, 1718), vol. 11, p. 537.
30. Works, vol. 7, p. 217.
31. There were three groups at Will’s: the Grave, the Wits and the Rabble. A ‘Wit’ would need to be in Dryden’s section.
32. Works, vol. 7, p. 217.
33. The use of terms suggests a popular Cartesian conception of the self, of body and spirit or mind divided. Behn could remain a woman in body, while having a masculine or ungendered mind that wrote. It was a conception that looked back more to the humoral notions of the hot dry man and cold wet woman (in which heat was of course the source of mental and bodily strength) than forward to the gendered body-mind of the eighteenth century. For a discussion of this change in emphasis, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
34. Also politics was leaving the theatre, and Behn’s description of herself as a Royalist of ‘heart and Pen’ was growing irrelevant. Although not as political as earlier plays, The Luckey Chance touched on topical events: a controversy over the City of London’s charter, continuing anti-Catholic fears, and rumours from Ireland of French invasions—neither as out-of-date as might at first seem. There was also a swipe against Holland and its bourgeois culture when Gayman impersonated the devil; the latter was addressed as Pantamogan in echo of the much mocked Dutch title, Hogan Mogan, High Mightiness.
35. See P. B. Anderson, ‘Buckingham’s Chemist’, TLS, 1935, p. 612. Bellon was the author of a number of medical works. It is also possible that Bellon is the Peter Bellon who wrote a play, translated ‘Agnes de Castro’ and shared Behn’s publishers, Magnes and Bentley.
36. People between the Amazon and the Surinam Rivers were ‘strangly afflicted, with the Gout & Dropsie’, BL Sloane MS 3662.
37. The original reads ‘shews’ not ‘she’s’.
38. The original reads ‘& plagues’. ‘An Epistle to Julian’, BL Harleian MS. 7317, 59.
39. All commedia dell’arte productions were conventional and relied
on stock scenes, such as ‘Scène de la fille de chambre’ and ‘Scène de L’Apotiquaire’. These were listed in Evariste Gheradi’s Le Théâtre Italien, ou Le Receuil de toutes les Comédies et Scènes Françoises, qui ont été jouees sur le Théâtre Italien. Par la Troupe des Comédiens du Roy de l’Hôtel de Bourgogne à Paris (Paris, 1695). This work has selected scenes from Arlequin Empereur, but Volume I of the 1741 edition prints all the French scenes.
40. Although Dryden found something in astrology, to many Royalists prognostications were dangerous since they had been used for political purposes in the Interregnum and in the Popish Plot with its endless figures and analogies: Monmouth, misled by soothsayers, fitted into the Puritan-Whig pattern.
41. Behn’s scepticism about what can really be seen with instruments was of long standing, if the incident with Sir Bernard Gascoigne on the boat from Dunkirk in 1667 can be credited. Then she had at first taken the allegorical apparition as a scene of painted glass.
42. Behn comically alludes to a range of fantastic ‘science’ works e.g. Cyrano de Bergerac’s Histoire comique ou Voyage dans la Lune (1650), translated by Thomas Sydserff in 1659 and by A. Lovell in 1687; the classical Lucians Dialogue of Icaromenippus, in which Menippus describes his journey to the moon, translated by Ferrand Spence in 1684; and, especially, The Man in the Moon by Francis Godwin, Bishop of Llandaff, published in 1629 under the Spanish pseudonym, Domingo Gonsales. Gonsales claims he went to the moon in a machine drawn by geese.
43. This scene is based on the ‘Scène du déséspoir’. See Le theatre Italien, 1741, vol. 1, pp. 129–30.
44. The Tempest V, I: ‘I’ll drown my book’. There is also an echo of Don Quixote, when the knight realises how he has been fooled.
45. See the account in the Newdigate Newsletter, 26 March 1687: ‘A Country man haveing invented a head & soe contrived it that whatever language or tune you speak in the Mouth of it is Repeated distinctly and Audibly’.