by Janet Todd
46. The epilogue, too, sounds like the Behn of The Second Part of The Rover and The Luckey Chance. The theatre is neglected and this symptomises the rottenness of the body-politic: Rome flourished when it saw its poets as ‘necessary Ministers of State’, when they ‘were useful in a City held, / As formidable Armies in the Field. / They but a Conquest over Men pursu’ed, / While these by gentle force the Soul subdu’d.’ It is, of course, not King James’s fault, but it would be good if he let some ‘God-like Bounty’ fall on poets for a change.
47. In his second part of The Play-House. A Satire, Gould mocked ‘You that Write Farce, and You that Farce Translate’. Yet he could say little against The Emperor of the Moon beyond repeating the charge of Behn’s wanton wit and ‘Luscious Bawdry’. Contrasting rather than allying her with Jonson, Shakespeare and Fletcher, ‘ye Immortal Three’, Gould pitted Behn against the good moderns: Otway, now safely dead, and Wycherley and Etherege, both retired from the theatre. See The Works of Mr. Robert Gould, II, p. 241. Reprinted in Montague Summers, The Restoration Theatre (London, 1934).
48. Possibly Behn’s ill-health made her think more sympathetically of Jonson, who had been bedridden for the last nine years of his life.
49. See Brian Corman, Genre and Generic Change in English Comedy 1660–1710 (Toronto, 1993).
50. Behn now looked back nostalgically to Charles II, ‘that Great patron of Noble Poetry, and the Stage, for whom the Muses must for ever mourn’. Although she may have despaired of the court for theatrical patronage, however, she was still looking to aristocratic patronage as much as to the market.
Chapter 26
1. The Catholic sympathy most conspicuously appears in the poem Behn addressed to John Howard, the son of the executed Viscount Stafford, ‘Pastoral To Mr. Stafford, Under the Name of Silvio’, Works, vol. 1, no. 64. She described Stafford as dying for a common faith.
2. Dryden, Letters, ed. Charles Ward (Durham, North Carolina, 1942), p. 127.
3. This rather uncharacteristic poem was not ascribed to Brown at the time and scholars have pointed out that he was a man to whom anything anonymous and scurrilous tended to be assigned. For the habit of ascribing satirical verse to Brown, see POAS, 5, 12. But the verses ‘Traitor to God’ are authenticated and, in BL MS Harl. 7319, part of ‘Dryden Renegade’ appears attached to them under the title ‘To Mr. Bayes’. Cf. the controversy in TLS over the ascription of ‘Mr Higden’ to Dryden or Brown, 19 May 1995, pp. 12–13.
4. The Late Converts Expos’d; or the Reasons of Mr. Bays Changing his Religion (London, 1688); A Description of Mr D—s Funeral. A Poem (London, 1700), p. 5.
5. Cf. Pope’s rather different but similarly worded sentiment in Essay on Criticism: ‘True wit is nature to advantage dressed, / What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.’
6. Behn was not La Rochefoucauld’s first English translator but she was the first since the authorised versions of the Maximes had appeared in France. John Davies translated an earlier edition. Behn seems to have used the 1675 edition, the fourth of five authorised ones. It contained 413 maxims of which she translated 391. She omitted some, repeated some, joined up some, and rearranged and added to the sequence. Possibly Behn worked on the translation while she was in France and soon after she returned, since she supplied references from 1682 and 1683 which would still have been current in early 1684. To illustrate the gallant executions of very different men, she used the noble Lord Russell and the criminal Christopher Vratz, executed in 1682. See The Confession And Manner of the Execution of the Three Notorious Outlandish Ruffians (London, 1682).
7. Two final sections dealt with self-love and death, the former being always present, the latter inevitable and feared, whatever hypocrites like Seneca pretended.
8. Works, vol. 4, pp. 1–9.
9. Hoyle was stabbed to death by George Pitts on 27 May 1692, having provoked a quarrel. He talked ‘very scurrilously against the present Government, and spake very unbecoming words against the Person of King William’. It was said that ‘Hoyle, in his life-time, was a Person much addicted to quarrelling’. Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 29 June 1692.
10. Works, vol. 4, p. 2.
11. Barlow’s Aesop was an elaborate production frequently in elegant, expensive binding. Not much care was taken by those who actually put the pages together, however, and most often texts of Philipott and Behn are intermixed. Given the fact that Behn’s words are engraved over the erasure of Philipott’s, a composite text is not disastrous.
12. Once she has made a political point, Behn seems unable to resist others and her overt political references tend to come in clumps. So, after this remark on Parliament, she makes the next fable into an illustration of Monmouth’s ‘false ambition’. The political additions were not always felicitous. Some years later, Roger L’Estrange brought out another Aesop translation and criticised recent translators for having ‘Ventur’d a little too far from the Precise Scope of the Author, upon the priviledge of a Poetical License’. Part of Behn’s ‘Poetical License’ was Barlow’s commercial and her own convinced politics. Having published her verses, Behn perhaps took a leaf out of Barlow’s book and either printed them, or let them be printed, as playing cards, with slightly changed copies of Barlow’s engravings. The publisher might have been Randal Taylor since he also brought out political and coded playing cards.
13. Behn had actually mocked the device in Sir Patient Fancy when Lodwick had laid out less romantic plans for his sister according to the watch of her comic suitor: ‘Beginning at Eight, from which down to Twelve you ought to imploy in dressing, till Two at Dinner, till Ten at Supper with your Lover, if your Husband be not at home, or keep his distance, which he’s too well bred not to do; then from Ten to Twelve are the happy Hours the Bergere, those of intire Enjoyment,’ Works, vol. 6, Act I, Scene I.
14. The poem first appeared in La Montre, beginning ‘Philander, since you’ll have it so...’ in 1686. It was republished in the poems appended to Lycidus in 1688, beginning ‘Alexis, since you’ll have it so’. In Miscellany (1685) there is a poem called Song ‘While, Iris, I at distance gaze’ (vol. 1, no. 57) which, though it uses the name of the heroine of La Montre, describes an unhappy love that Damon, La Montre’s lover, does not experience except in dreams. It sounds as though the poem might have been left over from the sections for four and five o’clock in the morning of La Montre, omitted because the work was growing too long. Again there seems an association of Alexis and Philander, which makes more likely a possible identification of Alexis and Condon, linked through the dedication of Love-Letters to Condon.
15. Works, vol. 4, p. 303.
16. Works, vol. 4, p. 345. Behn urged Morland to create fountains in the Castle. He had already managed to pump water into the pond, see London Gazette, 12 September 1682.
17. Some impersonal praise of Cliveden, the Duke of Buckingham’s house seen from Windsor makes it seem unlikely Behn was intimate with the Duke.
18. A similar claim was made in the 1660s for Katherine Philips’s translation of Corneille’s Death of Pompey: ‘The copy [is] greater than th’Original’ (Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, printed in the 1667 edition of Poems). The compliment to Behn is signed G. J., probably George Jenkins. If so, he is also the editor of her posthumous The Widdow Ranter; his admiration for Behn did not prevent his emending the play.
19. ‘Session of the Poets’, The Literary Works of Matthew Prior (Oxford, 1971), p. 63.
20. Works, vol. 4, p. 380.
21. Works, vol. 4, p. 388.
22. Works, vol. 1, no. 56.
23. Lysander’s attitude follows the description of Tallemant, but the original is more conventional and serious than Behn’s version.
24. Works, vol. 4, p. 421.
25. Works, vol. 1, no. 80. Similar gender ambiguity through the word ‘youth’ occurs in ‘In Imitation of Horace’.
26. See ‘Satire on the Ladies of Honour’ (1686), BL Harl. MS 7319, p. 423, and ‘Ballad to the Tune of Cheviot Chace�
�� in Court Satires, p. 102.
27. To Julian’, BL Harl. MS 7317. For the possibility that Albemarle might have been a commissioner of Part I of Love-Letters, see note 9 of Chapter 22.
28. See Estelle Ward, Christopher, Duke of Albemarle (London, 1915).
Chapter 27
1. Lord Grey later became a successful politician and was raised to an earldom. Lady Henrietta died on 13 August 1706; Lady Grey married again after her husband’s death and died in 1719.
2. Monmouth Routed, and Taken Prisoner, With his Pimp the Lord Gray. A Song (London, 1685). In ‘Advice to a painter’ (1685) Grey is labelled a traitor to the Whigs as well as to the King; see Folger MS, p. 135.
3. Works, vol. 2, p. 433.
4. Octavio may in fact have been inspired by a man at Cleve, the Brandenburg ambassador M. Fucks, with whom Grey reportedly struck up a great friendship.
5. This was published in 1754 as The Secret History of the Rye-House Plot.
6. These documents would have come from agents and spies to the Secretaries of State, Sir Leoline Jenkins and Sunderland in Whitehall. See Peter Fraser, The Intelligence of the Secretaries of State and their Monopoly of Licensed News 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1956).
7. This sort of action was not uncommon. For example L’Estrange was given the papers of the Whig propagandist, Stephen Colledge, by the Chief Justice to write against him during the Exclusion Crisis.
8. The Secret History of the Rye-House Plot, pp. 80 and 90.
9. If she read the confession, Behn would have seen the name of Sir Patience Ward among those who had engaged to provide money for Monmouth’s rebellion. Some of Behn’s opinions are close to those of Grey in this document, especially in attitude to the plotter, Robert Ferguson, written off as garrulous and undependable.
10. Quoted in Kenyon, Sunderland, p. 78.
11. In exile James II came to believe in this elaborate treachery, see The History of English Persecution of Catholics, ed. T. A. Birrell (Catholic Record Society, no. 48, 1953).
12. Perhaps, too, Monmouth believed there might be family feeling, for there were those who insisted he was not the son of Charles II with Lucy Walters, but rather of Robert Sidney and thus a relative of Sunderland’s.
13. After James II’s removal, the death of Monmouth was rewritten more heroically. In 1690 the play The Banish’d Duke: or, the Tragedy of Infortunatus made of Monmouth a duped heroic figure dying less romantically than piously.
14. The phrase echoes the dedication to Seneca Unmasqued, where the actions of Monmouth appear ingratitude and folly ‘to all good Men’.
15. Diary, vol. IV, p. 245
16. ‘The Lovers’ Session’, Firth MS c. 25. p. 277.
17. The event is described in Carola Oman, Mary of Modena (London, 1962), p. 101.
18. The claim of factual truth may or may not be genuine since the records of Ypres, where the story is set, have not survived.
19. Mazarine is particularly viciously attacked in the satire ‘On the Ladies of Honor’.
20. There seems some doubt of the sex of the author since it is variously given as S. B. de Brillac and Mlle de Brillac, but Behn assumed it was a woman and made a feminist point on female literary excellence. Although the plot mainly concerned the prince’s love for Agnes, there was much on female friendship. ‘The Maid’ was ‘so dear to the Princess’ while Agnes ‘lov’d Constantia sincerely’; indeed ‘their common Misfortune’ in loving and being beloved by the same man did not change their friendship and they vied with each other in virtue not rivalry.
Chapter 28
1. ‘A Satyr on the Modern Translators’ (London, 1684).
2. After her death Gildon published the works of the deist, Charles Blount, as well as The Oracles of Reason, for which he wrote a preface declaring that reason was enough for happiness.
3. The original Agnes de Castro, Behn’s translation, and one by Peter Bellon all appeared within the same year. Behn would have known of Bellon since he too was probably a playwright; Langbaine ascribed The Mock Duellist (1675) to him and he may be the Bellon mentioned in ‘Astrea’s Booke’. He translated several French fictional works.
4. The other translation came out in the same year. It was by J. Glanvil. The two translations are fairly close, though Behn tends to be more long-winded.
5. Essay on Translated Verse (London, 1685).
6. Behn concluded that English was closer to Italian, while French might be ‘more agreeable with the Welsh’.
7. Fontenelle quotes the supposed speech of the male philosopher’s eager female pupil, and Behn again panders to anti-French sentiment by commenting, ‘an English Woman might adventure to translate any thing, a French Woman may be supposed to have spoken.’ She was not entirely happy with Fontenelle’s condescending device. The woman listener was a hybrid, she judged, foolish at one moment, sage-like at another.
8. Behn corrected an error about the height of the earth’s atmosphere. For Descartes, reason allowed a person to gain valid knowledge, to discover truth by cognitive processes. His method used an innate faculty, supposedly equal in everyone.
9. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Sociable Letters (London, 1664), p. 14.
10. Works, vol. 4, p. 85.
11. History of Oracles was included in the 1700 edition of Histories, Novels, and Translations Written by the most Ingenious Mrs. Behn, the Second Volume.
12. See Leviathan, pp. 75–86.
13. Milton, Paradise Regained, ll. 455–9.
14. Works, vol. 4, pp. 82–3.
15. See, for example, ‘A Letter written by Dr George Hickes’ in An Answer to Fontenelle (1709).
16. Behn had, however, toned down some of the anti-Scottish sentiment in The Roundheads.
17. Drumlangrig and Melfort were associated in the 1680s. Melfort and his brother, the Earl of Perth, had served under the Protestant Duke of Queensbury, governor of Edinburgh, the Earl of Drumlangrig’s father. The brothers both converted to Catholicism for James. The anti-papist riots in Edinburgh in 1686 worried James, who removed Queensbury from office and promoted the two Catholic converts. Behn probably knew little of the shifting power among James’s ministers.
18. BL Stowe MS, 770.
19. George Hilton Jones, Convergent Forces: Immediate Causes of the Revolution of 1688 in England (Ames, Iowa, 1990).
20. While Behn was writing this hyperbole, she and her fellow scribes were probably copying into ‘Astrea’s Booke’ scurrilous poems on the pregnancy such as ‘The Miracle. How the Dutches of Modena being in Heaven prayd the Virgin Mary that the Queen might have a Son And how Our Lady sent the Angell Gabriel with her Smok upon wch the Queen Conceived’, and ‘Loretta & Winifred’, which suggests that James was not the father of the child. Other poems in ‘Astrea’s Booke’ include ‘Tom Tyler’, ‘An Excellent New Song call’d The Prince of Darkness’, ‘The Audience’ and ‘The Miracle’: these declare that the father was really the Papal Nuncio, Father D’Adda, a handy name for lampooners, or that the baby had been smuggled into the bedchamber in a warming pan.
21. Luttrell, vol. 1, p. 448.
22. The poets were adept at excuses. Dryden, for example, had apologised for late delivery within Threnodia Augustalis on Charles II’s death, ‘Thus long my grief has kept me dumb.’ He too might have had other reasons since by 1685 payments for his Laureateship were in arrears of £1245, see James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven, 1987), pp. 525–31.
23. Epilogue to The Luckey Chance, Works, vol. 7.
24. To Poet Bavius came out anonymously, quoting heavily from Baber’s poem. This Behn probably did from memory or from a circulating manuscript copy, since there are many differences between Baber’s printed text and Behn’s quotations.
25. Behn ended by echoing an earlier satire on Baber printed in Court Satires, p. 43, in which he takes ‘pains to make himself an ass’: ‘Thy Wit, thy Parts, thy Conduct, Mien and Grace, / Thy Presence, Cringes, and thy Court Grimarce, / But Swears Heaven meant th
ee for a perfect—As—’, Works, vol. 1, no. 85.
26. The description of a bishop as the ‘Reverend Gown, / Doom’d by his Nations Scandal’ seems particularly risky.
27. See ‘A Heroic Scène’, p. 105, in which L’Estrange is lampooned as ‘Oliver’s Fiddler’, accused of disloyalty and spying.
28. Burnet was being so successful as a propagandist that he constantly feared he would be kidnapped by James’s agents. He went round with a bodyguard of four men.
29. The cataloguing of trees was a common device in European literature, appearing in Ovid and more recently Spenser’s Faerie Queene, as well as in James Howell’s political allegory of 1640.
30. See Evelyn’s dedication of Sylva to Charles II in 1664.
31. The few other additions and omissions are typical of Behn: always sceptical about the institution of marriage, she chose to omit the picture of the yew as a widow mourning at the urn of her husband.
32. The author of the commendatory poem before Poems on Several Occasions entitled ‘Upon these and other Excellent Works of the Incomparable Astrea’ had declared even more universally, ‘surely she will live, / As many Ages as are past, / As long as Learning, Sense, or wit survive, / As long as the first principles of Bodies last.’ The comparison with Orinda was kept up in the commendatory poem to La Montre by Nahum Tate, where Behn was on a level with Katherine Philips; both were found equal to Sappho. In the commendatory poem to the later Lycidus, Daniel Kendrick placed Behn above Philips: ‘If we Orinda to your works compare, / They uncouth, like her country’s soyle, appear.’ Anne Killigrew died in 1685, declaring ‘for a monument I leave my VERSE,’ Poems by Mrs. Anne Killigrew (l686).
Chapter 29
1. Tom D’Urfey was urged to deliver a comedy ridiculing the Dutch States General.