by Janet Todd
2. For a discussion of other pamphlets on Bacon, see my ‘Spectacular deaths: history and story in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters, Oroonoko, and The Widdow Ranter’, Gender, Art and Death (Cambridge, 1993).
3. A True Narrative of the Rise, Progresse, and Cessation of the Late Rebellion in Virginia... by his Majestyes Commissioners (1676). Documents relating to the rebellion are printed in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, I, i (1894) and IV.1 (1898).
4. This avoidance of portraying royal authority directly continued the trend in Behn’s works. Where Dryden in Absalom and Achitophel had ended his poem with a too easygoing Charles II becoming suddenly assertive and centre-stage, Behn in The Roundheads had avoided bringing in the proper royal ruler.
5. Personal feeling may also have dictated this suppression. The large and diverse family of the Colepepers, to which Behn’s foster-brother Thomas belonged, were intimately bound up with Virginia. Governor Berkeley had taken as his third wife the widow Frances Colepeper, and, when he was recalled to England shortly after the rebellion, his successor was Lord Colepeper, who arrived in the colony in 1683. Behn might have met either Berkeley or Lord Colepeper, who was soon back in England, and learnt some of the facts which she appears to know, but which do not occur in the public accounts of the uprising. Of course Sunderland’s office might have been forthcoming once more. Another personal memory may have led to a possible reference to the botched trial of Algernon Sidney when Dullard says that a single witness is ‘good in Law’.
6. See Martha W. McCartney, ‘Cockacoeske, Queen of Pamunckey: Diplomat and Suzeraine’, Powhatans Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, ed. Peter H. Wood, Gregory Waselkov, and Thomas A. Hatley (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1990), pp. 173–95. Cockacoeske was given a crown, scarlet and purple robe, striped silver and gold brocade Indian gown lined in cherry-coloured soft silk, and a bracelet of false stones in compensation after the Bacon rebellion had been quelled.
7. The same could be said of the ‘Darling Indians’, whom Bacon regarded as marauders. These too were Europeanised but allowed some exotic customs. Their dance ‘with ridiculous Postures’ Behn may have borrowed from Richard Blome’s The Present State of his Majesties Isles and Territories in America, published in 1687 in London, which described the ‘devilish Mysteries’ of Native American religion and the ‘antick’ or grotesque dance of ‘monstrously painted’ figures in horns and loose coloured hair, pp. 185–6.
8. Works, vol. 7, p. 299.
9. There is also an analogy between the Monmouth Rebellion and the war with the Native Americans. The young chief is buoyed up with enigmatic prophecies of the sort Behn had observed in Monmouth and exposed in her translation of Oracles.
10. In keeping with her softening in The False Count and The Luckey Chance towards ‘good’ merchants who know their limits, Behn can now allow heroine status to the widow of a merchant, Mrs. Surelove, without birth but with reasonable breeding (in the context of the colonies).
11. See A New Dictionary of the Canting Crew (c. 1690). In Crowne’s The English Friar, published in the same year as Behn’s play, the leader of the town sparks is generically called Young Ranter and is a brute and a brawler, while Behn herself used the terms ‘rant’ for boisterous behaviour in the whore in The City-Heiress.
12. Works, vol. 7, p. 307.
13. ‘Knowing Mrs. Behn in her Life-time design’d to Dedicate some of her Works to you’ G. J.
14. Works, vol. 7, p. 338.
15. Ranter also shared Behn’s view of male heroism, mixing admiration and cynicism: men ‘get a name in War, from command, not courage’, she commented.
16. The Indian queen was played by a very different actress, Mrs Bracegirdle, making her debut in a Behn play—if her possible appearance as the child Mrs Ariell at the end of Abdelazer is discounted.
17. Events were moving so fast in 1688 that, by the time The Widdow Ranter was ready, its moment was gone and it was not performed until after Behn’s death late in 1689, with the satiric scene of the Virginian councillors omitted. Dryden wrote a prologue and epilogue, his first public statement since the arrival of William. Inevitably he equivocated, praising the recent triumph of William’s Protestants over James’s Catholics in Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, while suggesting that the former might be regarded as rebels. He insisted that Behn was not a politician or a propagandist, but simply the mistress of love: ‘She who so well cou’d Love’s kind Passion paint’; her play was an ‘Orphan Child’. The play flopped primarily because it was badly produced and cut: ‘Had our Author been alive she would have committed [the play] to the flames rather than have suffered it to have been acted with such omissions as was made,’ wrote its editor, probably George Jenkins (commender of Behn’s La Montre), who yet published with James Knapton an expurgated and very careless version without Dryden’s prologue and epilogue. Probably Tonson would not release these since he published them separately. Knapton was forced to provide the play with a substitute prologue to which he had access, one written much earlier by Dryden for Shadwell’s A True Widow. The epilogue came from The Covent Garden Drolery, without even a change of pronouns to fit it for a female author. Later, the verses appeared again with changed pronouns as the prologue to a second edition of Abdelazer, proving the point made by Mr Bays in The Rehearsal, that certain lines ‘may both serve for either: that is, the Prologue for the Epilogue, or the Epilogue for the Prologue... nay they may both serve too...for any other Play as well as this’. For a discussion see Rare Prologues and Epilogues 1642–1700, ed. Autrey Neil Wiley (London, 1940).
18. In the story, Trefry believed he could hinder the fate of Oroonoko by insisting that Byam’s and the rabble’s authority did not extend to Parham, the Proprietor’s house. Where order has collapsed and selfish interest is ruler, however, there is no respect for this equivalent of royal prerogative.
19. Imoinda was only partly assimilated into European culture and although the pastoral name, Clemene, is donated to her, it is seldom used.
20. See Lois Schwoerer, ‘Propaganda in the Revolution of 1688–89’, American Historical Review, 82, 1977, pp. 843–74.
21. For Burnet, this was always crucial to his own position as a supporter of monarchy but a traitor to James, as he explained in his An Enquiry Into the Measures of Submission to the Supream Authority.
Chapter 30
1. Some time earlier in Holland, Burnet, uncured of frank speaking, had asked what William had delicately avoided asking Mary: whether in any circumstances she, as the heir, would rule alone in England. Schooled in wifely duties, Mary was horrified and absolutely refused. This conversation was unknown in England when William, the nephew of Charles and James, was invited to invade. Burnet, History of His Own Time, vol. 111, p. 131.
2. Marion Grew, William Bentinck and William III (London, 1924), pp. 150–2.
3. Evelyn, Diary, 29 January 1689.
4. In fact, Behn probably did fairly well financially in 1688 with three stories, the anthology Lycidus, and two translations. If she had £20 to £25 a volume, what Tonson offered for Poems on Several Occasions, this would have brought in about £175. See Virginia Crompton’s ‘Forc’d to write for bread’.
5. Since The Luckey Mistake was published as a volume I, Behn must have intended one or two more stories to accompany it. These may have been ‘The Nun’ and ‘The Dumb Virgin’, both set on the Continent. Although two end tragically and one happily, all three stories look back to the Spanish sources of Behn’s early plays and are different from the idiosyncratic hybrids of fact and fiction which she had published just before James’s fall.
6. Of Elizabeth Cellier of the Meal-Tub Plot fame, Burnet had written that she ‘had a great share of wit and was abandoned to lewdness’.
7. Dryden, Works, vol. III, ll. 454–6. When the Jacobite propagandist machine got going, Burnet would be presented as a lover of Mary II.
8. Cowley also called himself Moses who ‘still alone (alas) dost gaping stand, / Upon the naked Beach, up
on the Barren Sand’. See too his translation of Horace’s tribute to Pindar which helps makes a line for Behn from Pindar through himself and Horace. All these poets declare modesty and exclusion. See Poems, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge, 1905), pp. 178–9.
9. Behn had used the metaphor of a coin, given value only because the King’s head was upon it, in her dedication to Sir William Clifton back in 1685. Now this coin, her poetry, though of little worth in itself, was given ‘value’—not converted to gold as it would be by a true king—by Burnet’s invitation. The image fitted well with Behn’s ambiguous opening image in the poem: she claimed she was more taken with Burnet’s request than a Roman consul chosen by ‘the Peoples Suffrages’. This seems a coded statement about authority: what Burnet was dealing in was not divine authority, but power held through manipulation of the people and through violence. Behn’s relation to it was equivocal but she needed both to have and to be ‘Currant Coyn’.
10. Comte de Pontbriant, Histoire de la Principauté d’Orange (Avignon, 1891), p. 247.
11. Behn may have held the common view that the crown should have been given to Mary alone. Sir Charles Sedley, for example, was unequivocally supportive of Mary but remained ambiguous in his attitude towards William.
12. Cowley, The Essays and Other Prose Writings, ed. Alfred B. Gough (Oxford, 1915).
13. Behn’s return to Bentley might suggest her shift in political attitude. At the same time it is notoriously difficult to assign political views to publishers on the basis of their publications. Behn’s works are the only specifically political works that Bentley admitted to publishing in 1689. Canning seems to have been tried for publishing a Jacobite broadside in 1690, see Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1668 to 1725, ed. Arundell Esdaile (Oxford, 1922).
14. Dryden was attacked a great deal in the autumn of 1688 and spring of 1689 by his literary enemies, including Tom Brown in The Reasons of Mr. Bays Changing his Religion. Address of John Dryden, Laureat to... the Prince of Orange was one such attack, attributed to Shadwell.
15. Gould, To the Society of the Beaux Esprits, p. 11.
16. It is not easy to say of what any Restoration person died. In the plague year the compilers of lists included as the causes of death beyond the plague: age, ague, cancer, childbed, canker, consumption, convulsion, distraction, dropsy, fever, flux, fright, gangrene, gout, griping in guts, small pox, French pox, grief, jaundice, King’s Evil, lethargy, pleurisy, rickets, sciatica, scouring, scurvy, spotted fever, stone, surfeit, ulcer and worms.
17. Ward, The London Spy, pp. 119–20.
18. The present stone reads ‘Mrs Aphra Behn Dyed April 16 A.D. 1689’. The original stone read ‘Mrs. APHARA Behn’.
19. Sam Briscoe at least must have scented something derogatory in the lines, since, in his dedicatory epistle to Familiar Letters of Love, Gallantry (1718), he complains of the taste of the Restoration, claiming that, if it had the same taste as now, Milton and Tom Brown would not have been neglected nor Dryden relieved of his pension nor ‘Mrs. Behn ever had but two Lines upon her Grave-stone’. At some point, however, the two lines were four with the addition: ‘Great Poetess! Thy stupendous Lays / The World admires, and the Muses praise.’ See Bodleian MS Eng. Poet.e.40, fo. 38; Top. gen.e. 32, fo. 13. The extra two were removed, perhaps in the recutting of the stone recorded by Joseph Chester in The Marriage, Baptismal, and Burial Registers of the Collegiate Church or Abbey of St. Peter Westminster, Harleian Society, 10, 1876. The ‘Memoirs’ declares the ‘wretched Verses’ made by ‘a very Ingenious Gentleman, tho’ no Poet, the very Person whom the Envious of our Sex, and the Malicious of the other, wou’d needs have the Author of most of hers’. This sounds like Hoyle, but, since Ravenscroft was also said to have helped Behn with her plays, the reference could conceivably be to him; the remark on his being no poet would then have been occasioned solely by the lines themselves.
20. Behn had said as much of Rochester. See also ‘To the Memory of the Incomparable Orinda’, Poems and Songs, 4th edn (London, 1686): ‘Thou, / Whose happy Verse made others live, / And certain Immortality could give; / Blasted are all thy blooming Glories now’ and ‘Upon these and other Excellent Works of the Incomparable Astrea in Poems on Several Occasions: ‘even Astrea with all her sacred store, / Be wreckt on Death’s inevitable Shore,’ though this writer declares she has left examples of her ‘immortal Wit’ behind.
21. The stone was most recently recut in April 1986.
Appendix
Chronological List of Behn’s Original Works, Ascribed Works, Edited Works and Translations
1671
The Forc’d Marriage
1671
The Amorous Prince
1671
‘To the Author of the New Utopia’, The Six days Adventure, or The New Utopia
1672
Covent Garden Drolery
including ‘I led my Silvia to a Grove’
‘Come my Phillis, let us improve’
‘When Jemmy first began to love’
‘Damon being asked a reason for loveing’
1673
The Dutch Lover
1677
Abdelazer, including the song ‘Love Arm’d’
1677
The Town-Fopp
1677
The Rover
[1677
The Debauchee]
1678
Sir Patient Fancy
1679
The Feign’d Curtizans
1680
A Paraphrase on Oenone to Paris’, Ovid’s Epistles, Translated by Several Hands
1680
The Revenge
1681
The Second Part of The Rover
1681
Song. To a New Scotch Tune
1682
The False Count
1682
The Roundheads
1682
The City-Heiress
1682
Prologue to Like Father, Like Son
1682
Prologue and epilogue to Romulus
1683
‘To the Unknown Daphnis’, in T. Lucretius Carus. The Epicurean Philosopher
1683
The Young King
1684
Prologue to Valentinian
1684
Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister Part I
1684
Poems upon Several Occasions
including ‘The Golden Age’
‘A Farewell to Celladon’
‘On a Juniper-Tree, cut down to make Busks’ ‘On the Death of Mr. Grinhil’
‘A Ballad on Mr J. H. to Amoret’
‘Song. The Complaint’
‘Our Cabal’
‘To Mrs. W. On her Excellent Verses’
‘The Sence of a Letter Sent Me’
‘On a Copy of Verses Made in a Dream’
‘The Return’
‘To my Lady Morland at Tunbridge’
‘The Disappointment’
‘The Dream, A Song’
‘A Letter to a Brother of the Pen in Tribulation’ ‘Song. To Pesibles Tune’
‘Silvio’s Complaint’
‘To Lysander, who made some Verses on a Discourse of Love’s Fire’
‘To Lysander, on some Verses he writ, and asking more for his Heart than ’twas worth’
‘To Lysander at the Musick-Meeting’
The Voyage to the Island of Love
1685
Pindarick on the Death of Charles II
1685
Poem to Catherine Queen Dowager
1685
A Pindarick on the Happy Coronation of... James II
1685
Love-Letters Part II
1685
‘On the Author of that Excellent and Learned Book, entituled Way to Health, Long Life, and Happiness’
1685
Miscellany
including A Letter to
Mr. Creech at Oxford’
‘On the Death of the late Earl of Rochester’
‘Cease, cease, Aminta to complain’
‘Paraphrase on the Lords Prayer’
‘A Pindaric to Mr. P. who sings finely’
‘Epitaph on the Tombstone of a Child’
‘Ovid to Julia’
‘Pastoral to Mr. Stafford’
Reflections on Morality or Seneca Unmasqued
1686
La Montre
1687
The Luckey Chance
1687
The Emperor of the Moon
1687
To the Most Illustrious Prince Christopher Duke of Albemarle
1687
Love-Letters Part III
1687
‘To the Honourable Sir Francis Fane, On his Excellent Play, The Sacrifice’
1687
To Henry Higden, Esq; On his Translation of... Juvenal
1687
Aesop’s Fables
1688
Lycidus... Together with a Miscellany of New Poems
including ‘To Damon, to inquire of him’
‘To Alexis in Answer to his Poem against Fruition’
‘To Alexis, On his saying, I lov’d a Man that talk’d much’
‘Pastoral Pindarick On the Marriage of...
Dorset’
‘On Desire A Pindarick’
‘To Amintas, Upon reading the Lives’
‘On the first discovery of falseness in Amintas’
‘To the fair Clarinda’
1688
A Congratulatory Poem... On the Universal Hopes... for a Prince of Wales
1688
Congratulatory Poem... On the Happy Birth of the Prince of Wales