The Theatre of Aphra Behn

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-20


10.1057/9780230597709 - The Theatre of Aphra Behn, Derek Hughes

Also by Derek Hughes DRYDEN’S HEROIC PLAYS EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS (general editor)


ENGLISH DRAMA, 1660–1700


The Theatre of Aphra Behn Derek Hughes Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-20

Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick


© Derek Hughes 2001

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–76030–1 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hughes, Derek, 1944– The theatre of Aphra Behn / Derek Hughes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–76030–1 1. Behn, Aphra, 1640–1689—Dramatic works. 2. Behn, Aphra, 1640–1689—Political and social views. 3. Women and literature– –England—History—17th century. 4. Feminism and literature– –England—History—17th century. I. Title. PR3317.Z5 H84 2000 822'.4—dc21 00–055683 10 10

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.



For Janet



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Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1 Background

4

2 First Attempt

14

3 First Impact

30

4 Experimentation

47

5 Maturity

80

6 Political Crisis

116

7 Political Triumph

133

8 Dearth and Famine

158

9 ‘Tho she is now no more’

174

Conclusion

192

Appendix

196

Notes

201

Bibliography

216

Index

222

vii



Contents

I should like to thank the friends who have given help during the preparation of this book: Rob Hume, Judy Milhous, Jessica Munns, Deborah Payne and Doug Canfield. I am also grateful to the many Web-friends in Kevin Berland’s 18th Century Discussion Group, who have provided prompt answers to numerous queries. My greatest debt of all is to Janet Todd, who suggested the project and has been an unfailing source of help and expert advice, which I have been quite unable to reciprocate during her simultaneous work on Mary Wollstonecraft. I am grateful to the University of Warwick for granting me study leave, and to the AHRB for granting me a one-term research fellowship, in order to complete this project. Parts of the Introduction and Chapter 4 have appeared in Women’s Writing, and part of my discussion of Sir Patient Fancy has appeared in Aphra Behn: Identity, Alterity, Ambiguity, ed. Mary Ann O’Donnell, Bernard Dhuicq and Guyonne Le Duc (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000). I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reuse this material.

viii



Acknowledgements

In the prologue written to Behn’s posthumously produced Widow Ranter, the actor chides the self-proclaimed wits for contesting the originality of one another’s productions and squabbling over literary property. Drawing on the metaphor of literary paternity, he concludes: But when you see these Pictures, let none dare To own beyond a Limb or single share; For where the Punk is common, he’s a Sot, Who needs will father what the Parish got. These lines would lose half their mordancy if the playwright were not Aphra Behn, the poetess-punk. This is a passage from what is unquestionably the most influential, and frequently reprinted, essay on Aphra Behn as a dramatist: Catherine Gallagher’s ‘Who was that Masked Woman? The Prostitute and the Playwright in the Comedies of Aphra Behn’,1 and it furthers Gallagher’s main, and widely accepted, thesis: that Behn ostentatiously manipulates what Gallagher considers to be the ‘a priori’ (p. 23) Restoration identification of authoress and whore, in order to imply the existence of an authentic, unrepresentable self, uncontaminated by the woman’s obligation to sell herself in the male literary marketplace. There are, however, two problems with this passage. One is that Gallagher simply misreads it. It is not about literary production at all: what it says is that the fools in the play are not based on individuals, so that to complain that one has been personally caricatured is as gratuitously self-incriminating as acknowledging paternity of a bastard whom anyone might have fathered. There is, however, a bigger problem: Gallagher never gets round the disabling fact that this prologue, which ‘would lose half [its] mordancy’ with another author, is a verbatim reissue of Dryden’s 1678 prologue for Shadwell’s A True Widow (and she persistently claims that it was spoken with The Widdow Ranter, not realizing that it was merely substituted by the publisher for the actual prologue).2 In early versions of the article, the origin of the prologue is tucked away in a footnote. In the final and fullest version, which forms the first chapter of Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story, the piece is described, 1



Introduction


without any qualifying footnote, as ‘written to’ Behn’s play (p. 27). Yet neither in its provenance nor its content does it have any relevance to Aphra Behn, the poetess-punk. That errors such as these (and there are others) should have remained largely unnoticed, in such an influential piece, reveals the huge gulf that has grown up between Behn scholarship and the wider study of Restoration theatre.3 The Behn revival has inspired acute analyses of individual Behn plays by scholars such as Janet Todd, Anita Pacheco and Jacqueline Pearson. Even so, only a few Behn plays have received sustained attention, and Behn critics have on the whole shown little interest in the large, complex, and constantly changing repertory of new plays – over two hundred during her lifetime – with which she interacted, and which she at times dominated. Rather, they have relied on untested assumptions about what men were writing. Jane Spencer, for example, claims: The typical sex comedy of the 1670s was a story of masculine dominance and sexual success. The hero was a libertine who dominated the action of the play through his clever tricks and its rhetoric through his witty repartee . . . Famous rake heroes include Horner of Wycherley’s The Country-Wife . . . and Dorimant of Etherege’s The Man of Mode.4 This is mistaken on two counts. Firstly, it has been known for a long time that Horner, Dorimant, and the plays in which they appear, are far from representative of 1670s sex comedy.5 Indeed, they have very few parallels. Secondly, attractive male dominance is far from the rule, particularly as the decade progresses, and there is even some protofeminist drama by male authors, such as Durfey, Shadwell and Behn’s friends Ravenscroft, Otway and Payne. Strikingly, they can be ingenuously utopian about women’s prospects, in contrast to Behn’s resentful realism. If we are assessing Behn’s place in the spectrum of Restoration drama, we must take the trouble to see all its colours. Behn’s plays have been analysed primarily as verbal texts; oddly, indeed, Gallagher argues that Behn preferred the abstraction of print to the corporeal clutter of a stage performance (Nobody’s Story, p. 58). Yet, far more instinctively than many of her male contemporaries (than Dryden, for example), she created an integration of verbal and visual signs, exploiting significant scenes and spaces, spatially arranged bodies, and props that enforce the social demarcation of gender: the sword, the document, the watch.6 This book is the first to provide a detailed study



2

of Aphra Behn’s entire dramatic output. It will pay full attention to the subtleties of the texts, their responses to political crisis, and their intellectual innovativeness, but it will also return them to the theatre in two ways, considering how Behn interacted with the constantly changing theatrical repertoire, and also how she wrote for spaces, bodies, objects and actors.



Introduction 3

1

When Behn’s last comedy, The Younger Brother, was published in 1696, it was prefaced by a short ‘ACCOUNT of the Life of the Incomparable Mrs. BEHN’, perhaps by Charles Gildon. According to this, ‘Her Maiden Name was Johnson, her father was a Gentleman of a good Family in Canterbury’.1 In her poem ‘The Circuit of Apollo’ Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, praised Behn’s talent (with moral reservations), but in a note on the manuscript curtly corrected misconceptions about Behn’s high birth: she was ‘Daughter to a Barber, who liv’d formerly at Wye a little market town (now much decay’d) in Kent’.2 Another witness is Colonel Thomas Colepepper, who records that Behn’s mother had been his wet-nurse, that her father’s name was Johnson, and that she had a ‘fayer’ sister called Frances.3 These independent testimonies by contemporaries are largely consistent, and as it happens there is a parish record that fits all the evidence: the baptism on 14 December 1640 of Eaffrey, daughter of Bartholomew Johnson, a barber of Canterbury, and his wife Elizabeth;4 Eaffrey had a sister, Frances, baptized in 1638. Whether or not this is the right family, the evidence of the Account, of Winchilsea and Colepepper seems beyond challenge, despite attempts to invent a more exotic background for Behn. Nothing is known of Behn’s childhood. In the preface to her first, but very belatedly premièred, play, The Young King, she revealed that the play had ‘visited many and distant shores’ and that its muse was ‘American’ (i.e. that it had been conceived in America; not that she herself was American, as is sometimes concluded) (Works, VII, 83). The account of a voyage to America was expanded in her late novel Oroonoko, set in Surinam, and it seems likely that she went there in 1663 (perhaps, as Janet Todd suggests, as a government agent), returning the following year. She first definitely enters the historical record in the mid-1660s, 4



Background

as a secret agent in the Low Countries, and in 1670 her tragicomedy The Forc’d Marriage, probably her second play, was staged by the Duke’s Company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Behn was not the first woman playwright to reach the professional stage. With the encouragement of the Earl of Orrery, an influential statesman and dramatist, the celebrated poet Katherine Philips had translated Corneille’s La Mort de Pompée. This had been performed in Dublin in 1663, and perhaps also in London the same year. It was not, however, until 1668 that the London stage started to open to women. Philips’s translation of Corneille’s Horace, completed after her death by Sir John Denham, was performed at court (February 1668)5 and, in January 1669, by the King’s Company at their theatre in Bridges Street. At about the same time, the first original woman’s play to reach the public stage, Frances Boothby’s Marcelia, was unsuccessfully performed at Bridges Street.6 Two plays by Elizabeth Polwhele, The Faithful Virgins and The Frolicks, were probably also staged at this time. Some scholars follow Pepys in attributing The Humorous Lovers (performed in 1667) to Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, rather than her husband, under whose name it was published. This is unnecessary, though it is interesting that Pepys could believe that he was watching a woman’s play.7 Nevertheless, Cavendish’s writings, including two large folios of feminist closet dramas, certainly gave prominence to the figure of the woman dramatist, and she published more extensively than any previous British woman. Innovative and seminal though she now seems, however, the spectacle of a noblewoman achieving ridicule through works published at her own expense provided Behn with neither an artistic nor an economic role-model, and she never mentioned Cavendish. The Restoration period was the one in which women first decisively entered the literary and theatrical marketplace.8 Actresses made their first appearance on the public stage, and from 1668 to 1673, when Behn was starting her career, the company for which she wrote was under the control of a woman.9 Bathsua Makin and, later, Mary Astell were to complain about the restrictions placed on women’s education, and it is noticeable that some men, even of a generally conservative and hierarchical outlook, were starting to think the same way. It is certainly true that the figure of the female poet inspired obscene and misogynous abuse, typified in the envious poetaster Robert Gould’s much quoted sneer that ‘Punk and Poesie agree so pat, / You cannot well be this and not be that’.10 Such sentiments cannot be ignored, but they do not represent the unanimous verdict of a monolithic culture (and it is



Background 5


generally overlooked that even Gould bestowed warm praise on Katherine Philips and Anne Wharton).11 Had they been, Behn could not have succeeded. Indeed, although Behn’s status as the first full-time woman dramatist might make her seem a vulnerable figure, lost in a crowd of men, she was in fact (after Dryden and Shadwell) only the third professional dramatist of either sex to emerge since 1660, for the stage in the 1660s had been largely dominated by gentleman amateurs, who were now bowing out. Although audience taste was, as always, capricious, Behn was often a prominent figure. For example, in the season of 1681–82,12 when the demand for comedies revived after a lull caused by prolonged political crisis, half of the eight new comedies were by her. Certainly, she records encounters with buffoons who found the idea of an authoress absurd; but she also enjoyed the friendship and admiration of many of the most successful male dramatists of her day, such as Edward Ravenscroft, Thomas Otway and Nathaniel Lee. One of Behn’s first publications was a contribution to the set of consolatory poems accompanying the published text of Edward Howard’s fiasco The Six Days Adventure, or the New Utopia (1671). Howard (Dryden’s brother-in-law, and one of three playwright brothers) was the son of the Earl of Berkshire, and his plays show a very rigid sense of social differentiation and hierarchy, but his sense of gender differentiation is more flexible. The Six Days Adventure is the second of two plays in which he had portrayed female governments which fizzle out, but succeed in diminishing male insensitivity and belligerence. In his preface, he defended his representation of gynocracy: perhaps it is more the authority of usage and manners, than the law of nature, which does generally incapacitate the Rule of women, there being not seldome to be found as great abilities in them (allowing for the disadvantage they have in not being suitably educated to letters,) as are to be observ’d in men of greatest comprehension.13 Courtesy books could write about women in similar vein. In 1631, Richard Brathwait had considered that women ‘should be seen and not heard . . . Their best setting out is silence’.14 Publishing in the year of Aphra Behn’s stage début, Richard Graham (later Viscount Preston) desired a more communicative companionship from a spouse. Man, he wrote, fearing lest [women] should Rival him in his Government, imposeth on them, by perswading them that their faculties are not receptive



6

Background 7

Women, he suggests, have co-operated in their own subjection and internalized the processes of oppression, seeming ‘to have made a Salique Law to bind themselves’ (p. 75). Another courtesy book to appear about this time, William Ramesay’s The Gentlemans Companion (1672) argues that women may perhaps be the better sex, and that daughters should be educated as carefully as sons.16 In an earlier courtesy book, The Gentlemans Monitor (1665), Edward Waterhouse condemns anti-feminist satire.17 Pre-Restoration royalist literature had emphasized the analogy between the wife’s subordination to her husband and subject’s subordination to the ruler, the husband of the kingdom.18 Such analogies continued to be used (though Behn herself had no truck with them), and they recur in many plays of the early 1660s, which repeatedly dwell on the recent cycle of usurpation and restoration, and frequently associate it with the suspension of male authority over women. For example, when Sir William Davenant revised Macbeth so as to stress its topical relevance to the murder of Charles I and the succession of his son, he made Lady Macbeth eventually regret that her husband had not governed her ‘by the Charter of [his] sex’.19 Yet political arguments drawn from the status of women could be more complex and idiosyncratic, as can be seen in a curious passage in a work by George Hickes, a staunch adherent of Charles II’s brother James both during the attempts to exclude him from the succession in 1679–81, and after his deposition in 1688. Defending the monarchy against democratic challenge, Hickes produced an extraordinary sequence of arguments. Who, he asked, were the People to whom government was entrusted? Did they include children? His opponents would object that children lacked full intellectual maturity, and he would grant the objection. But what about women? His opponents would object that women were also intellectually disqualified, but here Hickes would not agree: ‘there is no natural difference between their understandings and ours, nor any defects in their knowledge of things, but what Education makes’.20 Democracy, therefore, inevitably implies female suffrage, because women are the intellectual equals of men (Hickes later supported Elizabeth Elstob’s researches into Old English); yet the fact that it does so illustrates how absurd the democratic project is. To concede the potential intellectual equality of women was not to cast off all traditional notions of their



of Arts, and rough Virtues; and by this stratagem confineth them by the administration of a narrow Province . . . when it is clear that their inclinations are better than this, and their resolutions greater.15


social subordination; but their intellectual subordination is not here an essential, microcosmic part of an interlocking system of social and natural hierarchies. Richard Graham, similarly, sees no need to translate equality of ability into equality of status. Once he has deplored the unnecessary intellectual impoverishment of women’s life, he makes some disappointingly timid counter-proposals: ‘I offer this, not to encourage them to rebel against Man, whom God hath made their head; but to advise them to serve the World under some other Noble Character, and not onely to devote themselves to the uses of Generation’ (p. 76). Men, clearly, are not offering to share the world with women, but they are increasingly making the preliminary concessions that would eventually make such sharing morally inevitable, and in France one man, François Poulain de la Barre, did make a point similar to that which repeatedly provides the starting-point of Behn’s plays: that the subjection of women is an irrational survival from archaic societies which depended upon military strength.21 Graham’s is an obscure voice, directly if briefly addressing the issue of women’s intellectual life, and evidencing the early stages of a slow, inconsistently moving realignment of priorities in the male viewpoint. By contrast, one of the loudest voices of the age was that of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), widely denounced for his materialistic account of human consciousness, for his belief that the notion of an immaterial soul was an absurd contradiction in terms, for his radical reinterpretation of the Biblical text so as to remove from it all support for the idea of spiritual experience, and for his derivation of all moral principles from secular authority (to the point of asserting that the sovereign had the authority to determine which books of the Bible were canonical). His views were held, probably rightly, to imply a larger and unspoken doctrine: atheism. Although scarcely the spokesman of his age, Hobbes was enormously influential on the intellectual and sexual iconoclasm of the leading Restoration dramatists, including Aphra Behn; and, although he says little directly about the status of women, and contradicts himself in what he does say, his views about the human body (though without long-term influence, because they had no empirical basis) did provide a foundation for the new constructions of gender that we find in Restoration comedy.22 Hobbes reduced desire, sensation, and thought itself to the operations of matter in motion. Because the human constitution was one of incessant material process, human beings were creatures of restless desire, intrinsically egocentric: in the state of nature, prior to civilization,



8

everyone was at war with everyone else. Society was established not because men were, as Aristotle had maintained, naturally civilized, but for the opposite reason: that they were rapacious savages, needing the restraints of society to escape the chaotic violence of their own natures. The paradox that man is naturally a citizen because he is naturally a savage pervades the drama of Behn’s contemporaries, and feeds her own preoccupation with the persistence in modern society of the archaic military systems in which it originated. Hobbes is not consistent on the status and nature of women. He does argue that, in general, and with exceptions, women are less apt for government than men,23 but in his most famous and influential work, Leviathan, he questions whether man is ‘of the more excellent Sex’, and points out that women are just as capable of self-defence as men, making up in cunning what they lack in physical strength.24 He also denies the principle of patriarchal succession: if power comes from physical generation, then it should come from the woman.25 But he makes no distinction between the mechanics of the male and the female body, and the absence of bodily distinctions affecting the total personality is a key point in some leading Restoration comedies, where men and women are driven by identical or parallel desires, which are arbitrarily subject to very different social construction and control. Unsurprisingly, one of the most trenchant representations of the female body as a machine comes in one of Behn’s plays, The Younger Brother, first performed in 1696, seven years after her death. Here, one of the heroines, Teresia, lists her sexual attractions, which include ‘one Pretty well made Machin[e], call’d a Body, of a very good Motion’ (II. i. 50–1).26 In correcting a one-sided picture, one must not simply paint it from the other side. If Robert Gould was not the high priest of the Restoration culture of gender, he was not alone, and far more authoritative and thoughtful figures denounced the new social and sexual freedoms assumed by women. In the 1690s, the great high-church preacher Robert South listed female theatre- and tavern-going among the ills of a debauched and atheistic age: the modest sex, he complained, ‘are come to brave it in theatres and taverns; where virtue and modesty are drunk down, and honour left behind to pay the reckoning’.27 There was, however, a slight movement of the ground, a fissuring of the monolith, from which Behn profited, and which she also, for a while, assisted. As has been mentioned, Behn was not battling against a man-created repertory that was entirely hostile to her outlook. Indeed, a feminist



Background 9


book of 1696 praised most of the leading comedy writers for instructing the world in ‘Wit, Humanity, and Manners’,28 and attributes the easy wit of Etherege‘s and Sedley’s plays to their conversation with ladies (pp. 146–7). Two points repeatedly made by sympathetic male dramatists, as well as by Behn herself, are that men control both the writing of history and the management of law; that women’s lives are judged in codes perpetuated in narratives that are framed by an alien sex. There is, for example, mockery of men’s claim to narrative monopoly in Madam Fickle (1676), an early play by one of the most prolific of male feminist dramatists, Thomas Durfey. Fickle, the heroine, is a linguistic virtuoso, shifting styles, voices and dialects, in order to bemuse and deceive a variety of dim-witted suitors, all of whom wish to dominate women beneath the guise of idealization. One of the figures with whom she contrasts is Sir Arthur Oldlove, an antiquarian obsessed with the collection of (obviously bogus) historical relics: Sir Gawain’s skull, Sir Lancelot’s sword, Pompey the Great’s breeches, the tears of that patron saint of anti-feminist writing, St Jerome. These testify to an overwhelmingly male-dominated past. But it is now a past without a narrative: merely a clutter of disjunct objects. The power of narrative has passed to the woman; and, during the play, St Jerome’s tears are spilt. It is noteworthy, however, that Behn herself never takes so rosy a view of women’s ability to gain equality of status through equality of linguistic power. For her, men exercise the power of the word because it is always underwritten by that of the sword. The source and continuing support of men’s supremacy is in their capacity for violence, of which language is an instrument and an extension. Words by themselves are ineffectual. All the theorists who, from Aristotle onwards, have derived humanity’s capacity for civilization from its capacity for language, and who have linked the health of a civilization to the health of its language, have missed the point. For Behn, civilization is not founded on language; it is founded on violence. What changes throughout her work is the relationship of the milieu she is portraying to its origins in archetypal militaristic cultures. Her first two plays go back to the origins of male supremacism, depicting feudal societies whose hierarchies and imperatives are those of the battlefield. Memories of the warrior society are generally an important background to her later work, but increasingly she examines the transition from military to economic power, and the interaction between the two. At first she portrays the abuse of power by a wealthy, peacetime aristocracy. She then goes further, examining the conflict



10

11

between the ancient gentry, whose vitality and flamboyance she admires, and the rising commercial classes, who lack the glamour and potency of the old order but give new form to its ways of confining women and ritually exchanging them: however opposed the rival systems of male power are to each other, they can be identical in relation to women. The paradox particularly dominates the plays that she wrote in the early 1680s, when she supported James, Duke of York, against those who wished to exclude him from succession to the throne on the grounds of his Catholicism. Though unqualified in their contempt for the opposition, they reveal a despondent – and realistic – conviction that women are excluded subordinates in any imaginable allocation of political authority. In one of her last plays, The Widdow Ranter (as in her great novella, Oroonoko) she actually juxtaposes modern commercial and primitive militaristic societies, displaying the whole span of social evolution in a single landscape, and meditating on the oppositions and affinities of the conflicting cultures. Only in the political odes of her last years did Behn see the kingdom as embodying divinely instituted principles of order. In her plays and fiction, it never replicates the microcosmic hierarchy of the human body, or the larger hierarchies of the visible or invisible heavens; power is a human creation, and it can be variously created. As she moves beyond her simple concern with male military values, she becomes fascinated not only by the power of money but by that of enumeration: counting, measurement, time-keeping. Increasingly, the power of the sword cedes to that of the clock or watch: Behn was one of the first dramatists to observe that a universe of symbolic forms was being supplanted by one of numerical abstraction; an observation that, in the next generation, was taken up by the playwrights Centlivre, Farquhar and Steele. One purpose of this book, therefore, will be to clarify Behn’s status as an intellectual, interested in new ideas, such as those of Hobbes, but highly capable of thinking for herself, both about the books which she read and the world which they analysed. She expressed her ideas through the stage, which she manipulated far better than a more erudite contemporary such as Dryden. While clarifying the restless intellectual enquiry that runs through Behn’s plays, I wish to discourage the habit of reading the plays simply as ideological texts, and to demonstrate her supreme skill – unrivalled in her lifetime – in using all the resources of meaning offered by the theatre. 1660 was a year of double Restoration. In the eighteen months after the death of Oliver Cromwell in September 1658, the Puritan régime



Background


collapsed as a result of unpopularity and inner dissension. The monarchy was restored, and with it the theatre, which (apart from a few operatic experiments in the late 1650s), had been outlawed since 1642. The right to perform plays was quickly confined to two companies, the King’s and the Duke’s, managed by two men of the theatre from Charles I’s reign, Thomas Killigrew (1612–83) and the more able and adventurous Sir William Davenant (1606–68). But, despite these figures of continuity, the theatre was a different place, physically, culturally and commercially. Apart from Davenant, no pre-Restoration playwright produced any original work after 1660, and even Davenant’s postRestoration output consisted predominantly of alterations of Shakespeare. Outdoor theatre quickly disappeared, and under Davenant’s initiative changeable, sometimes spectacular, scenery appeared on the public stage for the first time. The first public theatre to use changeable scenery was the converted tennis court which Davenant opened in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1661. He dreamed of, but did not live to see, its more elaborate successor: the Dorset Garden theatre, opened in 1671, which was the late seventeenth-century theatre best equipped for ambitious stage spectacle. Like most talented playwrights who emerged in the 1670s, Behn wrote exclusively for the Duke’s Company, until the two companies merged. Scene changes were effected by shutters, set in sets of (probably) three grooves, and by matching wings, also set in grooves, and borders.29 Probably at Lincoln’s Inn Fields (and certainly at later theatres) two sets of shutter grooves were called for, sufficiently far apart for the first set to draw and reveal characters in front of the second.30 Aphra Behn was especially fond of such ‘discovery scenes’. The rear shutters could also be drawn, to reveal a three-dimensional scene, or to create a ‘long’ scene using the whole depth of the stage, such as the ‘long street’ which is used both in The Rover and Sir Patient Fancy. In addition to the scenic space, however, there was an apron stage in front of the proscenium arch, with one or two doors on either side,31 on which most acting took place. The forestage could be used as a neutral scenic space, in which change of place could occur without change in the scene behind it: characters could, for example, pass from room to room, or from the house to the street, simply by leaving through one door and returning through another, without any change of scenery.32 In addition to the usual resources for scenery, Dorset Garden had unparalleled resources for special effects, such as the following apparition from the opera Albion and Albanius by Dryden and Grabu:



12

Background

13

Although spectacular operatic productions were the jewel in the crown of Dorset Garden in the 1670s, they were necessarily a rare and special investment. Most productions used stock scenes, and special effects (such as the peacock) could be recycled.34 Only once, in The Emperor of the Moon (1687), did Behn use elaborate effects, yet she repeatedly used commonplace stage settings with great care and intelligence, particularly in order to create a sense of gendered space and boundaries. The long street scene in Sir Patient Fancy, which includes the absurd spectacle of a man riding an elephant, is a sudden, unique opening of a vista in a play otherwise marked by oppressive enclosure. In her first play to be performed, The Forc’d Marriage (1670), she creates a remarkable tableau divided by the proscenium arch: behind it, in the scenic area, is the forced marriage, along with the king, the father, and the priests who enforce it. Outside the arch, looking despairingly in, are the characters whose lives seem doomed to unfulfilment by the ritual of power and compulsion from which they are excluded. A subtler yet more permanent boundary runs through her next play, The Amorous Prince (1671), in which women never venture out of doors in female dress. On several occasions, they stand in the proscenium doors, but they do not step out of them. At these moments, they remain visually framed, denied the undifferentiated open space of the forestage. However much freedom the theatre may have given to Behn, and however much Robert South may have denounced the freedom with which women moved in such public places, Behn knew how to use the very structure of the stage to represent the visible and invisible walls within which most women still lived their lives.



The Clouds divide, and Juno appears in a Machine drawn by Peacocks; while a Symphony is playing, it moves gently forward, and as it descends, it opens and discovers the Tail of the Peacock, which is so Large, that it almost fills the opening of the Stage between Scene and Scene.33

2

The Young King As a dramatist, Aphra Behn is chiefly remembered for feminist contributions to ‘Restoration comedy’, a term now exclusively associated with witty comedies about rakish heroes and spirited or compliant women. When Behn started writing, however, sex comedy had not yet evolved, and her earliest plays were in the quite different genre of romantic tragicomedy: the most popular mode of the 1660s. It was a form peculiarly appropriate for dramatizing the recent reversals of British history, with the restored king miraculously arising from the ashes of his executed father.1 Politically, the euphoria of the Restoration soon wore off, and Charles had a poor first decade. Soon after his return, he began what Ronald Hutton has called ‘one of the great public adulteries of history’,2 with the Countess of Castlemaine. His brother James (lacking, as ever, Charles’s sense of style) made pregnant and secretly married a commoner, Anne, daughter of the Lord Chancellor Sir Edward Hyde. After some dishonourable vacillation about acknowledging the marriage, he eventually did so. James’s conduct appeared shabby, and Hyde – ennobled as Earl of Clarendon – gained a disastrous unpopularity. Further resentment was aroused by the sale to Louis XIV of Dunkirk (conquered by Cromwell) and by the childless marriage of Charles to Catherine of Braganza (both arranged by Clarendon). There followed plague (1665), fire (1666) and military humiliation by the Dutch (1667); made a scapegoat for the nation’s ills, Clarendon fled abroad to avoid impeachment for treason. In the wake of Clarendon’s fall, two plays appeared in which an ambitious favourite seeks to raise himself by marrying a female relative of the king: Sir Robert Howard’s The Great 14



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Favourite (1668) and Frances Boothby’s Marcelia (1669). It is possible that Behn’s The Forc’d Marriage (1670), with its favourable portrayal of royal marriage to a commoner, defends the York–Hyde marriage, though it is not clear why she should wish to do so. Nevertheless, the political embarrassments of the 1660s remained largely unexplored in the drama of that decade and most of the serious plays of the period ended happily, normally with a royal restoration. At the same time, dramatists did indicate that their scandalously promiscuous king should fulfil the moral expectations which had abounded in 1660. This is the kind of drama which Behn wrote in her early years; her very first play portrays a restoration, but (like each of her three early tragicomedies) it also deplores royal insensitivity to women. Behn turned to social comedy, however, only in the mid-1670s, after the fashion for sex-comedy had established itself and moved into its second phase, going beyond bed-hopping to a dark, ironic examination of sexual manipulation and betrayal. At the beginning of the 1670s, comedy had no clear sense of direction and was predominantly lightweight. During the previous decade, a daring form of comedy, outrageous in its sexual sentiments though perfectly chaste in its action, had been built around the talents of Charles Hart and Nell Gwyn at the King’s Company; in 1948, John Harrington Smith termed such partnerships ‘gay couples’, and the term remains in use.3 Yet even this formula had sometimes been exploited in the subplots of tragicomedies, and the last important play to exploit the Hart–Gwyn formula had been Dryden’s An Evening’s Love, in 1668.4 In retrospect, Etherege’s She Would If She Could, performed by the Duke’s Company in February 1668, can be seen to foreshadow some of the best comedy of the following decade, but it was not at first successful, and was not imitated until over four years had passed. The crop of new comedies in 1669 was unimpressive,5 and over the next two years the predominant fashion was for rather empty imitations of Molière, with none of the intellectually radical recasting of his texts that dramatists (including Behn) would achieve a few years later. Among the early imitators of Molière was the rising dramatist Thomas Shadwell, who tried to steer comedy to the moral high ground, but in his apprentice plays did so through pompous prefaces and priggish main characters. At first he could not, as Behn instinctively could from the outset, think morally and dramatically at the same time. In the years 1669–71, only one new comedy of any intellectual complexity appeared: Wycherley’s Love in a Wood, produced by the King’s Company in March 1671. Like most emerging dramatists, Behn wrote for the more go-ahead Duke’s Company, but this company had



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only premièred four comic hits since the Restoration. It is hardly surprising that she did not immediately see comedy as her natural medium, and chose tragicomedy. The first two Behn plays to be staged were The Forc’d Marriage (September 1670) and The Amorous Prince (February 1671), both performed at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre shortly before the Duke’s Company’s move to the more lavishly equipped theatre at Dorset Garden. It is probable, however, that the first of Behn’s plays to be written was another tragicomedy, The Young King. When this was published in 1683, after its belated première in 1679 at Dorset Garden, she described it in the dedication as ‘the first Essay of my Infant-Poetry’, claiming that it had traversed ‘three thousand Leagues of spacious Ocean’ and that its muse was ‘American’ (Works, VII, 83); that is, one assumes, that she had begun it before her return from Surinam. Behn clearly indicates that the play had not been revised. She may, of course, have been lying to disarm criticism, but in the absence of decisive evidence to the contrary it seems best to take her at her word and to consider this play along with her other early tragicomedies, which it resembles both in genre and subject. Its topic, the restoration of a king, clearly belongs to the decade after 1660, and it is linked to The Forc’d Marriage in portraying the place of women in a feudal, militaristic society, and in deriving male supremacism from the priorities of a military culture. The emphasis on feudal structures is generally characteristic of serious drama in the early Restoration, for in dramatizing (and fictionalizing) the recent cycle of usurpation and restoration playwrights forgot the real grievances of Charles I’s opponents: religious oppression, questionable taxation, unparliamentary rule. Political relationships are simplified into the feudal loyalties of an aristocratic élite, conflicts of economic interest disappear, male bonding is idealized, and love assumes a quite unrealistic political importance. In one of the earliest tragicomedies about Restoration, the Earl of Orrery’s The Generall, the usurper has seized power because he loves the heroine, and he is at one point tempted to rape her, his proposed sexual violence paralleling the violence by which he has already gained the kingdom. Contrastingly, Orrery’s heroes subordinate desire to rational control, internally re-enacting the submission of the kingdom to the true monarch. So powerful is the monarchy of reason that pairs of friends will even willingly help each other’s courtship when both love the same woman. Orrery’s tragedies portray a world without money, sustained by respect for the moral power of language: for the oath, the vow, the sacred name of king. It was, indeed, a long time before late seventeenth-



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century dramatists could adequately represent a contemporary commercial mentality; Behn was one of the first to do so. Experienced though he was as a politician and landowner, Orrery even gave a strikingly limited role to acts of counting in his tragedies, showing a sharply declining interest in numbers as they rise beyond two; few numbers above six are mentioned at all. The reason for the prominence of one and two is that they are the numbers of love, friendship, rivalry, and moral choice. Plays such as The Generall retreat from the social complexities of the present to an outmoded, simplified, and imaginary social order. As has been mentioned, one index of Behn’s changing interpretation of power is her increasing interest in systems of enumeration. This is absent in her earliest works, where she is portraying the same sorts of world as Orrery. In her case, however, the emphasis on the feudal is not a comforting and nostalgic simplification: it is more an exercise in social anthropology, tracing male dominance to its roots. If Orrery idealizes male bonding, Behn sees its harsh and destructive potential. Women certainly win clear victories, and inspire notable personal reforms in men, but they do not (how could they?) free the social order from the influence of its origins.6 She portrays rituals of victory involving the exchange of women, and emphasizes that social and sexual hierarchies owe their origins to violence and physical power. In her best known plays, such as The Rover and The Luckey Chance, women are exchanged in the marketplace, but in these first plays they are military prizes: the only ‘Trade’ is ‘War’ (YK I. i. 38), and only in later plays do commerce and enumeration replace the battlefield, or become an extension of it. We are, as yet, a long way from the sex by numbers that is to be offered, and suffered, by the courtesan Angellica Bianca in The Rover: ‘she’s exposed to Sale, and Four days in the Week she’s yours – for so much a Month’ (I. ii. 305–6).7 We do not know why The Young King was not performed along with Behn’s other early plays. One possible reason might be the tepid reception, probably in spring 1670, of a Duke’s Company play with a somewhat similar subject, The Womens Conquest by Edward Howard. Like his next and totally unsuccessful play, The Six Days Adventure (the play for which Behn supplied a supportive introductory poem), this was a sympathetic (though ultimately conservative) study of reversed gender roles, and it is rather close to The Young King in contrasting an Amazonian society with one of male warriors. Whether or not The Young King was tainted by the fortunes of The Womens Conquest, however, its moment quickly passed, for romantic tragicomedy rapidly went out of



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fashion in the 1670s, as drama became more politically pessimistic and sexually explicit.8 Its possible relevance to the political situation in 1679 will be discussed in due course, but the reason for its resurrection is likely to be a bread-and-butter one: comedy was not doing well. The Young King has two interwoven plots. The one portraying royal restoration is taken from Life is a Dream (La Vida es sueño [1635]) by the great Spanish dramatist Calderón de la Barca. In Calderón, King Basilio of Poland, priding himself on his learning, has discovered from portents and the stars that his son, Segismundo, is predestined to be a bloody tyrant, and therefore keeps him chained in a tower, dressed in the skins of wild beasts. Segismundo is allowed to be king for a day, behaves as tyrannically as the oracle had predicted, and is therefore drugged and returned to prison, where he is persuaded that his reign was a mere dream, and gains wisdom and moderation from the realization. Nevertheless, he is only freed as a result of a chaotic and bloody revolution, whereafter he is reconciled with his father, and imprisons as a traitor the soldier who liberated him. Calderón stresses Basilio’s presumption in reading the stars and folly in trying to override the divine will: a folly which led him to turn Segismundo into the very monster that he feared. Behn has no verbal debts to Calderón (indeed, it is unclear whether she knew the play at first hand),9 but she retained the outline of the Segismundo plot (turning him into Orsames, Prince of Dacia). She does not emphasize the presumption of reading the future and the folly of trying to forestall it. Orsames’s destiny has simply been foretold by unspecified oracles, and the point is not that the imprisonment intended to thwart the predictions perversely fulfils them, by corrupting his character; rather, the day of tyranny has fulfilled the oracle, and Orsames is now free to commence a second, just reign. Behn also simplifies the liberation of the prince. Instead of a bloody revolution, which Segismundo himself eventually punishes, Behn simply portrays a restoration. The motives and outlook of the soldiers who restore Orsames are satirically portrayed, but the event itself is largely beneficent. That this can be so is due to Behn’s major departure from Calderón. Segismundo’s mother died in giving birth to him, and Calderón focuses on a primal conflict between father and son. In Behn, it is the father who is dead: Orsames is already the rightful king, and he is imprisoned on the orders of his mother. The play is a struggle for power between the sexes, and the dispossessed heir who in Calderón is an embodiment of humanity pushed back to its basest and most fallen condition here becomes an embodiment of pure testosterone; the dis-



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tilled essence of manhood. In plays by men about rebellion or restoration, the seizing of power by inferior classes had sometimes been symbolized by the usurpation of power by women.10 Behn too portrays female usurpation, but characteristically reverses the usual significance of the theme, using the rule of women to criticize the rule of men.11 One aspect of this criticism has a particular and even daring topicality. Although tactful reproof of the king’s sex life had become quite common in drama by the mid-1660s, Behn goes further in this direction than anyone else, portraying the reform of a ruler who is at first a mass of indiscriminate, incestuous, and rapist lusts. La Vida es sueño had a secondary plot, in which the seduced Rosaura recovers her honour, and is united with her previously unknown father (who had seduced her mother). She first appears in male disguise, carrying the clue to her unknown ancestry: the sword of her father. Oddly, this deracinated figure at one point takes the pseudonym which Behn repeatedly used, and with which she signed the dedication of the play: Astrea.12 From this plot, Behn specifically retains only an incident in which Segismundo tries to rape the heroine, though she is keenly interested in the capacity of women to cope with male guise and the male symbol of the sword. In order to explore these preoccupations, however, she uses a plot of more extensive female cross-dressing, closely derived from the English translation of a popular French prose romance, La Calprenède’s Cleopatra.13 This concerns the problems of sexual identity which Orsames’s sister, Cleomena, experiences in sustaining the Amazonian role of female warrior which has been thrust on her by her brother’s displacement: ‘Tell me whom [sic] I am?’ (IV. v. 66), she eventually asks one of the most purely macho characters in the cast, the gruff colonel Vallentio. Her conflicts and divisions of identity become acute when she falls in love with Thersander (whose name recalls the Greek words for ‘bold’ and ‘man’). He is prince and heir apparent of the enemy nation of Scythia (his father killed Cleomena’s father), but he is fighting on the Dacian side under the name of Clemanthis, initially in order to liberate his captive friend Amintas but soon because he, in turn, loves Cleomena. Cleomena, of course, is unaware of Thersander’s true identity, only knowing him as the mysterious stranger Clemanthis. Both lovers thus have divided identities: woman and warrior, lover and foe. The portrayal of Clemanthis as being both (as is repeatedly stressed) a ‘Stranger’ and, in his origins, an enemy is the first appearance of a recurrent Behn theme, emphasizing the violence and lack of reciprocity that is latent in the love of men for women. The problems arising from the complementary divisions of identity



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culminate in an extraordinarily complicated series of disguises and misunderstandings, the upshot of which is that each lover nearly kills the other, actualizing the alienness and hostility in which their relationship is covertly rooted. The complications are hard to follow, but they are important, and therefore need to be spelled out. While disguised as Clemanthis, Thersander is chosen by the Dacians to fight a single combat with the enemy prince; that is, with himself. Forced to choose between his identity as lover and as feudal warrior, he chooses the latter, deciding to fight as Thersander and secretly arranging that his friend Amintas will fight, and lose, in the guise of Clemanthis. The friend, however, is wounded before the fight, and Cleomena secretly takes his place, in turn disguising herself as Clemanthis. Disguised as her lover’s second self, she thus enters a potential battle to the death with his primary self, and is seriously wounded in the conflict. What this battle between Thersander’s two selves does is to externalize an interior conflict between male and female principles. Cleomena, obviously, disguises herself as a man and seeks to enter the arena of male violence. By allowing Thersander’s Dacian self to be represented by a woman, however, Behn suggests that the principles which transcend and override the divisions of war are feminine. Thersander, retreating into ancestral patterns of military loyalty, retreats into masculinity, and into a violence that almost destroys the object of his love. If Thersander’s identity is split between that of the destructive warrior and the more feminine lover, Orsames, the imprisoned young king, is a pure embodiment of aggressive male lusts, even though the solitude of his imprisonment has isolated him from all cultural incitements to masculinity, his only culture being the ineffective platitudes of an elderly tutor. (Behn here reverses Calderón: Segismundo has been reduced to a monster by the denial of education and love; Orsames remains a man, despite all environmental discouragements.) Like Segismundo, Orsames attempts to rape the first woman he sees (while addressing her as a goddess – a frequent combination in Behn), and he is sexually aroused by the first glimpse of his mother. Behn here suggests, as she does throughout her work, that the fundamental familial relationships between man and woman are desperately fragile, easily destroyed when the most primal male response of all takes over: lust for a nameless and undifferentiated sexual object, without character or social identity. This is why Behn is so preoccupied with the image of the lover as stranger: within the most familiar and secure of relationships, there is some residue of the threatening alienness of the predatory male.



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Cleomena has had an Amazonian upbringing, ‘bred more like a General than a Woman’ so that ‘one would swear [she] were no Woman’ (I. i. 73, 66–7), and she attempts to act the male role to which she has been socially constructed; but the role is not the person and, as she admits early on, she has ‘a Heart all soft . . . all Woman’ (I. ii. 26). Even the tributes to her masculinity are not entirely objective, since they come from the most effeminate man in the play, the coward Pimante. This does not, however, mean that Behn was tamely acquiescing in male interpretations of sexual difference. The male supremacism of the Christian church was supported by the belief that men have a greater capacity for reason than women, who are more confined to the sensual. Here, however, it is men who are the more sensual and materially driven, and male reason is a fiasco: witness the impotently platitudinous philosopher Geron, whose teaching spectacularly fails to restrain Orsames’s lusts. Men exercise control because they have a greater capacity for violence, and violence, not reason, is the ultimate foundation of society. In the very nature of her work as a writer, Behn was claiming equal female access to public forms of discourse. Yet, at the same time, she seems to have doubted whether language was the primary key to power: language possesses authority only when it is supported by strength. Throughout The Young King, she compares the potency of language and violence, showing the former becoming increasingly subordinate to the latter. This is why the sermons of the philosophical tutor are largely powerless to influence Orsames’s lusts. There is only one occasion on which Geron’s discourses do morally affect Orsames – when he finally tells him his life story – and even here force takes priority over the word, for the discourse is extorted by threats of death. The conflict between language and violence is fundamental to Behn’s visualization of the play, and to her deployment of its two major props, the weapon and the document. The play’s first visual image is of letters. They are, as it turns out, from a woman, the Dacian Queen, and the man bearing them is the stock coward of the play, Pimante, who spends his life trying to remain spatially distant from the battlefield. Though here an instrument of authority, writing is at this point doubly distanced from military power, both by the sex of its author and the character of its bearer. When Cleomena first falls in love with ‘Clemanthis’, it is with the figure described in her mother’s and uncle’s letters: an idea abstracted into language, etherealized away from the direct brutality of the battlefield; an idea that she has seen only in dreams. As Cleomena’s love passes from the page to the flesh, however, so it progresses towards



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two symmetrically balanced acts of violence: in the single combat, Thersander nearly kills Cleomena; later, she nearly kills him. Acts of writing occur at key points in this progress, but they are acts which push language towards the domain of violence and away from pure female control. For example, when lots are drawn to decide who shall fight the duel with Thersander, the deciding lot is the one with his name on it. We see Cleomena writing the name, and Clemanthis drawing the lot that appoints him to fight with himself; Cleomena’s act of writing is thus self-undermining, initiating the sequence of events that is to lock the two lovers in violent, uncomprehending conflict, and to bring Cleomena close to death at her lover’s hands. It is also to bring Thersander close to death at Cleomena’s. His solution to the dilemma of how to fight himself had been to get his friend Amintas to disguise himself as Clemanthis; Cleomena had assumed the disguise after the first false Clemanthis had been attacked, and apparently murdered, by jealous rivals. Cleomena believes that Clemanthis has been murdered by Thersander, and this misconception – ‘The Mistake’ of the play’s subtitle – leads to the second act of violence between the lovers, when she attempts to murder him in revenge. Unable to do so in open combat, however, she has to do so by subterfuge. She enters his tent ‘drest like a Country-Shepherd’ (IV. v. 197a), a figure from the peaceful pastoral world that appears intermittently throughout the play as an alternative to feudal militarism: a world whose occupations enforce little distinction of gender role, but which is also passive and marginal. And she distracts Thersander’s attention by handing him a letter, whose text is ‘thou shalt die by the Hand that brings thee this’ (IV. v. 198–9). The text becomes the dagger. At this moment when she links her language so uncompromisingly to brutal action, however, Cleomena loses her authority. She is captured; she becomes subject to the dictates of the Scythian king; and she is put in fetters. In differentiating the kinds of power available to the sexes, Behn repeatedly contrasts the kinds of bondage to which they are subjected. In particular, she contrasts the male rhetoric which declares lovers to be the slaves of their mistresses with the women’s actual physical vulnerability to servitude, implying that the men’s emotional abasement before the women is a luxury sanctioned by their retention of physical mastery. Orsames professes adoring submission to the Scythian prisoner Urania even as he tries to rape her, until he is prevented by her lover and fellowprisoner, Amintas, who is wearing fetters. Having sought captivity in order to be with Amintas, Urania shows that she has internalized the restrictions created by her physical vulnerability; Orsames, on the other



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hand, longs to dominate even as he feels emotional bondage, and the fettered Amintas has a power that the unchained Urania cannot attain. Fetters are, indeed, a recurrent verbal and visual sign. Thersander wears the ‘Fetters’ (II. iii. 3) of love for Cleomena, but nevertheless dominates her in single combat; and, after her failed murder attempt, when she is visibly put in ‘Fetters’ (V. i. 2a) far more tangible than Thersander’s, Cleomena experiences the truest bondage of all: Thersander’s father releases her, with her chains replaced by – or rather transformed into – ‘Garments suitable to her Sex’ (V. i. 66). She is still, however, fettered when the garments are decreed: at the moment when she resumes her appointed female role, she is loaded with chains. If there is a contrast between the male rhetoric of erotic enslavement and the male retention of physical power, there are also conflicts within the bodily signs of submission: chiefly kneeling. People kneel to Orsames in mere acknowledgement of his political power (even his mother does so), whereas Orsames is tempted to kneel to Urania shortly before he rapes her. There is much kneeling to Cleomena in the early part of the play, both by political subjects and the enamoured Thersander, but these gestures of deference disappear with the first enthronement of Orsames. The first subject to kneel to Cleomena, Vallentio, is the one who engineers her dethronement. Right at the end of the play, Thersander does kneel one more time to Cleomena, to show that he still loves her despite the murder attempt, but this gesture is now quite separate from the bodily language of political power: immediately afterwards, the King of Scythia ‘Gives’ (V. iv. 183) Cleomena to her brother, who is now her king. When Cleomena inscribes the lot which chooses a champion to fight Thersander, she thus initiates a sequence in which all the authority implicit in the act of writing flies away from her. There is similar selfnegation in her most authoritative linguistic act in the play, the deciphering of the oracle. This divine utterance has been the primary shaping force in the play; it is this that has permitted the reign of women and the imprisonment of the king. Many oracles have a masked meaning, but the true meaning is nevertheless usually fixed: for example, when Croesus was told that he would destroy a great empire if he crossed the river Halys, he did not realize that the empire would be his own. Behn’s oracle, however, is different, in that it is a text of unstable meaning, contingent upon the will and ingenuity of the interpreter (Behn again differs from Calderón, who emphasizes the impiousness of trying to divert the divine will). The interpreter who wills the oracle into meaning is Cleomena:



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She declares that Orsames’s brief experience of power has fulfilled the prophecy about his tyranny and that he may now safely be allowed to reign, but her imposition of meaning on the words of the gods is at once her supreme moment of authority and her decisive surrender of power. The events which surround and prompt this act of self-disempowering interpretation emphasize the insecure and shifting basis of Cleomena’s physical power. The scene marks her first appearance after the trial by combat, and it is the first occasion on which she is required to dress simply as a woman. Previous indications of dress have required her to be dressed as an Amazon or, in her most recent appearance, like a man, but now she is dressed ‘in a Night-gown’ (IV. v. 0a), and has descended from Amazonian bellicosity to that stereotypical situation of filial passivity, the prospect of a forced marriage: instead of fighting with Thersander, she is now being required to marry him, by a combination of masculine authority: QUEEN The King [of Scythia] has generously offer’d it; My Council do approve it, and the Army Cannot contain their Joy for the blest news. (IV. v. 17–19) The one prop in the room identifies her as a writing being: ‘A Table with Pen and Ink’ (IV. v. 0b) – though, when the Queen has gone, she draws a dagger (IV. v. 32) as her plan to kill Thersander starts to form. Here commences the interchange of writing and violence, for her next action is to take up a pen, write, and despatch a letter to her mother. It is at this point that the crisis in Cleomena’s authority and identity emerges. The colonel Vallentio, the play’s chief embodiment of gruff military machismo, enters. Unprecedentedly clad in vulnerable female attire, Cleomena asks him to ‘tell me whom [sic] I am?’ (IV. v. 66), demanding a confirmation of her authority but getting the reverse, for it becomes clear in the ensuing discourse that there is gathering and dangerous male resentment at the rule of women. Vallentio’s own loyalty is guaranteed, yet sceptical, but the army cannot be counted



I will expound that Oracle Which Priests unridling make more intricate . . . But I my self will be his Oracle now, And speak his kinder fate. (IV. iv. 95–9)

upon, and the people are ripe for rebellion. It is her vulnerability to the gathering threat of violence that prompts her to appropriate the authority of the oracle, in order to surrender power. In the immediate aftermath of this episode, Vallentio meets ‘a RABBLE OF CITIZENS’ (IV. v. 128b) and questions them about their desire for a male ruler, which is exposed as being foolish, ignorant and pointless. More tellingly still, Behn emphasizes how deeply linked the mob psychology of Restoration is to the mob psychology of rebellion. Later, when the mob see the king they are restoring, their reactions are trivial, and contemptible: disappointment, incredulity, gaping desire for novelty. This is the greatest demythologizing of the act of restoration in early Restoration drama, yet it is the power of this brainless mob which is the reality behind Cleomena’s power to impose meaning on the oracle: it impels her to the interpretation, and is the means by which it is fulfilled. In the process of its fulfilment, the weapons of virile power pass to Orsames: Vallentio gives him a sword, and he later appears ‘drest gay with a Truncheon in his Hand’ (V. iv. 175b). Between the interpretation of the oracle and the restoration of the king, Cleomena’s attempt to assassinate Thersander has visibly conflated the power of the word with the power of the dagger, and transferred both species of power to the male. The restoration of a king who is initially presented as a mere compound of lustful and destructive impulses shows that, from the outset, Behn imaginatively linked her cherished political cause with a distribution of sexual authority from which she was excluded.14 In its plebeian disorder, the rabble scene in The Young King stands at the opposite extreme from the scenes of mass royal ceremonial, such as the first and second elevations of Orsames, and it shows the care with which Behn exploited significant choreographies and contrasts of stage space. The rabble scene is an anti-ceremony. Yet it directly makes possible Orsames’s restoration, and resembles the ceremonial scenes in showing the stage dominated by men in a way that is never possible for women. The streets of the city, where the mob gather, are always places of particular danger, or particular inaccessibility, for Behn’s women; they are male territory (in none of the first three plays is a woman seen in the street), and it is indeed this street mob that strips Cleomena of her power. Away from the supremely dangerous outdoor spaces of the city, however, in the expanses of groves and camps, Cleomena does at first move with some freedom, and it is here that she acts her Amazonian roles (on the two occasions when she is seen indoors, she is completely vulnerable).15 The open spaces in which she moves are at first contrasted with the enclosure within which Orsames is caged, and from which the



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rabble finally release him (the first five scenes, up to Act II, scene iii, are either in woodland or Orsames’s prison), but the contrast is more equivocal than it at first seems, for imprisonment figures strongly in both areas. The first thing that happens to a woman in the play, in the pastoral beauty of a grove, is capture: Urania is taken prisoner. In the next scene, in another grove, Cleomena falls in love with Thersander and experiences her first sensations of vanishing power. In the scene after that, her imprisoned brother experiences his version of sexual awakening, which expresses itself in the attempt to rape Urania; as Urania here discovers, men in prison have more dominance than women in outdoor spaces. Every scenic area in the play becomes a site defining the balance of sexual power.16 At the end of the play, ‘The God of Love o’recomes the God of War’ (V. iv. 267), and women have pacified the bellicose male. The once warring nations of Dacia and Scythia are now joined by a loving royal marriage and even Orsames has been civilized by love for a woman: Olympia, daughter of the Dacian general Honorius (his reform by love starts even during his first, tyrannical day of power). Having gained the weapons of power himself, Orsames even offers to share them with her: And thou shalt rule a World with me, my fair; A Sword I’ll give thee, with a painted Bow, Whence thou shalt shoot a thousand gilded Arrows. (V. iv. 202–4) The weapons are decorative, and the gesture is one of naïveté: Orsames has only heard of the effect of swords and arrows, and assumes that their power must be like that of Olympia’s glances. He reverses the balance of sexual power, in which men play at receiving metaphoric wounds from the lady’s eyes while remaining, in concrete reality, securely armed to the teeth. The reversal of normality, however, makes remarkably little difference to it, for the weapons are granted only because their value is not known. More typical is the treatment of the Scythian heroine Urania: a wouldbe Amazon, like Cleomena, but one who never manages to enact virility convincingly. After she and her beloved Amintas have been released from captivity in Dacia, and after he has been cured of the wounds sustained when he was mistaken for Clemanthis, we see the lovers in a pastoral realm, along with the Druid who has effected the cure, and who has just married them. It is a realm where the huge differences of gender role imposed by militaristic culture shrink, though not quite to van-



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ishing point: it is the shepherd who plays the pipe, and the nymphs who passively listen. There is, however, equality of language. The question of who has the power of narrative is always a key one in Behn (Orsames’s transition to true kingliness starts when he hears his ‘story’ from his tutor [IV. iii. 110]). Here the power is shared: ‘We’d lay us down and tell a thousand stories’ (V. ii. 27), Urania says. It is, however, a realm in which they cannot remain. After a speech toying with the charms of pastoral life – ‘I wou’d put off all frightful marks of War’ (V. ii. 29) – Amintas abruptly reasserts the claims of soldiership: ‘But come, Love makes us idle’ (V. ii. 35). With soldiership comes male supremacy, which reduces the woman’s bearing of weapons to an act of subjection, and an acknowledgement that the relationship is founded on the woman’s need for male protection from violence. AMINTAS thou canst not hate a Souldier, Since I am one: and you must be obedient, And learn to bear my Bow and Arrows now. It is the duty of a Scythians Wife. URANIA She that can claim Amintas by such ties, May find a safety wheresoe’er she flies. (V. ii. 49–53) Again, the word cedes to the weapon: a relationship imagined in terms of shared narrative gives way to one defined in terms of unequally owned weapons. Urania’s reduction to a wife thus encapsulates the larger normalizations of sexual authority that surround it (the event which immediately follows is the restoration of Orsames). When we next see the pastoral world, it has been incorporated in the systems of exchange which descend from royal power: at Orsames’s restoration, some shepherds and shepherdesses ‘present’ (V. iv. 234) him with a pastoral entertainment, in which Amintas and Urania participate. The last act of exchange in The Young King – indeed, its final action – is a prime instance of the feudal, man-centred economy that Behn is portraying. Rewarding the ‘services’ (V. iv. 261) which Vallentio has performed in bringing about the restoration, Orsames gives him a ‘gift’ (V. iv. 265): a bride. The bride is Cleomena’s companion, Semiris, who (like her mistress) had been first seen bearing a bow and arrows. She has never been seen out of Cleomena’s company, and the obsessive and obedient love of this under-Amazon for her commander mirrors, yet is profoundly different from, the bonds that unite the male soldiers. Conversely, she has only once been seen in Vallentio’s company: during the



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writing scene, when he enters and initiates the process that leads to Cleomena’s disempowerment. During this encounter, they take no notice of each other. The handling of this pair shows Behn’s instinctive grasp of the visual logic of drama. Semiris and Vallentio only twice appear together on stage, and converse on neither occasion. On the first occasion they are strangers; on the second, ‘gift’ and recipient. Yet the first encounter contains and inexorably leads to the second. The economy and symmetry of this utterly silent wooing strip courtship to its essentials: from stranger to possessor in one giant leap. In the same scene, very shortly before this incident, Orsames comes to ‘demand’ (V. iv. 177) Cleomena from the Scythian king, who in response ‘Gives him Cleomena’ (V. iv. 183). The receiving of Cleomena is Orsames’s first act as king; his last, in the play, is the giving of Semiris. With the empowerment of the man comes, instantly, the exchanging of women. In this final sequence of the play, all three ‘Amazons’ appear, in quick succession, in acts of giving centring on the king. Yet, despite her failure as an Amazon (she is so child-like that none of the enemy wants to take her prisoner, until she specifically asks), Urania is far from useless in war: she has saved Amintas in battle, and her intercession with Cleomena secures his freedom. Conversely, male heroism can be feminized. Conventionally enough, women are associated with softness, as in Cleomena’s ‘Heart all soft . . . all woman’ (I. ii. 26). But, when Vallentio describes the deeds of ‘Clemanthis’ in battle, his language feminizes both speaker and subject: ‘Oh! how soft and wanton I could grow in the Description I could make of him’ (I. i. 21–2).17 In the single combat, Thersander fights a feminine duplication of himself, and finds that Cleomena’s exploit increases his ‘softness’ for her (IV. iv. 3). The most remarkable overlap of the male and female occurs when Amintas rescues Urania from Orsames, providing him in quick succession with his first experiences of a woman and young man. For Orsames, the two experiences are deeply linked: ‘till I saw a woman, / I never saw a thing so fine as thou’ (II. i. 168–9), he says to Amintas, ‘Sure I could live a year with looking on thee’ (II. i. 174). The play seems to suggest that the differentiation of sexes is one of gradation and overlap, falsified by the binary oppositions imposed by the social primacy of male strength. Against the final, fixed distribution of roles are set the fluid dualities that have reigned for most of the play. All major characters – Thersander, Cleomena, Amintas, Urania, Orsames – have undergone a division of role or identity, suggestive of a division between masculine and feminine principles. Orsames’s first reign, an outburst of uncontained masculine impulses, gives way to his second,



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in which he is civilized by the power of woman, and there is an extraordinarily complex interchange of personal and sexual identities in the ruses whereby Thersander assumes the role of Clemanthis, Amintas that of Clemanthis/Thersander, and Cleomena that of Amintas/Clemanthis/Thersander. The interchange of male and female is reflected in complementary alternations of opposites. Characters cross and recross the boundaries between the pastoral and the military realms, and between dream and wakefulness. In Calderón there is one dream, and that a bogus one: the dream which the imprisoned prince falsely believes his first reign to have been. As Calderón’s title declares, the real dream is life itself: as in The Tempest, life is to eternity as dreaming is to waking. Behn’s dreams, by contrast, are many, and they are psychological, not metaphysical. Cleomena has dreamt of Clemanthis before seeing him; Thersander wonders whether his first encounter with Cleomena is a dream; and she first begins to sense the identity of Clemanthis and Thersander in a dream. Shifting between waking and dream, pastoral and martial, masculine and feminine, matriarchal Dacia and patriarchal Scythia, the characters exceed and defy the simple differentiations of the final scene, with its return to the principle that men rule, and women are exchanged.



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3

The Forc’d Marriage The Young King was the first play Behn wrote, but the first to be performed was The Forc’d Marriage (September 1670). Strikingly, it begins where The Young King had ended, with a king rewarding a warrior with a bride: the heroine, Erminia, is given as prize to the victorious warrior Alcippus, but she does not wish the match, since she and the king’s son, Phillander, are in love; the king’s daughter, Galatea, in turn secretly loves Alcippus. The emotional asymmetries are eventually resolved, but not before Alcippus has become so blindly jealous as, apparently, to murder Erminia. Further components are the tensely bantering courtship of the witty Aminta and the heroic warrior Alcander, and the altruistic love of her brother Pisaro for Galatea, whom he selfsacrificingly unites with Alcippus. The Forc’d Marriage has no known single source, but it is clearly influenced by several earlier plays, all (inevitably) by men: as she had done with Life is a Dream, Behn appropriates and transforms male texts for her own distinctive woman’s agenda. The most obvious influence is Othello, which was popular on the Restoration stage. The return of the heroine from death may recall Shakespeare’s earlier and non-tragic study of jealousy, Much Ado about Nothing.1 Beyond Shakespeare, there are debts to two more recent plays. One is to a play which constitutes Behn’s earliest documented contact with the Restoration stage, The Indian Queen (1664) by John Dryden and Sir Robert Howard, for which Behn (as she claims in her novel Oroonoko) provided feathers brought from Surinam. At the beginning of The Indian Queen, the Ynca of Peru offers his victorious general, Montezuma, any reward he cares to name, but banishes him when he requests the hand of his daughter. Here, it 30



First Impact

is the daughter who is willing and the king who is opposed. Behn’s reversal of this situation – with the king now willing the marriage and the woman resisting – creates an entirely new perspective upon military heroism: Dryden’s Ynca is unjust because he contravenes the rules of his society, breaking his promise to the soldier on whom he depends; Behn’s king, by contrast, is unjust because he obeys the rules and rewards the hero. Her simple switch – with the hero’s marriage opposed not by the king but by the heroine – turns civilization into a male conspiracy. In The Indian Queen, individual merit and affection are oppressed by unjust patriarchal power; in The Forc’d Marriage, the hero and the patriarchal ruler join forces to oppress the woman, and her own father very quickly supports them. The other debt is to an incident in a play which is now understandably forgotten, but which marked an important stage in the development of Restoration serious drama: The Generall (1661), by the Earl of Orrery. In each case, the focus of the incident is the female body, but in Orrery the significance of the body is completely determined by the patriarchal and militaristic context in which it is set, whereas Behn entirely reverses Orrery’s social vision of femininity, showing instead the invasion of a female order by disordered male force. Towards the end of The Forc’d Marriage the two men who love the heroine jealously duel as her seemingly lifeless body lies on its bier. The heroine of The Generall similarly undergoes apparent death, and lies insensible during no less than three duels, but these duels are not mere explosions of male sexual aggression. On the contrary, the first two bring decisive moral and political victories, including the killing of a Cromwell-like usurper by the true king. Indeed, Orrery’s heroine partially symbolizes the land over which they are fighting, so that her corpse is almost necessarily present during the duel. Although she is an elevating moral force, her body is significant because it can symbolize a system of patriarchal power, and it is never described as a thing in itself, but only as a moral sign: the pallor of the seeming corpse is, for example, a ‘pale Emblem of her Innocence’.2 In Behn, however, the body of the seemingly murdered woman is initially placed in a predominantly female order: it is surrounded by mourners who (apart from the penitent Alcippus) are chiefly women. But the scene of female community is then disrupted by male violence, as Phillander (Erminia’s true love) enters, the men draw, and the women mourners are put to flight, their ceremonial garb of grief being lost and disordered in the process. In Orrery, the woman’s body serves as an image of a male political order; in Behn, it illustrates the way in which male values invade female autonomy.



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Both The Generall and The Indian Queen celebrate Charles II’s return. The Generall is a clear allegory of the Restoration, as (at a greater and more critical distance) is The Indian Queen. We need not assume that Behn synthesized these influences because of their political connotations – most serious drama of the 1660s alluded in some way to Charles II – but she certainly altered the political meaning which the men gave to their material. They show rebellion being followed by the return of the old order and the triumph of justice; an exemplary status quo is disturbed and then reinstated. In The Forc’d Marriage, however, justice requires change: a determined female challenge to a status quo in which sexual and political power are indivisibly vested in men. It is remarkable that the heroine’s father is a former traitor: all customary differences in political virtue are overshadowed by a unanimous interest in controlling and exchanging women.3 The Forc’d Marriage visually signals the subordination of women before a word is spoken, for the initial spectacle is of a stage dominated by men: all the important male characters are there, plus ‘Officers’, yet there is not a woman to be seen. This is not only a gathering of men but a ritual of masculinity: the honouring of the heroic warrior Alcippus in a society whose values and structures of power are clearly militaristic. The cult of virile strength is encoded even in the Greek meanings or associations of the characters’ names, over which Behn took some trouble (it may have included the trouble of consulting a classically educated male friend): Alcander (man-strength), Alcippus (horse-strength), Phillander (loving masculinity), Orgulius (from orgê, anger), Cleontius (from kleos, glory). When the men start to speak, they at once establish an economic system of exchange in which the primary scale of value is male strength, a feudal economy, whose foundation is the warrior’s duty to his king. The question is by what sort of exchange the warrior is to be rewarded for his performance, and in the event he receives two rewards, military power and a woman. The woman, however, is a powerless cipher, erased in the linguistic transaction in which her body is transferred: KING Name her, and here thy King engages for her . . . Alcippus, with her fathers leave, she’s thine. (I. i. 114–18) From the outset of her career, Behn thought in terms of the tangible, visible and spatial aspects of theatre as well as the purely textual. Her ability to shape plays visually as well as textually is illustrated by this



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First Impact 33

The REPRESENTATION of the WEDDING. The Curtain must be let down; and soft Musick must play: the Curtain being drawn up, discovers a Scene of a Temple: The King sitting on a Throne, bowing down to join the hands of Alcippus and Erminia, who kneel on the steps of the Throne; the Officers of the Court and Clergy standing in order by, with Orgulius. This within the Scene. Without on the Stage, Phillander with his sword half-drawn, held by Galatea, who looks ever on Alcippus: Erminia still fixing her Eyes on Phillander; Pisaro passionately gazing on Galatea: Aminta on Falatius, and he on her: Alcander, Isillia, Cleontius, in other several postures, with the rest, all remaining without motion, whilst the Musick softly plays; this continues a while till the Curtain falls; and then the Musick plays aloud till the Act begins. The scene is pure dumbshow, separated from the surrounding action (unusually) by the rising and falling of the curtain. The characters are reduced to voiceless, paralysed prisoners in a spatially choreographed system of power. This system repeats and redisplays that which was visible in the first scene, with the wedding being visibly and directly an action of royal power, but it also highlights the plight of the unfulfilled and emotionally isolated individuals who are trapped in the hierarchies of power. This is a ceremonial exercise of authority which manifestly overrides the lives and aspirations of those who are forced to participate in its choreography, and by using the proscenium arch to separate the desirers from the objects of desire Behn creates a great fissure within the ceremony itself. The ritual is a composite sign, radiating from the will and person of the king, in which the individual persons are allowed no local or personal significance. The final scene of the play shows a reconciliation between the rituals of authority and individual desire, in that true lovers are finally united by royal action, but the rituals are still explicitly male. Those of women are far less powerful. Although women predominate in the scene of ceremonial mourning for Erminia, they are in a passive and victimized role, and the ritual is in any case disrupted when Erminia’s lovers start fighting over her corpse. The public rituals of the opening scene are followed by a scene of privacy, involving most of the female characters.4 At first, it seems to



opening ceremony of masculinity, which lays bare the basis and distribution of power, and which acts as a repeated visual point of reference at later stages of the play. For example, the second act opens with another ceremonial scene:


promise an alternative economy to that of the previous scene: a feminine economy of empathetically shared sensation rather than competitive violence. When Erminia talks with the Princess Galatea, who is tormented by undeclared love for Alcippus, there is no bitterness or rivalry: merely a sense of the equality of sorrow enforced by their different situations: Your cause of grief too much like mine appears, Not to oblige my eyes to double tears. (I. ii. 75–6) This alternative feminine economy is never, however, allowed to develop, for one of the recurrent points of the play is the degree to which the women become complicit in the warrior cult from which, in the first scene, they had been visually excluded. Galatea, for example, very quickly switches from feminine empathy with Erminia to a moment of aggressive hostility: restraining Phillander’s desire to kill Alcippus, whom she loves, she threatens to kill Erminia in retaliation. As she makes the threat, she draws a dagger: a recurrently used emblem of male violence. The appeal of the warrior cult to women is foreshadowed even in the closing stages of the opening scene. As the warriors successively leave, attention is increasingly focused on the cowardly courtier Falatius (i.e. Fallacious: false) and his unrealistic sexual rivalry for Aminta with the warrior Alcander. The falsity declared by his name is his fraudulent pretence to courage, as is indicated when, in a half-feminine act, he sticks patches on his face to create the appearance of battle-scars, and in doing so plays upon the meaning of his own name: I’le wear a patch or two there . . . And who, you fool, shall know the fallacie [?] (I. i. 259–61; italics added)5 Virility is written into the names of all the other male principals; the falsity that is written into Falatius’s name is the absence of virility. The cult of the warrior may constrain and obliterate the autonomy of women, yet its opposites seem irremediably marginal. Falatius is contemptible, and there is no love or reward for the more admirably unaggressive character of Pisaro, Aminta’s brother, who loves Galatea but selflessly schemes to unite her with Alcippus.



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Ignominious as he always is in his lack of macho courage, however, Falatius nevertheless increasingly exposes the problems of manliness itself. After Aminta’s suitor Alcander has seemingly killed Pisaro in a scuffle outside Erminia’s lodgings, it is to Falatius, her other suitor, that she turns for vengeance, appealing to his virility in a fortunately unsuccessful attempt to incite him to murder: I care not who thou beest, but if a man Revenge me on Alcander. (III. ii. 104–5; first italics added) Falatius’s inability to meet the challenge of manhood here averts disaster, yet the incident also shows how uneasily complicit women can be in the cult of violence. The moment at which Aminta demands her lover’s death is the darkest moment in what is in general a very dark love duel, featuring an intelligent, articulate woman who is apprehensive of her infatuation with a war machine. Conventional though their amorous sparring is, it is unconventionally conditioned by the violence of the male. The greatest eruption of erotic violence occurs when Alcippus seemingly murders Erminia, believing that she has cuckolded him with Phillander. As in many of Shakespeare’s plays (including Othello), the heroic aggression which sustains the state on the battlefield proves dangerous and uncontainable in peaceful life. The centrality of war to civilization creates fissures and contradictions within the nature of civilization itself and, like many Shakespeare characters, the national hero becomes an alien and barbarian within the very state that he has saved: ‘A strange wild thing’ (IV. ii. 5), and a traitor who fights against his prince. Thersander had also been a ‘Stranger’, and had also nearly killed the woman he loved, and in Behn’s late play The Widdow Ranter the hero does inadvertently kill his beloved, the queen of an alien enemy race (she is an American Indian, he an invading European). Time and again, there is a fearful alienness in sexual relationships. Erminia, however, survives the murder attempt. Whereas Hero in Much Ado (and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale) eventually return from apparent death in a climactic surprise of which the audience has had no prior warning, Behn takes the aesthetically risky course of having Erminia repeatedly appear to other characters as, seemingly, a ghost. The first character to whom she appears is the cowardly Falatius, who reacts according to type, falling on the ground and trembling; but, when she appears to Phillander, Alcander and Alcippus, they are frightened



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too, if less ludicrously. In her period as a ghost, Erminia suspends the distinction between the heroes and cowards, virile and non-virile, but she has the power to do so because she seems to lack a body: to lack that which disqualifies her from participation in the heroic world of war, and which has rendered her a mere object of exchange and possession. Whereas Shakespeare merely presents the heroine’s resurrection as a joyful fait accompli, Erminia must create circumstances in which she can repossess her body on new terms, and no longer be the cipher whom the King presented to Alcippus. When Alcippus’s remorse for the death of Erminia is described at the beginning of Act V, he is said to have embraced a marble statue of Venus and mistaken her for his wife. The woman is here reduced to a lifeless and passive sign, without interior essence or autonomy of her own. There is obviously, however, an allusion to the myth of Pygmalion, who had fallen in love with a statue of his own creation, and successfully prayed Venus to bring the statue to life, so that the story concludes with the dead icon of femininity gaining a consciousness and independence of its own. (When Shakespeare represents Hermione’s return to life and motherhood at the end of The Winter’s Tale, he varies the Pygmalion story, having her first appear to her husband as an apparent statue.) The name of Pygmalion’s statue was Galatea – the name of the woman Alcippus eventually marries – and succeeding events show Erminia recapitulating the myth of the statue, ascending from sign to personal presence: immediately after hearing about Alcippus and the statue, we see him directly, holding a portrait of Erminia with a mirror on the reverse, their conjunction literally reducing the woman to a sign reflecting the male; then, for the first time since her seeming death, Erminia appears to Alcippus, standing behind him in the guise of an angel, so that her reflection appears alongside his, claiming that women have a separate and autonomous significance. This is followed by the one occasion on which women do take command of the stage in a ceremony. With her seeming angelic powers, Erminia presents Alcippus with, apparently, a prophetic dream of his future: of the woman he is truly destined to marry, and the victories he is to win. Disguised as a spirit, Galatea passes over the stage. Then come Aminta and Alcander as Glory and Honour, two further characters as Mars and Pallas, and Alcander’s sister Olinda as Fortune. Here, women appear as the equals of men, even in the representation of war, but they can only do so because they seem disembodied: symbol rather than flesh, dream rather than waking. The return to the body brings a return to subjection. The quarrel over the corpse is still to come, and when



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affections are redistributed at the end – when the marble statue turns into Galatea rather than Erminia – it is in a ritualized sequence of giving where the men are the donors and the women the objects. As soon as Erminia has publicly returned from the dead, she is promptly given to her father: ‘receive the welcom Present which I promis’d’ (V. v. 195; italics added) says Phillander to Orgulius, and ‘Gives him Erminia’ (V. v. 195). Orgulius then ‘resign[s]’ her to Phillander, who gladly ‘receive[s]’ the ‘gift’ (V. v. 205–8). This is a recapitulation of the giving ritual of the opening scene. It lacks the conflicts between the design of the whole and the wishes of the parts that were so visibly delineated in the wedding ceremony, but it is an order in which men are the active disposers. They remain so in all Behn’s plays. Nevertheless, the rituals of power now acknowledge the woman instead of erasing her. Unlike most of Behn’s early plays, The Forc’d Marriage was published with a cast list. Falatius was played by Edward Angel, one of the Duke’s Company’s two best comic actors, who often played more broadly buffoonish roles, and the parts of Alcippus and Phillander were, as one might expect, taken by the company’s two leading men, Thomas Betterton and William Smith, Alcippus drawing on Betterton’s talent for conveying sexual danger and ruthlessness. Erminia was played by Betterton’s wife Mary, an important actress who excelled as Lady Macbeth, but who was often provided with roles which, like that of Erminia, suggest sexual vulnerability (Ophelia, for example). An actress who was to be a more consistently fiery star, Mary Lee, took the small part of Olinda.6 The text of The Forc’d Marriage gives very sparse indication of settings. Outdoor spaces are alluded to – the battlefield, the camp to which Alcippus plans to fly after the seeming murder, the fountain by which he weeps – but it is not clear that the characters are ever seen in the outside world. If not, the consistent constriction of the indoor setting would emphasize one of Behn’s major points: that the codes of the battlefield have been turned in against the domestic and the civic. What is even more clear than in The Young King is Behn’s interest in the sexual control of space: men can possess and dominate the entire stage in a way that is possible for women only when they are attenuated into fleshless symbols in a seeming dream. She also shows immense care in prescribing the language and actions of the body, and their extension through manual props: whereas The Young King had created a significant interplay between the weapon and the document, characters in this play hold almost nothing but weapons (apart from the mirror, which disembodies and equates the images of Alcippus and Erminia). The great



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marriage tableau, where Phillander stands ‘with his sword half-drawn, held by Galatea’, and where other characters are frozen in expressions of despairing unfulfilment, is the most elaborate expression of a general concern with the body and its adjuncts. The prominence of swords and daggers is certainly not unique to Behn, but it is distinctive of her, and constantly renders visible the ultimate sign and basis of male authority: women hold weapons on only two occasions, and on neither are they used. The language of the body itself is a language of domination and subjection, weakness and strength, with far greater range than the repeated kneeling of The Young King: characters still kneel, but they also bow, weep, fall down, embrace and pull each other; after he has seemingly killed Erminia, Alcippus throws her body on to the bed. Like the great tableau at the beginning of Act II, these gestures of force, equality, vulnerability and submission, show the implication of the body in systems of power, sometimes institutional and ritualized, sometimes spontaneous acts of domination and surrender which recapitulate the official systems of power. For only in special cases are women recipients of the bow or the bent knee. When Alcippus bows and kneels to Princess Galatea, he is coldly keeping the relationship at a distant and formal level, and refusing to take notice of her hints that she loves him. The only woman who systematically receives gestures of bodily submission is Erminia in her apparently disembodied and ghostly state: here men fall down, kneel, look frighted, and bow. But the submission of the male body ceases with Erminia’s re-entry into a female one. When her ‘ghost’ first appears to Phillander, he ‘goes back in great amaze’ (IV. ix. 29a), kneels, and seems ‘frighted’ (IV. ix. 27), as do both he and Alcander (IV. ix. 64). The two men at first refuse her invitation to touch her hands, since they are too terrified. Once they have touched her and discovered her corporeality, however, they manipulate her with confident superiority, Alcander leading her out and Phillander shortly afterwards leading her back in. Then, at the moment at which Erminia publicly re-emerges as an embodied being, Alcippus kneels to her. But this moment of recognition and submission is also the moment at which her power ends: shortly afterwards, she kneels to her father, and enters the play’s final ritual, of the giving and taking of women, and the bowing by grateful men to the king (women only perform the male gesture of the bow during the masque of spirits). In his invaluable and entertaining memoirs, John Downes, the Duke’s Company prompter, records that The Forc’d Marriage, ‘a good play’, had a run of six days but then ‘made its Exit’. (We know, however, that



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it was again performed in 9 January 1671.) Downes also records that Thomas Otway, who was to be one of the greatest playwrights of the Restoration, made his début as an actor in the role of the king: ‘but he being not us’d to the Stage; the full House put him to such a Sweat and Tremendous Agony, being dash’t, spoilt him for an Actor’.7 This was not an experience to be easily forgotten, but Otway remembered it in a rather unexpected way. Towards the end of the play Galatea begs the king, her father, to spare Alcippus, despite his apparent murder of Erminia, and works on his feelings by stressing her resemblance to her dead mother: If the remembrance of those charmes remain, Whose weak resemblance you have found in me; For which you oft have said you lov’d me dearly . . . (IV. vii. 36–7) At the end of Otway’s greatest play, Venice Preserv’d (1682), a daughter similarly pleads with her father for the life of the man she loves, and in writing her speech Otway clearly remembered the speech to which he had listened all those years before: in my face behold The lineaments of hers y’have kiss’d so often . . . And y’have oft told me With smiles of love and chaste paternal kisses, I’d much resemblance of my mother.8 The echo provides a glimpse of the mutually supportive friendship and regard between Behn and many of the leading male dramatists among whom she worked; and it reminds us that one such friendship existed on the first night of her first play.

The Amorous Prince The Forc’d Marriage and The Young King portray the workings of male power within feudal military élites. Behn’s other early romantic tragicomedy, The Amorous Prince (February 1671), continues to portray an aristocratic élite, but its military pursuits are now attenuated, with the appetite for conquest primarily directed against women. Specious rituals of courtly love tantalize women with an illusion of influence and privilege, but they are explicitly informed by the urge to dominate: when



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Frederick, the politically powerful womanizer of the title, refers to ‘the joys of Conquest’ (I. ii. 48), he means sexual conquest. War is certainly there in the background – Frederick ‘never yet, / Was vanquisht in the Field’ (V. iii. 60–1) – but it no longer directly determines events and ideologies; the social patterns of this play are secondary developments from the military origins of society. The play concerns the sexual misuse of political power by Prince Frederick (presumably Betterton), who seduces the sister of his friend Curtius and then attempts to steal Curtius’s prospective bride. Like The Young King, and like many other plays of the period, it topically portrays a sexually irresponsible ruler, though it is unusually severe in criticizing the potential for abuse which an aristocratic system possesses. A range of characters, from Frederick to the gentleman-whoremaster Lorenzo, keep insisting on their social quality, but it is a word whose residual moral resonance emphasizes its loss of moral significance. Quality is simply regarded as conveying sexual invincibility. No longer possessing a visible military purpose, the aristocratic hierarchy comes to regard the ‘Conquest’ of women as its prime raison d’être (until the reformed and now monogamous Frederick undertakes, in the last couplet of the play, to sacrifice his ‘Manhood’ ‘to War and Love’ [V. iii. 373–4]). The false gentility of Frederick and Lorenzo is emphasized by cross-reference to a more exaggerated, yet ultimately more trivial, pattern of the false gentleman: the peasant Guilliam, who is dressed up for court life on a whim of Lorenzo. He is unalterably clownish in his speech, his tastes and his headgear (for he quickly loses his gentleman’s hat), yet he remains harmless and good-natured. There is more to gentility than taste in hats. The spectacle of sexual conquest is the first thing that Behn provides in The Amorous Prince. The play opens with a scene that might strike the incautious modern reader as absolutely typical of Restoration drama: the immediate aftermath of a seduction. In 1671, however, such a scene was shockingly unprecedented, for in-play sex had hitherto been reserved for a few low farces. The visible iconography suggests invasion and domination. The seduced woman, Cloris, is still in her nightdress; the seducer, Frederick, is dressing. The room is clearly Cloris’s: it is the woman’s space that has been invaded9 and the intruder, mission accomplished, is resuming his former state and moving on, leaving his victim still visibly and unchangingly in her seduced condition. For her, the process of dressing takes the whole play: when we next see her, she is disguised as a boy, and she only resumes female garb in the final scene of the play, when – like the other female leads – she



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dresses as a prostitute. It is not clear that she changes clothes any further. The removal of the military foreground permits an altered emphasis in the portrayal of male power. Other early Behn plays had emphasized the dependence of language on violence. Here, Behn portrays the more equal and unstable relationship between language and wealth; for Frederick ‘has a Tongue and a Purse that seldom fails’ (III. ii. 11–12). The dominance of the male tongue appears in man’s greater power of narrative; for, when a ‘tale’ is told between man and woman, the telling is performed, or imagined, by a man, Cloris gains the opportunity to narrate her sufferings to Frederick only when she disguises herself as a male and tells her story with the sexual roles reversed. Even here the narrative is, paradoxically, one of failed narrative: ‘[I] told so oft the story of my Passion, / That she grew weary of the repeated Tale’ (IV. iii. 30–1). The power of the purse is equally emphasized, Behn for the first time in her career portraying the economic management of women, with its inevitable dimension of prostitution. Throughout the seduction scene, Frederick retains linguistic control of Cloris, soothing her with oaths and ‘fine words’ (I. i. 92); then, at the end, we see his other source of power, the box of jewels which was the price of her virginity. Two scenes later, the cowardly whoremaster Lorenzo – ‘The most notorious Pimp, and Rascal in Italy’ (I. iii. 120), and a shabby duplicate of Frederick – meditates on his campaign to seduce a virtuous married woman, Clarina, by bribing her maid Isabella and sending gifts via her (which, of course, she secretly keeps). Both take out their account books, he reading the sum paid, she the return which it has bought. It is a sign of the movement from a feudal to an economic world that, for the first time, Behn’s characters think numerically: LORENZO Item, 200 Crowns . . . Item, 2000 Crowns . . . Item, 100 more. (I. iii. 34–47) The ledger emerges as a prime icon of mastery, control through numbers as a prime male prerogative, and prostitution as a prime form of women’s subjection to men. In the final scene of the play, Frederick is confronted with an image of that subjection, when all the leading women of the play approach him in the guise of prostitutes. In the scene which prepares for the deception, Curtius hands out pictures of the women, counting out the price: ‘Five thousand Crowns a month’



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(IV. ii. 84). Acting as Prince Frederick’s agent, Lorenzo takes them up, and as he does so obliterates the distinction between the feudal lord and the commercial magnate: Frederick, he says, is ‘The best Chapman in all Florence’, his father excepted (IV. ii. 93), and Frederick will be Curtius’s ‘Merchant’ (IV. ii. 104). The power of the nobleman and the bourgeois start strangely to mirror each other; the sexual commerce of the marketplace, rather than of the feudal court, was increasingly to be the subject of Behn’s later plays. Lorenzo is the coward of the play, the successor of Falatius and Pimante. Yet, with the disappearance of military culture, the hero and the coward enter into a new relationship, of symbiosis and mimicry rather than opposition. Lorenzo is Frederick’s pimp – he even tries to set him up with his own sister – and his lifestyle is entirely a by-product of Frederick’s; for he is quite right to fear that the reform of the prince will put an end to his own sexual freedom. If the prince and the merchant become unexpectedly fused, so do the prince and the pimp. Between these opposed yet deeply linked extremes comes another attempt to prostitute the woman, also featuring Clarina, the woman whom Lorenzo is pursuing. Here Frederick’s abuse of princely authority over his subjects is paralleled in the power-system that was traditionally analogous to that of monarchic authority: a husband’s authority over his wife. Obsessed by the need to verify Clarina’s fidelity, her husband Antonio persuades his friend Alberto to court her: ‘For this uncertainty disturbs me more, / Than if I knew Clarina were a – Whore’ (I. iv. 229–30). He is, indeed, attempting to prostitute her, giving an astonished and disgusted Alberto jewels with which to second the efforts of his tongue: ‘There’s far more Women won by Gold than Industry’, he urges (I. iv. 46). In Behn’s source, the story of the ‘Curious Impertinent’ in Don Quixote, the testing of the wife leads to infidelity and tragedy. Here, Alberto is tricked by Clarina’s sister Ismena into courting her instead, but until the trick is exposed he struggles to put loyalty to his friend above his growing attraction to the woman he imagines to be Clarina, and who clearly returns his love. The substitution makes possible a happy ending, but the plot does show how male bonding – much celebrated in the plays of Orrery and others – can produce a destructive sidelining of the woman.10 It also means that Alberto’s first experience of his love for his future wife is as something sexually transgressive; as love for, in Antonio’s words, a ‘Whore’. In portraying male perceptions of women, Behn was repeatedly to fuse the whore and the wife in a single person, and to imply that the former is the precursor and precondition of the latter.



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The imaginative synthesis of the whore and the legitimate partner dominates the final scene of the play, where Curtius seeks to punish Frederick for the seduction of his sister and the attempted theft of the woman he loves. By means of the pictures which Curtius has distributed, the prince is lured into a supposed brothel, where the abused women confront him in their prostitute disguise, and where Curtius and some apparent ruffians menace him with pistols and reproach him for wrongdoing, exciting his penitence by pretending that Cloris has killed herself. In their disguise, the heroines represent women’s twin subjection: not only to the purse but to the tongue. For they are silent. Whereas the men disguise themselves as bravoes, figures of pure, brute action, and effectively menace Frederick, the women can only appear as voiceless objects of male purchase. Laura, the woman Curtius loves, ‘shakes her Hand, as not understanding’ and ‘answers in Grimasses’ (V. iii. 81a, 86a). In their masquerade as silent prostitutes, the heroines sum up the condition of women as the objects of men’s desire, men’s money and men’s language. The prostitute is what remains when a woman is not recognized as a sister, wife or daughter (Laura is ‘a Stranger’ [V. iii. 85]): when, instead of being classed by her relationship to a particular man, she is classed by her relationship to all men. The passivity of the women in the final achievement of justice suggests that there are grave practical limits on their opportunities for decisive public action. Throughout the play, men can act directly, whereas women can only pursue their ends by disguising themselves – temporarily escaping their prescribed roles – in order to elicit action from men. It is only before Frederick’s authority, however, that the women are truly dependent on men. In the more private spheres of the play, their disguises give them control. In the plot concerning Antonio’s testing of his wife Clarina, she and her sister Ismena take charge of the crisis, and Clarina’s would-be lover Lorenzo is thoroughly bamboozled by the maid Isabella, relieved of large sums of money and reduced to a condition of linguistic helplessness which closely prefigures that of the feigned courtesans in the final scene: a condition in which he is ‘confin’d to Signs and Grimasses only, / To declare his mind in’ (I. iii. 17). Finally, Isabella tricks Lorenzo into sleeping with her in the belief that she is Clarina, and subsequently claims him for a husband. We are not encouraged to expect a happy marriage, but it is a triumph of a sort. The further a man is from political power, the more he is susceptible to control by women. Women, however, gain their victories in the face of some grave constraints upon their movements.11 There are four street scenes, in which



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women only appear in doors or balconies: the streets belong to men (though the women’s pictures are distributed there in the lead-up to the brothel ruse). Indoors, they are observed (Antonio spies on Clarina and Ismena) and subject to intrusion from fathers or husbands. The first scene of the play, set in Cloris’s room, makes the essential point: newly seduced, fearing alike the departure of her lover and the arrival of her father, Cloris has no territory of her own. Women in The Young King wander in groves, even if they do so with ironic self-imperilment. Here, the woodland scenes are totally dominated by men. In the grove, Frederick gloatingly describes Cloris’s naked body to Curtius; and in the wood he duels with him.12 It is in this second woodland scene that Cloris makes her first appearance dressed as a boy (the only occasion a woman appears out of doors), and she submissively tends Frederick after the duel. The alternative possibilities of life and landscape that are felt, if not gained, in The Young King, are not even felt here. Cloris’s male disguise brings her no Amazonian freedom; on the contrary, she is still sexually harassed, by the bisexual Lorenzo (an incident which displays Behn’s persistent and well-known interest in homoerotic and sexually ambiguous situations).13 Indeed, cross-dressing paradoxically confirms the preponderance of male desire. Guilliam (perhaps Angel, who had played the effeminate Falatius in The Forc’d Marriage) offers to match Cloris’s disguise by dressing as a woman, revealing that at a carnival he had done this so successfully as to excite the lust of a shepherd. Of the four real or travesty gender roles, three are objects of desire for the fourth: the undisguised male. A pair of breeches brings a woman a very limited liberation. As in The Young King, the characters of The Amorous Prince move on the margins of the pastoral world, but its pull and appeal are atrophied, and its only native representative is the clownish Guilliam. Curtius has had his sister Cloris brought up in a pastoral milieu to keep her from sexual danger (even pastoral reveals man’s tyrannic deprivation of woman), but the only result has been to give her an unsophisticated vulnerability to seduction.14 The seduction itself takes place in her rural cottage, and the country landscape is the setting for male aggression and male narratives of sexual triumph. The alternative worlds of crossdressing and secluded rusticity present old prisons in new forms. In its portrayal of a sexually irresponsible ruler, The Amorous Prince resembles many plays written over the previous eight years, generally by dramatists who were well disposed to the king but disturbed at the disrepute which he was courting with his promiscuity. It is noteworthy that two other early plays by women, Frances Boothby’s Marcelia and



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Elizabeth Polwhele’s The Faithfull Virgins, have similar themes (though Polwhele’s treatment is far from well disposed). Plays by men about amorous rulers, such as Dryden’s The Indian Emperour and the Earl of Orrery’s Mustapha, tend to emphasize the ruler’s neglect of his political or military duties, and sometimes to show him as the victim of scheming women. Behn’s outlook is quite different, and Frederick is no victim: she portrays not the neglect of power but its abuse, and the cruel ease with which it oppresses women. The criticism of misused power is new in its complexity, and raises a question which was increasingly to dominate drama until the deposition of James II: how can subjects cope with, or even intelligibly talk about, a ruler who remains the arbiter of justice but whose conduct is, in any normal understanding of the term, criminal? Victims complain of injustice, injury, wrong, and crime; yet, finally, Frederick controls the terminology, able to proclaim the innocent Curtius a traitor for opposing his will (III. i. 74). Judicial redress fails and, with the masquerade of apparent whores and thugs, Curtius can only turn the tables on Frederick, trapping him in a descent into violence and whoredom that mirrors his own mismanagement of the kingdom. Only here, amidst this symbolism of anarchy, can the ruler be authoritatively accused of ‘crime’. The force with which Behn criticizes abuses of royal authority is remarkable. Yet it is criticism without an agenda for change. Curtius can never suppress his sense of Frederick’s divine right – ‘where lies this Power divine, / That can so easily make a Slave of mine?’ (IV. ii. 161–2) he asks; and, though he believes he is employing genuine ruffians in the brothel episode, they are in fact his friends in disguise, determined to avert any threat to their ruler. The rabble is not uncaged, and reform is achieved not by force but by the repentance of the ruler. The Amorous Prince, however, appeared at a turning point in the stage portrayal of royalty. A year later England allied with France to declare war on Holland – a move which caused deep anxiety in the nation, since England was combining with an absolute Catholic monarchy against a fellow Protestant nation. By the summer of 1672, it had become widely known that the Duke of York, who was heir to the throne in the absence of any legitimate children to Charles II, had been converted to Catholicism, and the following spring he was forced into public acknowledgment of his religion. Later in 1673, he married the Catholic princess Mary of Modena, raising the possibility of a perpetual Catholic dynasty. ‘Looking back’, John Miller writes, ‘thoughtful contemporaries saw 1672–73 as a watershed in Charles’s reign, in which designs to establish Popery and arbitrary government first became apparent.’15 Although



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James’s marriage was celebrated in two lavish operatic entertainments, the long-term theatrical consequence of 1672–73 was a darkening of drama and an increased fearfulness in the portrayal of royalty. Celebratory plays about restored kings continued to appear until 1671. At last, however, celebration of the Restoration gave way to fear about the succession; the first play to express this fear, Elkanah Settle’s Cambyses, also appeared in 1671. Tragicomedy, which had been so apt for fêting the king’s return, ceded to savage and sensational forms of tragedy. Amorous princes gave way to rapist tyrants, as in Nathaniel Lee’s The Tragedy of Nero (1674), and the problem of the criminal ruler, solved with such eventual facility in The Amorous Prince, became ever more tangled and nightmarish. Behn continued to deplore the feudal and economic tyranny of the male but, in the political crisis which started to develop in the 1670s, she was one of the most steadfast (though not the least critical), supporters of Charles and his brother. To encourage support for the war, Dryden in 1672 wrote one of his crudest plays, Amboyna, about a Dutch massacre of English settlers in the East Indies. Behn’s own next play, The Dutch Lover, made a more low-key contribution to attacking the Dutch. With the decline of the tragicomic genre in which she had first established herself, however, it took her some time to find a mature and consistent voice.



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4

The Dutch Lover Two years passed between The Amorous Prince and the première of Behn’s next play, The Dutch Lover (February 1673).1 Our knowledge of the day-to-day repertory in the Restoration theatre is woefully incomplete, especially in the 1670s: records of revivals, both of Restoration and earlier plays, are frustratingly few. We know of seven performances of The Forc’d Marriage, but know nothing at all about the stage history of The Amorous Prince, which is not to say that it did not have one. We do know that The Dutch Lover was a fiasco, and the passion with which Behn responds to its failure in her preface possibly suggests that it was a novel experience. Failure, however, drew from her her first direct personal statement, in the preface, and a confident statement of her intellectual credentials. Understandably, Behn was enraged by a man who, on the first night of The Dutch Lover, had informed his neighbours ‘that they were to expect a woful Play, God damn him, for it was a womans’ (preface, l. 108). To avenge this attack upon the female mind, Behn deprived the offender of anything resembling a male, or indeed a human, body, terming him ‘a long, lither, phlegmatick, white, ill-favour’d, wretched Fop . . . a sorry Animal’ (ll. 100–2). She had, however, more substantial aims than that of meeting abuse with abuse: to define the place of a woman in the literary and intellectual community, and to situate herself in relation to specific dramatists, and indeed specific philosophers. Her first paragraph mocks the style and intellectual confusion of a number of opponents of the materialist philosopher Thomas Hobbes, with quite detailed and well-informed mockery of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More.2 She then glances with cautious irony at the impossible feats per47



Experimentation


formed by figures such as Almanzor, the hero of Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada (1670–71). The attack is more direct, however, when Behn turns to a dramatist who is not named, but who is clearly Thomas Shadwell. He had claimed to be the heir of Ben Jonson (a claim to which Behn alludes in ll. 125–6), and in his early plays and prefaces had loudly deplored the degeneracy of the stage, claiming that the supposedly genteel characters of recent plays (clearly including Dryden’s) show no signs of true gentility.3 Behn turns this charge against Shadwell, jibing that his own allegedly witty characters are so dull that he is driven to inform the reader in his Dramatis Personae who the wits are (as, indeed, happens with The Humorists and Epsom-Wells). Why this spleen? Behn, I have observed, was only the third full-time professional dramatist to emerge since the Restoration. The two who preceded her were Dryden and Shadwell: the central characters of this preface. Dryden had had an extraordinary run of success up to 1671, but his luck seemed to be turning. The theatre of the King’s Company, for which he wrote, had burned down, and the company ignominiously moved into Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which the Duke’s Company had just vacated for the splendours of Dorset Garden. The Assignation (by November 1672) had recently flopped, signalling the demise of heroic tragicomedy, and he had been mocked to an unprecedented degree in print and on the stage. Some of these attacks are alluded to in the anonymous epilogue to The Dutch Lover, about which Behn expressed (or professed to feel) discomfort;4 but, whatever her true feelings, the epilogue further illustrates the nature of the theatrical moment at which The Dutch Lover appeared. In 1673, most of the now familiar Restoration dramatists had yet to establish themselves. With Dryden’s star apparently flickering, Behn is likely to have felt that there was only one man – Shadwell – to beat, and in 1672 it cannot have seemed hard. Although unperformable today, Behn’s early plays are exceptional in their period for their closely imagined unity and their assurance in using the scenic space. Shadwell had had successes, but chiefly through personal caricature. From the vantage-point of 1672–73, Behn was very near the top; but with The Dutch Lover she miscalculated. The Dutch Lover follows an early Restoration fashion for comedy of intrigue and elaborately mistaken identity, set in Spain, with much swordplay, and a brother murderously determined to punish his sister’s dishonour. The fashion, however, was waning. The increasingly dominant mode was the one by which Restoration comedy is now remembered, a social comedy of men-about-town, without the distraction of a serious main plot, and a key play in the development of the form was



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the last comedy to be premièred before The Dutch Lover. This was Shadwell’s Epsom-Wells (December 1672), the most sexually daring play to be produced since the Restoration, in that it is the first realistic social comedy to contain consummated sex, although (unlike the later The Country-Wife) it confines it to secondary characters. It was a success, and it is clearly alluded to in Behn’s bitter disparagement of plays ‘which have been prettie well receiv’d of late’ (ll. 86–7). The anger that seethes in this preface is that of a playwright who has misjudged the moment against one who has calculated it perfectly. The preface to The Dutch Lover is a complex record of a very transient moment. If it voices the bitterness of failure, it also seems to voice its novelty, and the bitterness is that of a woman who had seemed very near the summit (and who was to recover that position). By intervening in the dispute between Hobbes and the immaterialists, she confidently adds her voice to the central intellectual debate of the day. And the triangle of Behn, Dryden and Shadwell, which is the primary subject of the preface, shows how intimately Behn’s stature and self-esteem were linked to the transient conjunctions and power alignments within the ever-changing population of dramatists and the ever-changing fluctuations of fashion. The theatre world, and Behn’s place in it, changed almost year by year. The Dutch Lover was Behn’s first play for the lavishly equipped new theatre in Dorset Garden, to which the Duke’s Company had moved in November 1671. This was specially designed to mount operas, which at that time in England meant plays with musical episodes and spectacular scenic effects. Such shows, however, were special, high-risk investments, and the closest Behn came to them was in her late farce The Emperor of the Moon (1687). Most plays, however, were undemanding, requiring only stock scenes, such as the groves, gardens and rooms in which Behn’s characters habitually move. The Dutch Lover is slightly more elaborate in its scenic demands than the earlier plays had been: the scene sequence in Act III is a house, ‘A flat Grove’ (i.e. painted shutter), which draws off to reveal another part of the grove. The next scene is a garden with arboreal wings, which ‘Changes to a fine Arbour’, whence characters exit into the garden.5 This certainly benefits from the extra depth of the Dorset Garden stage, but it was probably not beyond the resources of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Indeed, most of the play is scenically undemanding (the ten scenes of the first two acts simply use a street, the grove, a house interior and a room). If Behn made little use of visual spectacle, however, she developed her interest in the relationship between place and the distribution of sexual power.



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The Dutch Lover is dominated by mistaken or unknown identity. The grossest confusion of identity occurs when the gentleman Alonzo courts one of the many heroines, Euphemia, by impersonating the suitor preferred by her father: Haunce van Ezel (Hans van Donkey), a gauche, gentrified bourgeois, and the Dutch lover of the title. Haunce has to be so convincingly impersonated that he and Alonzo are completely confused, to the point that he himself is taken in by his doppelgänger, and Behn complains in her preface that her proposed means of making the confusion plausible had not been followed: this was that Haunce should have such an outlandish and distinctive costume that Alonzo’s duplication of it would override the obvious bodily differences between the actors. This was not, however, done, and the plot simply seemed silly. The point about costume gives us an interesting glimpse of Behn’s way of approaching theatrical problems, but it is unlikely that it sank a play which is, in truth, very hard to follow. It is made so by the intricacy with which Behn portrays the precariousness of one’s public or social identity. Although Alonzo dextrously deprives Haunce of his sense of identity, he is also ignorant of his own name and origin, since he does not know who his parents are. Further ignorance of identity causes the seeming half-siblings Silvio and Cleonte to be guiltily tormented by the apparently incestuous nature of their love for each other – unnecessarily, since Silvio is not the child of his nominal father. The identities of the women characters are frequently confused or not recognized (with the result that, on two occasions, real brothers desire their unrecognized sisters). The pervasive confusion of identity enables Behn to expand one of her favourite themes: the chaotic operations of sexual desire in situations where social and familial relationships are suspended and erased (as when Orsames in The Young King lusts after his mother). The play opens with the spectacle of men in transit. Alonzo, fresh from service in Flanders, and his old friend Lovis, whom he has accidentally met in a church. One purpose of the church meeting is to establish the men’s character as libertine sceptics (fancy meeting you in a place like this). Another is to attract the attention of a lady in need, who sends her maidservant, Olinda, to fetch one of them, though she turns out to be unsure which of the two men she has been sent to fetch; for they are ‘strangers in the City’ (I. i. 101). It has already been made clear that the men have a long-term, and repeatedly honoured, agreement to share their sexual ‘spoils’ (I. i. 26). They are willing to toss a coin for the privilege of first go at the lady, but Olinda chooses Alonzo, who promises that Lovis should have the next turn, should the lady be



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worth having. Clearly, this is a scene of male bonding, rooted in a militaristic turn of mind, reducing women to exchangeable ‘spoils’ of battle. It is the male outlook of The Forc’d Marriage, transplanted to a more complex and contemporary social setting, in which soldiership belongs to a special group, and operates on foreign soil. It is also a scene in which the identity and person of the desired woman is completely unknown. We see the blind lust of ‘strangers’ for an unknown object: an object who turns out to be Lovis’s sister, Euphemia, anxious to be rescued from enforced marriage to the Dutchman of the title. The next scene sets out the remaining rivalries and sexual complications of the play. From what will turn out to be Lovis’s inadvertently incestuous interest in his sister, we move to what seems to be genuinely incestuous love. Silvio, reputed to be the bastard son of Ambrosio, violently loves his seeming sister Cleonte, and in an attempt to overcome his passion is comprehensively misusing the rest of womankind. He has tried to divert himself with virgins and whores alike, and is disguising his passion by seeming to court yet another woman, Clarinda, who is also being genuinely pursued by his legitimate half-brother, Marcel. Marcel hates Silvio anyway, and the apparent sexual rivalry makes things worse. Marcel is the main embodiment of tyrannical male supremacy: he wishes only to seduce Clarinda, though he is promising marriage, yet he is murderously outraged that his other sister, Hippolyta, should have been debauched by the final young blade of the cast, Antonio. To improve the circle of complication, Hippolyta is the unseen bride whom Alonzo has returned from Flanders to marry (before being diverted by the equally unseen woman who sends for his help in the first scene). There is one further complication: the previous evening, as Silvio tells Marcel, he had visited a brothel: ‘One of those houses where love and pleasure / Are sold at dearest rates’ (I. ii. 127–8). Unattracted by all the ordinary prostitutes, he was led into the inner sanctum, where he saw ‘Hippolyta our Sister, drest like a Venice Curtezan’. She has been placed there by Antonio, and deluded into thinking it was her bridal palace. For Antonio had only seduced her to avenge himself on Marcel, whose rival he is for Clarinda. At the end of The Amorous Prince, the appearance of the women as prostitutes had been a metaphor, exposing the urge to prostitute latent in most socially sanctioned or socially tolerated male relationships with women. For the first time, a gentleman nakedly and maliciously attempts to reduce his partner to the status of a prostitute. Hippolyta’s status, however, is both literal and metaphoric, illuminating the way in which her fellow women are pushed to an



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equivalence with her condition. At their first meeting, Alonzo takes Euphemia for a courtesan, and their second meeting is, indeed, in the brothel, which she selects as the only building other than her father’s house to which she can go (II. ii. 64–7). (The only other place open to her is the church [I. iii]). Clarinda lives next to the brothel, and when he turns up for his assignation with her, Marcel enters it by error, and mistakes Euphemia for Hippolyta. And the train of ruthless seduction and whore-mongering with which Silvio tries to escape his passion for Cleonte leads him, in an almost inevitable circuit, to the other sister, in the inner sanctum of the brothel. By comparison, the efforts of the dim bourgeois Dutchman, Haunce, to purchase Euphemia as marital ‘wares’ (IV. ii. 55) seem relatively benign, lacking as they do the destructive and manipulative undercurrents of the gentlemen’s lusts. The primary effect of such summary will be to confirm the entangled incomprehensibility of the plot. If the confusions of identity are overintricate, however, they reiterate a clear and simple fundamental point: the blind indiscriminateness of male desire, and the fragility of the social and familial roles that declare particular women to be proscribed from this general lust (‘treating all women-kind alike we seldome err’, says Alonzo [I. iii. 48]). Silvio loves the woman who is deemed to be his sister, and his steps through the maze of the brothel eventually lead him to the room of his other seeming sister. Alonzo’s and Lovis’s bargain to share their sexual booty leads to a situation in which Lovis is unknowingly clamouring for a place in his real sister’s bed. Despite his immediate, and quickly honourable, attraction to Euphemia, Alonzo retains a roving eye, and is also strongly attracted to Cleonte and Clarinda. When his true identity and parentage are finally revealed, it turns out that Clarinda is his sister. As if all these errors and miscoordinations of sexual attraction were not enough, the maid Francisca tries to satisfy her own love for Silvio by telling him that Cleonte is at last willing to yield (a disclosure which horrifies him), and by planning to substitute herself for Cleonte in bed. Such deceptions were extraordinarily popular in Restoration drama (particularly in the plays of Behn and Otway). Their effect is to create a complete separation between sexual desire and social character. It is essential for such tricks that they be accomplished in darkness and silence, with all signs and tokens of social conduct effaced: the object of desire becomes a speechless, characterless object. Bedroom deceptions sum up the blindness of desire, the ease with which a woman – perhaps a mother or sister – becomes an anonymous and unindividuated object of desire. Again, the essence of a sexual relationship is the lust of



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stranger for stranger, and again alienness breeds violence. The murderous Alcippus in The Forc’d Marriage had been ‘A strange wild thing’ (IV. ii. 5); his passion for Cleonte turns Silvio into ‘A strange wild Monster’ (III. iv. 65), and when (through Francisca’s lies) he believes that she is ready to yield, his combination of lust and disillusionment makes him wish to kill her. The major difference from Behn’s earlier plays is that the visible political structures of patriarchal and feudal power have gone, though their cultural heritage remains: witness Marcel’s murderous obsession with the honour of his sisters, and the male bonding of Alonzo and Lovis, with its agreement to exchange women. Fathers remain figures of power, but they too are subject to mistakes of identity, becoming elusive or interchangeable: both Alonzo and Silvio discover new fathers during the play. The most striking confusion of identity occurs when the Spanish cavalier Alonzo impersonates Haunce, the absurd Dutch merchant. Clearly, this farcical mix-up lacks the menace and oppressiveness of the confusions to which the women are subjected, but the interchangeability of the cavalier and the merchant does contribute to the portrayal of a world in which old categories have become fluid and uncertain. Alonzo’s and Haunce’s backgrounds clearly correspond to those of royalist gentry and dissident citizenry. Haunce is from the Spanish Netherlands (Flanders), resentful of his Spanish masters and the taxes they impose. His complaints against the tax on beer (III. ii. 73–4) also apply to the British excise, introduced in 1661, which disproportionately penalized the non-landed classes, providing ‘a nasty shock for any commoner who enjoyed a drink’.6 Still more broadly topical is the portrayal of the Flemish as a class as discontented with their rulers: ‘Are they as dissatisfied with their new Governour, as they were with Don John? for they love change’ (III. i. 60–1).7 In selecting Haunce for a son-in-law, Euphemia’s cowardly father Carlo is explicitly rejecting social bonds inherited from feudal cultures: CARLO I shall grow mad, to think that in spight of all my care, Euphemia should marry with so notorious a man of war . . . what fortune has he? LOVIS His Horse and Arms, the favour of his Prince and his Pay. CARLO His horse and Arms I wholly dislike as impliments of war, and that same Princely favour, as you call it, will buy no Lands, and his Pay he shall have when he can get it. (V. ii. 100–1, 117–21)



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In reply, Lovis says Alonzo’s prince has promised him a place, but Carlo does not trust princes’ promises. As far as England was concerned, he had a point. In order to fund the Dutch war, the Treasury suspended payments by the Exchequer in January 1672, originally for one year, but eventually for two. And, during her spying work in the Low Countries, Behn herself had suffered great hardship as a result of non-payment by her masters. Her earliest plays had ignored, or erased, the role of money in society. Now, it is moving towards the centre of her mind, with small and passing incidents in the dealings with Haunce evoking far larger crises in the nation’s dealings with the Dutch. She is now portraying a fissured society. Haunce is Behn’s first literal portrayal of a merchant. Seeking to buy a bride with his wealth, he complements the pervasive prostitution of women that Behn was increasingly using to display the real character of the marriage-market. Prostitution is latent in the most socially respectable exchanges of women, and this is why the cavalier and the bourgeois become, however absurdly, interchangeable. In The Amorous Prince, Frederick had metaphorically been turned into a merchant; here, the transformation into merchant is more literally enacted. But the element of metaphorical transformation is retained, and is ultimately more significant, as is shown by one of the most haunting and enigmatic passages in the play. Describing his encounter with his sister in the brothel, Silvio narrates: ‘but the Matron of the house, a kind obliging Lady, seeing me so nice, and of quality (though disguis’d) told me she had a beauty, such an one, as had Counte D’Oliveris in his height of power seen, he would have purchast at any rate’ (I. ii. 131–4; final italics added). Count Olivares was a favourite of Philip IV and virtual ruler of Spain from 1621 until his fall in 1643, caused by the series of revolts within Spain’s dominions and its military reverses abroad. Within the play, he eventually turns out to be Silvio’s true father. Olivares has a number of possibly relevant associations: too many, indeed, and none of them quite right. He did have an illegitimate son, of worthless character, and increased his unpopularity by legitimizing him; his fall – had it been mentioned – might parallel that of the Earl of Clarendon;8 a generation earlier, Strafford’s enemies had likened him to Olivares. None of these facts, however, improves our understanding of the play, and it seems likeliest that Behn simply needed a famous Spaniard and felt that the outwardly straitlaced Philip IV would not do. The reinstatement of Olivares’s son, however, does significantly distort the restoration theme that had dominated so much recent drama. The hero of Dryden’s



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Marriage A-la-Mode (1671) turns out to be the son of the king of Sicily, and the play concludes with his restoration. Olivares, however, was a fallen ruler who lacked the sanctity of kingly office. In The Dutch Lover, power is no longer expressed in institutions, and the restoration motif is stripped of any public significance: it is a private moment, whose chief significance is to resolve the impasse of seemingly incestuous desire, and the first reference to the dead father is as a potential whoremaster; a purchaser of women. In tracing the route through the brothel, Silvio takes the path that his father might have taken: the ancestral and universal path to the woman whose tokens of social and familial character have been erased, leaving her in the role of whore. Behn is addressing economic tensions in a way that is rare in drama of this decade. Politically and socially, her sympathies are entirely with the aristocracy and gentry, but she repeatedly insists that the old and new systems have a depressing isomorphism in their treatment of women, and she again expresses the vulnerability of women through their limited control of stage space; the easy, unrestrained movement that Alonzo and Lovis display at the opening of the play is the prerogative only of men. Men still attempt to confine women indoors, though women now evade the constraints upon their confinement, appearing out of doors without invariably having to disguise themselves as men. Every place, however, is a place of potential oppression. Having seen Alonzo in church, the only place she is officially permitted to go, Euphemia manages to meet him in a grove. But the only building available for further meetings is the brothel, which thus becomes the double of the church. Emerging from the brothel in which she was placed by her seducer Antonio, Hippolyta in the next scene is dragged by him through the street; claiming that no house is safe from the vengeance of her brother, he insists that they spend the night in the grove (where Euphemia had met Alonzo), and there he tries to renew their intimacy by forcible rape. In the next scene, set in a garden, the maid Francisca attempts to engineer the rape of Cleonte by her seeming brother Silvio. In both cases, there is a contrast between the idyllic setting and the potential for sexual violence which men introduce, and which women cannot equal: in the grove, before the rape attempt, Hippolyta tries to stab the sleeping Antonio, but she lacks the killer instinct; later, disguised as a man and attempting to duel with Antonio in the grove, she is wounded by her own brother, who tries to kill her (for dishonouring the family) when she is recognized. In the two near-rapes, the contrast between setting and action is amplified by ironic performances of pastoral. Before her near-rape, Hippolyta sings a pastoral song about a



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seduction, and the attempt on Cleonte is preceded by a pastoral of shepherds and nymphs, who lay garlands at her feet and lead her to the arbour where she is to be raped. In The Young King, pastoral constitutes an alternative to the world of violence, fragile and unsustainable, but still desirable. Now pastoral itself is corrupted into an instrument of rape. There is no safe or ideal place. After The Dutch Lover, Behn wrote nothing more for the stage for three years, perhaps because she was being kept by her lover, John Hoyle.9 Some ascribe to her the anonymous The Woman Turn’d Bully (March 1675),10 whose heroine, Betty Goodfeild, flees an unwelcome marriage in Derbyshire, coming to London disguised as a gallant and quickly acquiring the knack of swearing and talking like a man. There are no grounds for this ascription, however, beyond the mistaken assumption that no other playwright could create a liberated heroine, and many features seem uncharacteristic of Behn: her heroines do not acquire male linguistic authority in five minutes (those of Shadwell and Durfey do); Betty often depends for her language on texts written by men, quoting from plays such as Marriage A-la-Mode and The Assignation; and her male mentality and vocabulary vanish as soon as she resumes female dress (The Young King is altogether more complex, as is Behn’s intertextual use of Dryden). If the author’s name were, by chance, to turn up, it would probably mean nothing to us. If we must – and why should we? – attach it to a known dramatist, we might reflect that the linguistically liberated heroine of Durfey’s Madam Fickle (1676) is, in the epilogue, termed ‘a woman now turn’d bully’.

Abdelazer When Behn broke her silence, it was with her only pure tragedy, Abdelazer, based on Lust’s Dominion, perhaps by Dekker, Day and Haughton.11 The first recorded performance was on 3 July 1676, and while there is no evidence that this was the première, it is unlikely to have been premièred long before that date, since the epilogue seems to refer back to that of Otway’s Don Carlos (the Duke’s Company’s previous new play), which had almost certainly been premièred on 8 June.12 The protagonist of Lust’s Dominion and Abdelazer is a dispossessed Moorish prince (named Eleazer in the original), whose father had been overthrown by the king of Spain. Though originally a captive and slave in Spain, he has gained royal favour and military honour, and has married a Spanish noblewoman. The Biblical Eleazar was the son of Aaron, and his successor as priest. This Eleazer is also the son of Aaron, but of Shakespeare’s: like the villain of



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Titus Andronicus, he has become the lover of the Queen, and during the play she assists him to murder her husband and eldest son (who is pursuing his wife), and co-operates in a scheme to exclude her younger son from the succession by declaring him a bastard. In both plays, the young king’s desire for Abdelazer/Eleazer’s wife is the weakness that permits the Moor to divide and nearly destroy the kingdom. In the light of Behn’s later concentration on social comedy, Abdelazer might seem an anomaly in her output; but only with hindsight. She had not yet written unmixed comedy; The Dutch Lover, her closest approach, had flopped; and the two years following its failure had not seen any outstanding new comedies that might provide her with a model. Epsom-Wells had pointed the way towards The Country-Wife by portraying more in-play sex than any previous social comedy, but Behn did not convert resentment of its success into imitation. Nor did she take a lead from The Country-Wife, successfully premièred in January 1675, which displayed a more carefree attitude towards sex than she ever adopted herself. The play she in fact wrote nevertheless suggests that she was still brooding on her previous failure. If Epsom-Wells had been the last success before The Dutch Lover, the first success after it had been Elkanah Settle’s tragedy The Empress of Morocco (by July 1673), in which, just as in Abdelazer, a villainous Queen and her lover engineer the death of her husband and son. In the juxtaposition of Behn’s fiasco and Settle’s success perhaps lie the seeds of Abdelazer. Settle’s play, however, was an elaborate scenic and musical spectacular, whereas Behn worked with the usual stock scenes: private chambers, a room of state, a tent, the almost inevitable grove, and a prison. Yet it was she, not Settle, who best used the resources of the stage, for Settle treats his elaborate backdrops as mere spectacle and decoration; by contrast, although the sequence and situation of events in Abdelazer were largely determined by Behn’s source, her far fuller stage directions visually clarify the structure and conflicts of the play. They emphasize Abdelazer’s alienness, and his destructive machismo (symbolized by his dagger), which is far more sinister for Behn than his blackness. Women have more public freedom of movement than in the earlier plays, but they die in the bedroom, sexually threatened or sexually expectant; and they die by Abdelazer’s dagger, which they have themselves briefly held in unsustainable moments of power. The spatial and visual examination of sexual power is assisted by the overall scenic design of the play, of contrast between the mass public ceremonies and battles (where men entirely predominate) and the private, often enclosed, spaces of adultery, plotting and treachery where power is really allocated. The rituals



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of authority rapidly deteriorate and disappear, and when the court finally regroups and regains power, it is not in a great room of state but in that alternative place of power, a prison cell. The opening scene of the play is a private one, of sexual tension between the satiated Abdelazer and the still amorous queen, and it reveals the illicit passions (and the specific weapon) which initiate the coming sequence of murder and usurpation. The old king has already been poisoned, and during the lovers’ quarrel Abdelazer prophetically draws the dagger which will kill his wife, (indirectly) the new king, and the queen herself. The next three scenes are of progressively unsatisfactory public ceremony, the rituals of power becoming less and less controlled; all three are marked by threatened violence between Philip (the new king’s younger brother) and Abdelazer, and they trace the contraction of the new king’s public agenda into love for Abdelazer’s wife Florella. A scene of collective mourning for the king degenerates into mass quarrelling, during which the young king’s amorousness leads him to a politically and personally fatal act: he overrules an order for Abdelazer’s banishment because he hopes to sleep with Florella. In the next scene, the aftermath of the young king’s coronation, there is more strife, including a public row between the royal brothers, and the court is visibly fragmented, with small groups talking in asides; as it withdraws, Abdelazer and the queen arrange the death of the king, and start to plot against Philip. By the third scene, a banquet, the king is so obsessively in love with Florella that he is discussing his passion in full court; it dominates public life, and Philip leaves in disgust to set up a rival power-base. The scene again contracts to the duo of Abdelazer and the queen, who plot to neutralize Philip’s power by proclaiming him a bastard, and to murder the young king. Here Abdelazer again pulls out his dagger. The triumph of private manipulation over public displays of power continues in the civil war, between Abdelazer and Philip, which breaks out after the young king’s murder. In both plays, Lust’s Dominion and Abdelazer, the Queen decides the outcome of battle by inveigling a lovesick Cardinal away from Philip’s side, but Behn greatly increases the length and detail of her intervention, her independence and initiative, and the fragmentary and shifting nature of the battle in which she intervenes. This battle is decided in a tent, by a woman. After it is finished, the heir to the throne is packed off to what turns out to be the culminating enclosed space – indeed, the final space – of the play: the prison. The struggle for control of the state resolves itself into a struggle for control of the prison. Another visual pattern runs through this alternation of public and



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private spaces, and that is the isolation of Abdelazer and his group. Until his victory in the civil war, after which he is presented with the crown in full court, Abdelazer is always an intruder or observer in the great scenes of ceremonial power, never entering along with a white person of importance: not even his wife or mistress. He is not segregated, for he enters the group, but he does so separately. The stage directions reiterate the fundamental point: he comes from somewhere else. He is a rival centre of power, with different origins and different aims. The isolation briefly ends with his coronation, which scenically recapitulates that of the young king, but then (like the young king) Abdelazer throws away everything for love, and he reverts to being an isolated and sexually destructive alien. In his reversion, however, the nature of his alienness is given a specific, subtle, and individuated character (unlike Eleazer, he is never a stereotyped lustful black villain), and Behn’s visual orchestration of the action is again important, defining and isolating his motives. Gambling on gaining the love of Princess Leonora (the daughter of his present mistress, the Queen), Abdelazer surrenders the crown to her, has the Queen murdered, and then declares love to Leonora in the very room of the murder. She rejects him, and this is one of the relatively few occasions on which he is rejected for his blackness, its anomalousness emphasized by what immediately precedes it. Just before Abdelazer declares love to Leonora, his brother-in-law Alonzo condemns his affair with the Queen, but emphasizes that his condemnation has nothing to do with colour: ‘I spoke without reflection on your Person, / But of dishonest love’ (V. i. 396–7). This isolates and highlights the moment, very soon afterwards, when Leonora reacts in the opposite way, disparaging Abdelazer’s ‘Person’ (V. i. 508). Here, for the only time in the play, Abdelazer regrets his blackness: And curst be Nature, that has dy’d my skin With this ungrateful colour! cou’d not the Gods Have given me equal Beauty with Alonzo! – Yet as I am, I’ve been in vain Ador’d, And Beauties great as thine have languish’d for me. The Lights put out! thou in my naked arms Wilt find me soft and smooth as polisht Ebony. (V. i. 510–16) What is clearer in the staging than the reading is that the beauty ‘great as thine’ that he here lyrically recalls is the murdered mother whose body has just been carried off the stage before Leonora’s eyes. Nevertheless, he gets carried away by his lyricism. He kneels – the only time



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he does so sincerely – but rises in anger at his rejection and attempts to rape her, only to be interrupted by his slave Osmin, who privately discloses to Leonora that he is on the side of virtue. It is noteworthy how carefully Behn uses sequence and crossreference to derive Abdelazer’s reactions from specific intersections of circumstance rather than a generalized notion of black villainy. Leonora’s disparagement of Abdelazer’s ‘Person’ has a specifically wounding force because Alonzo has just refused to condemn him on such grounds. When Abdelazer kneels to Leonora in love but rises in anger we see an outrage that is partially understandable; but, at the same time, Abdelazer is recapitulating the sequence earlier in the scene when he had hypocritically knelt in grief by the body of the murdered Queen and then risen in joy. The visual cross-reference shows that even the gesture of submission is tinged with evil, but the attempt to rape Leonora is not simply presented as the kind of thing a black villain could be expected to do. It arises from a specific combination of circumstances and motives, and the prompt arrival of Osmin, the contrasting good Moor, confirms that Abdelazer is an individual rather than a type. In rejecting crude stereotypes of villainy, Behn differs profoundly from her source, which relies on them. Her Moor and adulteress are deeply villainous, but blackness and sexual transgressiveness are not, as they are in Lust’s Dominion, complete and self-evident explanations of villainy. She omits her source’s concluding expulsion of the Moors from Spain, and a royal proposal that negroes who touch Spanish women should be executed. As Jacqueline Pearson has pointed out, she reduces the abusive emphasis on Abdelazer’s blackness, and excises the moral symbolism of black and white.13 (The word ‘white’, indeed, is never used in Abdelazer; nor is the word ‘negro’.) The association between Abdelazer and the Devil remains as repeated as ever, but it is different in character. In Lust’s Dominion it is objective and unquestionable, as we can see in the following speech by the King of Portugal, a detached, external observer, in which the alien, the brutish, the diabolical, and the black merge in virtual synonymity: The Moor’s a Devill, never did horrid feind Compel’d by som Magicians mighty charm, Break through the prisons of the solid earth, With more strange horror, then this Prince of hell, This damned Negro Lyon-like doth rush, Through all, and spite of all knit opposition. (IV. ii. 29–34)



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The Moor! – a Devil! – never did Fiend of Hell, Compell’d by some Magicians Charms, Break through the Prison of the folded Earth With more swift horrour, then this Prince of Fate Breaks through our Troops, in spight of opposition. (IV. i. 88–92) The emphasis on blackness has gone, and the devil image now refers neither to blackness, nor to evil, but to speed. The other references to Abdelazer’s fiendishness also reduce the association between the demonic and the black, and explicit abuse of Abdelazer’s blackness is (as noted) rare. When, early in the play, he is banished, the objections are to the constructed features of his culture – his religion and dress – rather than to any essential racial character. Abdelazer remains as villainous as Eleazer, but (as in the scene of attempted rape) his villainy arises from a confluence of specific circumstances, not from the universal wickedness of black-skinned people. This is clear from the first reference to blackness, in a defiant speech by Abdelazer himself, in part indebted Lust’s Dominion yet different in its context and conclusion: a Moor! a Devil! A Slave of Barbary! for so Your gay young Courtiers christen me: – but Don, Although my skin be black, within my veins Runs bloud as red, and Royal as the best. (I. i. 162–6) So far, the speech closely follows the original, but there is no parallel for what follows. Abdelazer goes on to imagine his father’s corpse, covered with wounds on the battlefield, red, not black; and he imagines the crown that has been torn from his father’s temples and placed on that of the Spanish king; a crown with which he is determined to adorn his own body. In Lust’s Dominion, bodies are moral signs, with blackness of skin guaranteeing blackness of soul. In Abdelazer, bodies are vehicles of material power, and the distinction which dominates this speech is not between the body which is black and that which is



The comparable speech in Abdelazer, delivered by Abdelazer’s brotherin-law and erstwhile supporter, is by contrast one of subjective surprise at Abdelazer’s speedy advance in battle:


white, but between the body which bears the wounds and that which wears the crown. As Pearson has recognized,14 it is Abdelazer’s vengeful ambition rather than his blackness that is the driving force in Behn’s play, and his ambition is fuelled by his childhood memory of his father’s reddened and lacerated body, and the stolen crown on the brows of an alien king (‘I was but young, yet old enough to grieve’ [I. i. 174]). The alteration of this speech sums up one of Behn’s main intellectual differences from her source: she and the authors of Lust’s Dominion differ on the meaning of blackness because they differ on the meaning of the body. In Lust’s Dominion the body is sacred and symbolic, inferior to the soul, yet a temple which enshrines it (the temple image occurs four times, but not in Abdelazer). Eleazer’s blackness and evil are associated with a denial of the spirit, a belief in a world only of bodies, and his ambition is expressed in a desire to reshape the bodies of his victims: he will ‘make an ark of carcasses’ (II. iii. 191), ‘have a chair / Made all of dead mens bones’ (V. ii. 116–17), and sing ‘Upon an harp made of dead Spanish bones’ (V. iii. 50). But the non-Christian, carnal vision that isolates Eleazer and constitutes his black evil is the vision of Aphra Behn herself; the vision of the woman who, in the preface to The Dutch Lover, had sympathized with the materialist Hobbes. Soul, though far more frequent a word in Abdelazer than Lust’s Dominion, generally means personality or desire, and when the young king and Abdelazer’s wife Florella are caught compromisingly together and murdered, their intimations of immortality quickly yield to a sense of bodily extinction. Behn’s most striking departure from Lust’s Dominion, then, is that she writes her play from the intellectual standpoint of the original villain, the atheist Eleazer. Her de-demonizing of the black man goes hand in hand with her de-sanctification of the body – including the body of the king. The blackness of Abdelazer’s body is therefore no longer an adequate explanation of his evil, for the body is no longer a receptacle of the spirit but an agency of material power, whose colour is of tangential importance. Similarly, the polluted body of the adulteress does not guarantee total corruption. The Queen in Lust’s Dominion is a simple strumpet (the word occurs ten times, to one in Abdelazer, and that applied to another character), and her sexual desire repels Eleazer himself. Behn’s queen commits all the crimes of her predecessor, but she is an individual in the grip of a grand and ultimately self-destructive passion, and she is repeatedly associated with the word soft (not a common word in Lust’s Dominion). Early in the play, she shows her soft side by indulging



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in a pastoral fantasy of retreat to a country cottage with Abdelazer, away from the toil and distraction of power. Characteristically, Behn juxtaposes the illusion of pastoral with the actuality of danger and violence (the Queen promptly demands the death of Abdelazer’s wife and assents to declaring her son illegitimate), but the combination of violence and pastoral aspiration is infinitely more subtle than anything in the original Queen’s character, and the conflicts of her nature are recalled and realized in the scene of her death. Whereas the original Queen will expiate her crimes (and purify her body) in a life of penitence, Behn’s is killed – on Abdelazer’s instructions – as she awaits him in her bedroom, which she tries to adorn with vernal, rustic beauty: Hast thou strew’d all the Floor his feet must press, With the soft new-born Beauties of the Spring? (V. i. 239–40) Once again, the pastoral illusion is interrupted by violence, in the murder of the Queen herself by an agent of Abdelazer. Disguised as a friar, he brings a dagger (Abdelazer’s characteristic weapon and symbol) into the Queen’s erotic Arcadia. In the original, the institutions of religion finally reclaim and redeem the Queen. Here, they are part of a treacherous combination of sex, violence and illusion. Blackness and whoredom, parallel pollutions of the body’s sanctity, lose their moral significance along with the body’s loss of sanctity. The dialectic which shapes Abdelazer is not that of black and white, or whoredom and chastity, but masculinity and femininity, and the changed patterning is signalled right from the outset. At the beginning of both plays, the Moor halts the playing of music. Eleazer does so because he hates ‘all unity’; because he is opposed to the harmony and order of a morally designed cosmos. Abdelazer, by contrast, does so because he ‘hates all softness’ (I. i. 18); because he is opposed to femininity. He is also, unlike Eleazer, alone. This is the first occurrence of the physical isolation which he so frequently displays; but it is the isolation of alienated machismo, not of an alien race. Shortly afterwards, he confirms his virile ruthlessness by drawing his dagger on the Queen, and the dagger is to be a key visual sign in differentiating the power of men and women. It features very prominently when Abdelazer engineers the death of his wife and the young king. Knowing that the amorous king plans to visit her, he gives her the dagger, telling her to defend her honour with it. In the event, she keeps the king at bay by threatening to stab herself, but she has nevertheless



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been tricked into the appearance of attempting to kill the king. When Abdelazer and the Queen burst in, the Queen ‘Snatches the Dagger and stabs her’ (III. iii. 93), whereupon Abdelazer kills the king. Abdelazer here delegates his dagger to the two principal women in the cast, but it remains a distinctively male instrument of power: Florella dies by it immediately, the Queen later, as she waits in her bedroom for Abdelazer. The tragic triangle of the murderous husband, the chaste wife, and the amorous king is in Lust’s Dominion, but Behn alters and deepens it in a way which is clearly influenced by her earlier critique of militaristic machismo, The Forc’d Marriage. In Lust’s Dominion, the Moor’s wife is completely in love with her husband, the King is a lecher who attempts to rape her at sword-point, and Eleazer cynically manipulates the situation in the service of his own ambitions. In Abdelazer, the King and Florella were in love before she was given to Abdelazer as a reward for his military services (an exact replication of The Forc’d Marriage), and Abdelazer genuinely loves her, is genuinely jealous, but stifles his love, making Florella a victim of his ambition. Abdelazer is thus an extreme version of that familiar Behn figure, the stranger-lover whose unextinguishable reserves of violence are ultimately unleashed upon the loved one. The alienness is that of individualistic male instinct to cooperative society. If the politically fatal act within the play is the young king’s sacrifice of political prudence to his love for Florella, the original fatal act is the ritual of bride-giving with which the military hero was rewarded. Abdelazer gained his Spanish wife in one of the primal rituals for honouring a national hero: the seeds of disaster lie in one of the sustaining rituals of a martial society; not in the alien, but in the structurally central. Abdelazer’s alienness is a means of defamiliarizing and scrutinizing the impulses that are common to him and the Spaniards. For his motives are not those of his tribe but those of his sex: patriarchy, warriorhood, sexual proprietorship. Behn’s subtle portrayal of Abdelazer would not have been possible had she shared the crude phobias of her source, but she is not primarily writing a play about attitudes to black people: Abdelazer’s blackness makes strange that which is commonplace in any male-dominated society. He is a successor to Thersander in The Young King, to the ‘strange wild thing’ Alcippus in The Forc’d Marriage, and the ‘strange wild Monster’ Silvio in The Dutch Lover. Behn is again portraying conflicts within a warrior culture: the stranger who challenges that culture is also its greatest exemplar, for he is its greatest warrior.



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In addition to giving her villain a fluidity of response and motive that is absent from her source, then, Behn shifts attention from his blackness to his maleness. If Lust’s Dominion sets black against white, Abdelazer sets man against man: Abdelazer is opposed by other men, with competing male codes and egos. Abdelazer’s chief antagonist is the younger son of the old king, Philip. Philip is difficult enough to like in Lust’s Dominion, but Behn increases his unamiable qualities, heightening his boastfulness as a soldier and his obsession with his mother’s adultery. He would prefer, he finally says, to have had fifty brothers murdered than hear that his mother had been whored. His unamiableness is remarkable because it is difficult not to see in him some parallel to the man whose cause Behn was later fiercely to champion: James, Duke of York. For in England, as in Behn’s Spain, there was tension between an amorous king and his abrasive, militaristic younger brother, whose status as heir presumptive to the throne was already arousing immense concern.15 The succession was not yet the explosive problem that it was to become in 1678–81, when moves to exclude James from the succession (the Exclusion Crisis) polarized the nation into the bitter factionalism of the royalist Tories and pro-Exclusion Whigs. It was already, however, problem enough. The question of who was to succeed Charles had been preoccupying dramatists and the nation ever since it became apparent that the Queen was barren, and the preoccupation grew after the beginning of the third Dutch War and the public admission of James’s Catholicism. Many plays of this period, most notably Settle’s, are concerned with tyranny, problematic succession, and the moral enigmas confronting the oppressed subject: particularly that of coping with an absolute ruler who was both the arbiter of justice and, in normal parlance, a criminal.16 Abdelazer addresses and seeks to neutralize problems raised by such plays. The young king does lust after Florella, causing her brother to fear that the very man who should afford him ‘Justice’ ‘Has made her Criminal’ (III. ii. 68–70). But he has not; he is killed by the villain, not by an injured subject; and the play concludes with that great theme of the 1660s, restoration. Philip’s throne is ‘restor’d’ to him, and he in turn is ‘restor’d’ to Spain (V. i. 809–11). The repetition of the word is a demonstrative adherence to the key word of early Restoration drama, revived amidst gathering apprehensions about the Stuart régime and its future evolution. Yet, as indicated, the restoration in this play is victory in a struggle to possess that grim yet ultimate support of power and its public ceremonies, the prison cell. It finalizes a linkage between the public cere-



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mony and the hidden dungeon that has run through the play (during the ritual of his own coronation, Abdelazer had packed off to this cell the Cardinal who had banished him during the coronation of the young king), and the very visual structure of the play emphasizes the metamorphosis of the court into the dungeon. In this final scene Behn achieves the large-scale cross-reference of stage grouping that ties together the beginnings and endings of some of Shakespeare’s plays, and sums up their course. As in Hamlet and King Lear, there is the ironically changed regathering of a court that had assembled in ceremonial yet illusory splendour in the first act. In the Shakespeare plays the regrouping of the court is, predominantly, a ceremony of corpses, and Behn at first seems to be doing something comparable, for what we first see is a group of prisoners. The scene opens upon Philip, the Cardinal, and Alonzo – the only surviving figures of power from the first court ceremonial – chained. Then Osmin, the good Moor, frees them. The remaining survivors of the court scene – the princess Leonora and various courtiers – enter, so that the court reassembles within the prison and Abdelazer, when he enters (separately, as usual), does so as the unwitting prisoner of those to whom he thought he was gaoler. There is an instructive contrast with the ending of another adaptation of an old play, produced later in the lead-up to the Exclusion Crisis: an adaptation of Timon of Athens ( January 1678) by Thomas Shadwell, now the leading Whig dramatist. This sets the story in the historical, political context that Shakespeare ignores, ending the play with a revolution that is also a restoration: the overthrow of the oligarchy of the four hundred tyrants (411 BC), and the re-establishment of democracy. It concludes with an assembly of the people in the Agora, and its last words are the people’s cries of ‘Liberty, Liberty, &c’. There is a sharp contrast between the open spaces of liberty and political debate here, and the oppressive enclosure at the end of Abdelazer. The sense of enclosure is unlikely to be ironic, but it is equally unlikely to be fortuitous, and it is certainly depressing. The contrasting endings of Abdelazer and Timon emphasize two distinctive features of Behn’s royalist vision. Firstly, whereas Shadwell’s Athenian populace floods the stage, the people have no physical or imaginative presence for Behn: she omits even the ‘rout of Stinkards’ (III. iii. 26a–b) who memorably appear in the original. The only significant players are the principals in the power struggle. Secondly, Behn does not have Shadwell’s expansive, general, Whig abstraction of liberty. Liberty, of course, was one of the most contested terms in the ideological struggles of the late seventeenth century, and for Behn it is always personal and specific, denoting



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particular liberations of particular individuals from slavery or prison. Liberty as a general and abstract ideal is evoked only once: as a slogan to justify the campaign to deny Philip the succession. We recognize in Shadwell’s text the polarized opposition of freedom and oppression that shapes modern democratic thinking. In Behn, all relationships are personal ones of power and subjection, of master and slave. Abdelazer’s resentment at his past slavery is not abhorrence of the institution itself but rage that he should have been its victim rather than its beneficiary, and he frequently appears as the slave-master, despotically ordering around his own Moorish slaves. If the relationship of owner and slave takes power and subjection to unacceptable extremes, it is a particular form of a universal relationship, its boundaries are blurred, and it is not a denial and reversal of man’s natural state. The necessity of subordination is visually confirmed by the three acts of kneeling that, in the play’s last few lines, constrain the body itself into a sign and medium of political subordination. As always in Behn, kneeling has been a recurrent ceremonial and private act, defining the relationship of the individual body to the body politic: characters have hitherto kneeled, or talked about kneeling, twenty times. But all previous kneelings have been unsatisfactory: acts of political hypocrisy, seduction ploys, expressions of impotence. The one effective act has been self-negating: the anti-ceremony in which Philip kneels to renounce duty to his mother. Here, for the first time, relations of authority and submission are normalized. Florella’s brother Alonzo kneels to Philip, the new king, and then to Princess Leonora; the penitent Cardinal kneels to Philip. All three are permitted to rise. It is the willingness to allow the subject to rise that distinguishes the ruler from the slave-master, but this concluding emphasis on the subordination of the individual body to superior will is very different from the ending of Shadwell’s Timon, which insists that ‘Government / Is in the Body of the People’.17 Yet, even in this final scene, Philip’s superiority is qualified, and Abdelazer manages to the end to overshadow his conquerors. It is commonplace for the villain gloatingly to recite his crimes before his death, and Abdelazer does so with especial panache: ‘I whor’d the Queen thy Mother’ (V. i. 746); ‘My next advance, was poisoning of thy Father’ (V. i. 754). What is unusual is the spluttering impotence, and unfulfilled threats, to which Abdelazer reduces Philip: threatening to fight Abdelazer – or even twenty-one Abdelazers – single-handed, Philip is quickly persuaded that he is ‘too rash’ (V. i. 742); a little later, when Philip boasts that he will kill his antagonist ‘unassisted’ (V. i. 797), Abdelazer is in



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fact killed by the entire male cast, in a singularly unattractive and unheroic moment which is the more striking because aborted single combat between Philip and Abdelazer is a running visual gag throughout the whole play. It occurs in the first two scenes of court ceremony. ‘Hell seize me if I want revenge for this’, vaunts Philip (I. ii. 114), only to be seized by a far less spectacular agency: the surrounding lords, who restrain him. A little later, he vainly boasts that he will ‘cut [Abdelazer’s] Wind-pipe’ (II. i. 18), and during the civil war a proposed single combat quickly turns into a mass mêlée. Although male violence is unattractive, unperforming boastfulness is even worse. If Philip is the rightful heir to the throne, he is also another intemperately aggressive male, and the constant pairing of him and Abdelazer emerges from Behn’s rethinking of the conflicts which shape Lust’s Dominion, changing a play shaped by the ideal criterion of the sacred body to one shaped by the immutable fact of the male body. Lust’s Dominion opposes absolutes: a Christian monarchy threatened by a moral and bodily alien, and by a transgressive woman (who ultimately resanctifies her body by retiring to solitary penitence). The criteria of alienness are fixed and uncomplicated. Behn, by contrast, portrays a conflict between two men who mirror each other, whose antagonism is inseparable from their likeness, and who are united by an imperious attitude towards women: the feature which Philip most shares with Abdelazer is contempt for the Queen Mother. By changing an insider– outsider relationship into one of constant, reciprocal mirroring, Behn alters the relationship between the parallel exclusions which are juxtaposed in both plays: the attempted banishment of Abdelazer and the attempt to remove Philip from the succession. In Lust’s Dominion, the banishment of the negro is clearly a desirable expulsion of the alien, counterbalancing the necessary enthronement of the Christian king; indeed, the enthronement of Philip leads directly to the total expulsion of negroes from Spain. Behn, by contrast, is interested not in fixed categories of normality and alienness, but in the structural process and mentality of exclusion: in the symmetry between Abdelazer’s banishment and Philip’s exclusion; in a process which is constantly reversible, in that each side is the other’s alien and monster, yet also – perhaps – its double. Behn portrays power relationships which are fixed in structure but endlessly reversible in particular application. This is a prime feature of the master–slave relationship: Abdelazer was a slave as a child, but is a slave-owner now. Behn is interested not in the moral character of slavery but in its geometry: the roles of owner and owned may easily be reversed, but the structure remains the same; the only question is of Who



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and Whom. The same is true of the insider and the outsider, and of the ruler and the subject: Abdelazer’s coronation recapitulates that of the young king, and the pattern of reversible relationships culminates in that scene of restoration in the prison cell, where the prisoners suddenly turn out to be the gaolers, and the gaoler the prisoner. If Behn persists with the theme of restoration while many others were dramatizing change, she could scarcely endorse it with less idealization. The prison cell is the reality behind all the ceremonial pageantry of state. If the power relations between men are constantly reversible, however, those between men and women are fixed, and one function of the ceremonial scenes is to demonstrate this fixity. As men carry the dagger in scenes of tense and spontaneous violence, so they carry the official signs of power in ordered scenes of ceremonial authority, the visible but silent connection between these two facts again illustrating the care with which Behn uses and correlates non-verbal signs. It is not, however, only non-verbal signs which are denied to the women in the court scenes: apart from the Queen Mother, women take such a subordinate role as hardly to speak. Yet the early scenes of ceremony are increasingly chaotic and anti-ceremonial, with the rival men increasingly at each other’s throats, and the court more and more fragmented by the king’s obsession with Abdelazer’s wife. Masculine systems are here eroded from within, by the very impulses that create them; nevertheless the tottering ceremonial structure preserves enough integrity to keep affirming female impotence. There is only one exception to the public and ceremonial subordination of women: in the final act, when Abdelazer has gained the crown, he amorously surrenders it to the Queen Mother’s daughter, princess Leonora. It is noteworthy that, although she is the king’s brother, and although she appears in all the ceremonial scenes, Leonora has only spoken once: briefly to lament her father’s death. She does not even say a word when, shortly afterwards, her brother gives her to the heroic warrior Alonzo. And even Abdelazer’s offer of the crown is an attempt sexually to possess her. When it fails, he tries another means: rape. It is clear that at this point he is holding the dagger. This is the most effectual twinning of the crown and the dagger, the sign of authority and the instrument of violence. Abdelazer offers both to women: his wife and mistress hold the dagger, and the woman he loves and tries to rape is given the crown. Both objects, however, remain instruments of his male sexuality. The relationship of crown and dagger has one further twist. Plays about restoration had tended to culminate, either visually or verbally,



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with the image of the crown. At the end of Dryden’s Marriage A-la-Mode, for example, the restored king rejoices:

There are no final celebrations of the crown in Abdelazer, and the prison setting ensures that the visible and effectual signs of power continue to be weapons. Indeed, the process of restoration commences with the neutralization of the dagger: Abdelazer’s henchman menaces Philip with a dagger, but the virtuous Moor Osmin unbinds him and arms him with a sword, with which he is killed. In her minimalist stripping away of royal iconography, her reduction of the sources of authority to brutal and destructive instruments of iron, clashing within the walls of a dungeon, Behn achieves her harshest representation of the militaristic political world that she had first staged in the assembly of warriors at the beginning of The Forc’d Marriage.

The Town-Fopp Most of Behn’s career decisions can be explained by the state of the theatrical marketplace; there is, however, no external reason to explain why she wrote only one tragedy. Abdelazer was a modest success (though not a hit, like the tragic play which preceded it, Otway’s Don Carlos),19 and, as to quality, it was one of the best new tragedies since the Restoration. We can only conclude that Behn did not feel tragedy to be her métier, and of this the marketplace does provide some evidence. In the troubled years of the Exclusion Crisis, the demand for comedy was to drop, and tragedy became the dominant mode. Behn is the only writer to remain productive throughout these years without writing a tragedy. She did deviate from pure comedy to the extent of resurrecting The Young King and adapting Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan as The Revenge, but during most of the crisis she was the only prolific writer of comedy. The marketplace also explains the division of Behn’s career into periods where she finds a steady artistic rhythm, and periods (such as the one covered in this chapter) when she had not settled on a consistent style and genre. Her early tragicomedies have a consistency of approach, as does the sequence of social comedies from The Rover to The City-Heiress. But between 1673 and 1676, in the years following the demise of tragicomedy, she was unsettled and tried a variety of forms;



Beyond my Crown, I have one joy in store; To give that Crown to her whom I adore.18

her next play after the tragic Abdelazer was a pessimistic city comedy, The Town-Fopp, a significant move towards her mature style. The Town-Fopp (September 1676) is Behn’s first comedy to be set in London high society, as most successful comedies now were. It follows two innovative and popular plays which radically changed the direction and potential of Restoration comedy: Wycherley’s The Country-Wife ( January 1675), the first important London comedy to show attractive principal characters engaged in sex during the play, and Etherege’s The Man of Mode (March 1676), the first to portray the ruthless and painful aspect of what in The Country-Wife had largely been fun. Although an intellectually complex play, The Country-Wife had continued the carefree attitude to sex of the old Hart–Gwyn gay couple comedies, where sex had been discussed, or remembered (by the man), but not performed (Horner, the hero of The Country-Wife, was performed by Charles Hart). Once matters had been brought to consummation, however, the way was open for a more serious exploration of the sex drive and its consequences; if The Country-Wife finally liberated sexual insouciance from all inhibitions, it made possible (and even necessitated) a far harsher kind of comedy. The play which shaped the course of comedy in the late 1670s was not The Country-Wife, which was little imitated, but The Man of Mode. Its hero, Dorimant, enjoys power and the giving of pain more than he enjoys sex, and the distress of his rejected mistress, Loveit, is extensively portrayed. Etherege, however, displays the sometimes unattractive complexities of sexual motivation without passing clear judgment upon them, and he seems pragmatically resigned to the prevalence of false friendship and broken vows. Dramatists writing after The Man of Mode are on the whole more censorious and morally concerned; more inclined unequivocally to side with the woman. There had been no immediate rush to write sex-comedies in the aftermath of The Country-Wife. Most new comedies of 1675 and early 1676 are harmlessly lightweight, and those that portray promiscuous heroes generally portray their eventual moral reform. By the autumn of 1676, however, a noticeable shift is taking place. Sex is becoming a predominant theme, and with it a concentration on betrayal: on the fragility of oaths, trust, and friendship before the power of desire. The first great example of the darker kind of comedy was Wycherley’s The Plain-Dealer (December 1676); The Town-Fopp is a slightly earlier example of the same trend. The Town-Fopp is a very dark play indeed, based on a semi-tragic source: George Wilkins’s The Miseries of Inforst Mariage (1607). In both plays the hero (Bellmour in Behn) is forced by his guardian’s threats of



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financial ruin into abandoning his betrothed (Behn’s Celinda), to whom he is bound by solemn vows, and entering an unwanted marriage to his guardian’s niece (Behn’s Diana). Remorse at his baseness drives the hero into a confused state of tormented dissipation. In Wilkins the rejected woman kills herself, and the hero eventually reconciles himself to his marriage. Behn’s Celinda, however, disguises herself as a young man, puts on a sword, and saves Bellmour’s life in a fracas. Eventually, the couple are united, Bellmour’s first marriage being annulled. In his bout of dissipation, however, he has denied his sister Phillis her portion, and she therefore desperately enters a disastrous marriage with the fop of the title, Sir Timothy Tawdrey; although the hero is released from the consequences of his folly, his sister remains trapped in them. Another feature added by Behn, which is very characteristic of comedy in these years, is the betrayal of friendship. In marrying Diana, Bellmour betrays not only Celinda but her brother, Friendlove, who loves Diana himself, and – in a still greater violation of friendship – is finally induced by her to seek Bellmour’s death. Yet another response to current fashion was Behn’s replacement of the rapacious sharper Ilford by the fop Sir Timothy Tawdrey. Fops or fools were now an almost obligatory ingredient of comedy, but Sir Timothy turns out to be a significantly unusual example of the species. More than in any previous play, Behn emphasizes that sexual relationships at every level are governed by a monetary economy; that the socially approved institution of marriage reproduces the nature of its socially proscribed opposite, prostitution. The more archaic, militaristic forms of male power portrayed in her first plays occasionally surface, but are now rarely dominant. In the first speech of the play, Sir Timothy (who is at this stage contracted to marry Celinda), boasts about his bride, but only because she will supply him with money to spend on his whore, so that marriage and prostitution are linked in a direct economic chain. Bellmour’s marriage to Diana is, of course, a transaction to retain his wealth, and his remorse at it drives him to join Sir Timothy in a sordid brothel and court the prostitutes, conscious that his mercenary marriage has rendered him their moral equal: ‘What is it I negotiate for’, he exclaims as he vainly tries to work up sexual interest: a Woman! Making a bargain to possess a Woman! Oh never, never! (IV. i. 427–9)



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The words are, of course, equally appropriate to his marriage, and indeed the entire brothel scene is conceived as a staged replication of Bellmour’s wedding celebrations; characteristically, Behn signifies through body and space as well as text; through ironic disruptions and recapitulations of ceremonial scenes. Hitherto, the wedding party has been the only other scene of crowded indoor space. It too had been a scene of false festivity, with Bellmour shell-shocked and sexually paralysed amidst the revelry (and finally failing to perform the customary public ritual of copulation); the festivities had been gatecrashed by masked intruders, and there had been a general sword-fight. The brothel again portrays false merry-making, a sexually unresponsive Bellmour, masked intruders, a fight, and a sexual contract underwritten by law, when Bellmour prepares to make a binding settlement on Betty Flauntit. What is different is the long dice-game in which Bellmour loses part of the fortune he has gained by marrying Diana. The monetary forces which had driven the earlier ceremony are here exposed in total nakedness. Male violence remains a constant presence, particularly in conjunction with sexual desire and rivalry: the wedding party and the brothel scene culminate in sword-fights, as does the unconsummated wedding night, when Sir Timothy Tawdrey enrages Bellmour by singing a bawdy serenade. But money is still king, and the dreams of pastoral escape that tantalize so many of Behn’s heroines are now reactions against the economic rather than the military systems of men. Hearing that the guardian, Lord Plotwell, has the power to impoverish Bellmour should he marry against his will, Celinda asserts that she and Bellmour can ‘purchase’ a ‘loanly Cottage’, where they would tend a flock ‘That shou’d in gratitude repay us Food’ (I. ii. 35–42; italics added). The threats to pastoral fantasy certainly include male violence: when the intruders turn Bellmour’s wedding party into a brawl, they enter in shepherds’ outfits hired from the playhouse, purpose-made for the very kind of fantasy which Celinda has evoked. But a more precise negation of her fantasy has already occurred, and it is the negation of economic illusion by economic power. When Lord Plotwell makes his threats to Bellmour, and forces him to abandon the marriage, we discover that the alternative to genteel prosperity is not the thatched cottage with the grateful flock repaying food (by being eaten?). It is the debtor’s prison: ‘a Dungeon Sir, / Where you shall ask your food of Passers by’ (II. iii. 129; italics added). This is the true destiny of one who falls through the economic net: not a return to a primal, ideal economy, but degradation to an economic cipher, outside the rituals of exchange



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because he has nothing left to exchange, since his body has already been taken. Whereas Behn’s earliest plays had consistently linked male sexuality and male militarism, she now creates a hero who is equally ineffective with the phallus and the sword. Horner, the hero of The Country-Wife, spends the play feigning impotence in order to gain easy access to women. Bellmour is repeatedly impotent. He is incapable of consummating his marriage, and equally incapable of showing any interest in the whore whom he courts in the brothel scene. He is almost equally off-form with the sword. For example, when first told by Lord Plotwell that he must abandon Celinda and marry Diana, he draws his sword and meditates both murder and suicide, but commits neither, and he is twice helped in a mêlée by a woman – the disguised Celinda. His greatest success is in the final duel of the play, when he disarms Friendlove and, now mistakenly believing that Celinda loves another, forces his way into her chamber, ready to heap reproaches on her. But this success is prelude to a prolonged renunciation of the sword. He enters Celinda’s chamber ‘with two Swords’ (V. i. 338b), but quickly ‘Throws by the Swords’ (V. i. 357), is ‘ready for the welcom Sword’ of Friendlove (V. i. 389), and ‘Offers to fall on his Sword’ (V. i. 402b). Believing Celinda in her male disguise to be a successful rival, he is ready to kill ‘him’, but recognizes her in time and ‘lets fall his Sword’ (V. i. 409b). His other most effective piece of swordsmanship is dangerously to wound his own brother, Charles, when he tries to rescue him from the brothel. This action threatens the patriarchal lineage already threatened by his impotence, and the brothel location is appropriate; for, although it reruns the marriage party, it also reveals a complete distintegration of what the marriage party should have affirmed: Bellmour’s role and mentality as heir to the ancestral estate. The wounding immediately follows Bellmour’s unsuccessful attempts to conjure up sexual desire, and his attempts to dissipate his estate. ‘Home! I have no home’, he exclaims (IV. i. 491); ‘Home! – no, never to that place thou call’st so’ (IV. i. 542). With the enervation of the hero comes the empowerment of the fool. Behn shuns the increasing fashion for rakish heroes, creating two heroes, Bellmour and Friendlove, who both desire faithful and loving monogamy from the outset. The sexual outlook of the rake-hero is confined to the fool, Sir Timothy Tawdrey, who is not a harmlessly decorative fop, but a loathsome figure of some power and cunning.20 Nor does he receive the normal sexual come-uppance of the fool. If, at the end of the play, he is tricked into a marriage, he does not marry



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the usual serving-girl or cast mistress, but a virgin gentlewoman whose portion will enable him to support his whore. There is one point at which Behn specifically aligns Sir Timothy with a fool from an earlier play (Sir Oliver Cockwood from Etherege’s She Would If She Could), and the reworking of Etherege shows with particular clarity how she is redefining the role of the fool, judging him by standards other than the customary male ones of aggressive wit and virile power. As his surname indicates, Sir Oliver is a boastful sexual fantasist whose attempts to dominate or cheat on his wife are repeatedly defeated.21 When he turns up at a tavern for an assignation with some prostitutes, Lady Cockwood simultaneously turns up in pursuit of a man. Realizing that Sir Oliver is also there, she courts him in the guise of a prostitute and then reveals herself, claiming that she came to the tavern in order to expose his infidelity, and leaving him looking completely in the wrong. The same sequence of events happens with Sir Timothy, except that he emerges with more control than Sir Oliver, and the partner who tricks him is not a wife disguised as a whore but one whore (Betty Flauntit) disguised as another. What is at issue in the subsequent recriminations, therefore, is not the balance of power and privilege within the marriage, but simply the amount of money that the apologetic male has to hand over in order to pacify his partner, and here Sir Timothy manages to hang on to most of what he has. Into the incident are interwoven Sir Timothy’s gains at the gaming table and Bellmour’s horrified attempts to court Betty. Etherege’s fairly light comedy, based on male-orientated humour about the hen-pecked husband, is turned into a grim portrayal of transient relationships governed by lust, loathing and money. Here, the fool with the purse is the arbiter of events. Although Sir Timothy is physically timid (he too is ineffective with the sword), cowardice does not inconvenience this creature of the marketplace, and he is often a threatening, aggressive, and intrusive figure. Many Restoration social comedies open with a dialogue between young men, generally in a state of sexual expectation, conspiracy, or stagnation. The Town-Fopp opens more energetically, with an image of male invasiveness and greed. As at the opening of The Amorous Prince, we see a man invading female territory. In The Amorous Prince, however, the invader had been the Prince; here it is the fool, about to court Celinda: ‘Hereabouts is the House wherein dwells, the Mistriss of my heart; For she has money Boyes, mind me, money in abundance, or she were not for me’ (I. i. 1–3). Later, he gatecrashes Bellmour’s wedding in disguise,



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in order to pursue Bellmour’s sister, and in the aftermath of the secretly unconsummated wedding night he reruns his entrance in the opening scene, again appearing in the street with his hangers on, this time to sing a mocking serenade and break the bride’s windows. His invasions do at first keep grinding to a halt. For example, when he actually progresses from the street to the interior of the house in Act I, he is reduced to linguistic helplessness by Celinda and her nurse, since Celinda almost refuses to talk to him, and the nurse almost refuses to stop. After his gatecrashing of the party and his bawdy serenade, he is on each occasion driven off the stage at sword-point. But neither swords nor words can stop him: he keeps re-invading, and finally he enters in triumph, as lord of Phillis’s body and fortune. If Behn provides monogamous heroes and a libertine fool, however, she scarcely shows her heroes to advantage, for she shows that their monogamous passions are themselves corrupting, making them increasingly conform to patterns established by the fool. Bellmour’s sense of guilt drives him to consistently unattractive actions: wasting his sister’s portion, deciding to settle money on Betty Flauntit, and wounding his brother. As a result of an ambiguous conversation with Friendlove, he falsely concludes that Celinda has taken a new lover and is ready to denounce her for an imagined infidelity which exactly matches his own real one. In all this, his alignment with Sir Timothy is quite overt. His dissipation and his assault on his brother are performed when he is Sir Timothy’s companion, and in the final scene, when he forces his way from the street into Celinda’s room with his false accusations, he appropriates that very first image of Sir Timothy as the invader of female space. Yet more unattractively, Friendlove is led by love for Bellmour’s unwanted wife Diana to agree to her command to seek his life. He is the one archaically aggressive male in the cast, and Behn specifically highlights his primitive masculinity in the sequence which leads to his assumption of the assassin’s role. After Sir Timothy has sung his satiric epithalamium outside Bellmour’s marriage chamber, there is a swordfight in which Celinda in her male disguise again assists Bellmour, and also rescues Diana, who is of course her rival for Bellmour; deciding to retain her power over Diana, she takes her back to her lodgings. Taken in by Celinda’s male disguise, Diana tries to get ‘him’ into bed, partially through genuine sexual attraction, but primarily because she wishes to use Celinda’s skill with the sword to avenge herself on Bellmour. Celinda is, of course, uninterested in intercourse (this is yet another scene of non-arousal), and her successful play with the cultural signs of gender



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Experimentation 77

For since ‘tis my Revenge that I pursue Less Beauty, and more Man, as well may do. (IV. i. 140–1) Whereupon, ‘Enter FRIENDLOVE disguis’d, as one from a Camp’. An atavistic figure from the world of The Forc’d Marriage enters Restoration London, and Diana proposes a ritual of exchange that belongs to the pre-commercial world of the earlier play: her body for Bellmour’s life. The exchange systems of the city give way to the primal ones of the camp, and the regression brings with it a return to other archaic forms of exchange: vengeance and sacrifice. Both had been initially associated with Sir Timothy, though in him they lose their primal violence and become economic concepts. As they migrate to other areas of the play, however, they revert to type, showing how the heroes unexpectedly take over and (still more unexpectedly) darken the characteristics of the fool. Timothy starts talking about sacrifice in the opening minutes of the play, but its transactions are purely monetary: ‘All things are sacrific’d’ to the ‘pow’rful God’ (III. i. 36–7) of money. As the sacrificial images accumulate, however, (there are seven in all) the monetary element in the transaction disappears, and it becomes an immediate transaction involving the body. Courting the disguised Celinda, Diana asks her to ‘pay’ the ‘sacrifice’ of sexual surrender (IV. i. 131–4), and the ultimate sacrifice is the one which Diana immediately afterwards proposes to Friendlove: her body for Bellmour’s corpse. ‘the Traytor here! and at Diana’s feet’, Friendlove later exclaims: ‘The fittest Altar for my Sacrifice!’ (V. i. 385–6). The same thing happens with vengeance: a primitive form of exchange, in which the body itself is the only currency, gradually takes over from an attenuated form which has been translated into the processes of commerce. Again, the attenuated form is the intellectual property of Sir Timothy, who proposes to avenge an affront from Bellmour by a crime against property: by breaking the windows of the bridal chamber. In the first part of the play, indeed, the idea of revenge is exclusively associated with him and his circle, and his species of revenge are specifically separated from bellicose violence. Too cowardly to turn up for a duel with Bellmour, he decides that a better form of revenge would be to debauch Bellmour’s sister, Phillis, and he then hands out money to his hangers-on in order to buy their help. Purchase of the female



starts to fail because of the absence of the penis. Disgusted by Celinda’s sexual unresponsiveness to her, Diana longs for sheer machismo:


body is here represented as an alternative to male combat; when Diana formulates her revenge scheme, the female body reverts to being the prize of male combat. There does not, however, seem to be much to choose between the two systems, and Behn interlinks them with some care. Timothy first approaches Phillis when he gatecrashes Bellmour’s wedding party (partly in order to court her). The word that is spoken immediately before he first addresses her is ‘Revenge’ (III. i. 97). It is spoken by Friendlove, who has just similarly gatecrashed the party, in a pastoral outfit indistinguishable from Timothy’s, and who is here first formulating his plan to kill Bellmour. To emphasize the strange doubling of the cowardly Sir Timothy and the virile Friendlove, with their parallel yet culturally discrepant schemes of vengeance, Behn has Celinda mistake Sir Timothy for Friendlove (her own brother), conclude that she is looking at the prospective murderer of Bellmour, and resolve to fall a ‘Sacrifice’ (III. i. 142) in protecting him. Yet again, this incident shows that one cannot interpret Behn’s plays simply by invoking word-counts, verbal patterns, or overall templates of ideology. One must always look at the moment, the juxtaposition, the garb, and the place. What their combination shows here is that the new economy of the purse mirrors the old economy of the sword. They are, literally, visually indistinguishable, and their parallel pastoral disguises make the same point: there is no regression from either economy to the pre-economic world of pastoral which appears as a haunting illusion in so many Behn plays. The only possible regression is from the marketplace to the battlefield. When Bellmour and Celinda talk about sacrifice, they always mean self-immolation, and neither of them talks about vengeance. If Bellmour avoids the word, however, he comes to desire the thing. The point at which he draws his sword on the disguised Celinda, believing her to be Celinda’s lover (V. 409), brings us to that moment which recurs so often in Behn’s plays: the moment at which lovers become complete strangers, and at which the man seeks the death of the woman. Once this moment of ultimate violence has been faced, however, there is a retreat to peaceable society. As at the end of The Forc’d Marriage, there is a ritual of exchange in which the ruling man – Lord Plotwell – gives the heroine to the hero in an act of transfer to which she consents: ‘I give thee thy Celinda’ (V. i. 524). It is nevertheless worth noting that the consent, though undoubted, is silent. After the recognition scene, Celinda exits. When Lord Plotwell demands to see her, ‘Bellmour goes out, and brings in CELINDA’ (V. i. 521a) – restored, we must assume, to female dress. The bringing in is striking: Celinda’s body is now con-



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trolled by the male hand. What is equally striking is that, during her last appearance on stage, she does not utter a single word. Lord Plotwell then promises to arrange a speedy annulment for Bellmour and Diana, on grounds of pre-contract and consanguinity.22 He also permits Friendlove to ‘take’ Diana (V. i. 534), and prompts Bellmour to promise Charles his portion. The return of peaceable society, however, brings the return of Sir Timothy’s power, and the last episode of the play is his. At the point when Charles hails his recovered money as ‘the greatest blessing Heav’n can send me’ (V. i. 543), Sir Timothy enters with his hangers-on, Bellmour’s sister, Phillis, whom he has just married, and Betty Flauntit, his whore. There can be no quickie divorce for Phillis, and her entrapment is vividly illustrated by the simultaneous onstage presence of Betty Flauntit, on whom Sir Timothy explicitly plans to squander Phillis’s money. All seems set for another very hollow scene of festivity: LORD PLOTWELL This day we’ll set apart for mirth, And all must make my house their happy home. (V. i. 606–7) Happy home, indeed; the word sounds as empty as it had done in the brothel scene. At the beginning of the play, Sir Timothy had invasively approached Celinda’s house, boasting that his prospective wife had money which he would spend on Betty Flauntit. In the final minutes of the play, he is inside the house with his hat-trick achieved: wife, money, whore. If the wife is not the one originally foreseen, that does not matter, because she is a mere economic cipher. The fool’s triumph completely takes over from that of the heroes: no previous Restoration comedy had ended so bleakly. Equally, no later Behn play was to end so heavy-handedly. Although a sense of unresolved inequity remained a repeated feature of her endings, in future it was to be part of a more complex and multi-faceted distribution of fortune. Festivity, so hollow and false in the wedding and brothel scenes of The Town-Fopp, would be a regular feature of her work (most notably in The Rover), and it was normally to have a dark undercurrent. Yet it would also have a genuine comic vitality. The TownFopp is a remarkably original and well-integrated piece of stagecraft. It is also relentless. Behn had yet to discover the art of tonal complexity and counterpoint, but she was soon to do so.



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5

The Debauchee We do not know for certain what was Aphra Behn’s next play after The Town-Fopp. In February 1677 the Duke’s Company performed The Debauchee; or, The Credulous Cuckold (Duke’s, February 1677), an adaptation of Richard Brome’s A Mad Couple Well Match’d (1639), in which the titular couple are a lively, unscrupulous rake and a witty, sexually tolerant widow. Brome’s hero (Careless) combines exuberance with deep moral unattractiveness, and is so cynically ungrateful to his uncle and benefactor that he even tries to cuckold him. The play was revived and rewritten when a critical attitude towards the rake figure was starting to resurface. For example, another adapted play produced the following month, John Leanerd’s The Country Innocence (King’s Company), deals very severely with a lecherous lord of the manor.1 According to Gerard Langbaine The Debauchee ‘is by some ascrib’d to Mrs. Behn’,2 and ‘John Philip Kemble’s copy of the play, now in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, has the seventeenth-century annotation: “Altered by Mrs. Behn from R. Brome’s Mad Couple Well-Match”.’3 We cannot know how reliable such ascriptions were, but they cannot be ignored. Behn’s unquestioned adaptations are thorough rethinkings and rewritings of the originals. The Debauchee is still very clearly Brome’s play, with some updating and adjustment. There is increased criticism of the libertine gentry, some of it expressed by the lower classes: contemplating Careless’s raucously drunken lifestyle, the Butler expresses relief that he was not born a gentleman, and remarks on the gentry’s taste for bawdy plays (III. i. 205–22). There is more sympathy for the seducer’s victims (this is characteristic of the late 1670s, and not of itself 80



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a sign of female authorship). Careless’s mistress, Phebe, loses the shrill vulgarity of her original, and his indifference to her is made more unattractive. Brome’s Lord Lovely, another gentlemanly womanizer, is reproachfully renamed Lord Loveless. In both versions, the Lord is accompanied by a ‘youth’ who is actually a gentlewoman he has deflowered, but in Brome the injured woman is merely given money to secure herself a good husband, whereas here Loveless repents with emotional earnestness: ‘You melt my soul. – Pray let me make new vows to you, or well confirm the old. . . . Can you forgive what’s past, and take a penitent man to your mercy?’ (V. i. 304–20). Careless also shows a greater inclination to reform, and the adulterous shopkeeper’s wife, Mrs Saleware, another mistress of Lord Loveless, also displays an explicit reform that is not in Brome. The play is typical of the way in which minor writers were reacting against sex comedy in these years. If it is by Behn, however, it has a simplicity of judgment and tidiness of ending that she nowhere else displays. Another anonymous adaptation of 1677 is The Counterfeit Bridegroom (September), an adaptation of Middleton’s No Wit No Help Like a Woman’s (1613), which was speculatively attributed to Aphra Behn by the early nineteenth-century scholar John Genest.4 Middleton’s play repeatedly shows kinship being transformed into alienness. Since this is also a favourite preoccupation of Behn, and since the adaptor largely excises it, Genest is probably mistaken.

The Rover Behn’s first undoubted play after The Town-Fopp, however, was The Rover, which appeared in March 1677, a month after The Debauchee. It is clearly a post-Man of Mode play, and is the first in which Behn finds herself in the mainstream of comedy, responding in an original and outstanding way to the innovations of her peers. She was to write still better plays, but The Rover remained her most successful, and was the first in which she asked for a specially painted piece of scenery: the Molo (jetty) in Act IV, scene ii (though playwrights did not always get what they wanted). The Rover too was an adaptation, of Thomas Killigrew’s twopart closet drama Thomaso; or, The Wanderer (1654).5 Killigrew was the manager of the rival King’s Company, but he was also involved in intelligence, and had helped to recruit Behn for her spying work in the Low Countries;6 Behn may have had his consent for the adaptation. Thomaso is set in Madrid, and reflects the experiences of Killigrew and his friends as displaced Cavaliers during the Interregnum years. Thomaso



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courts the rich and virtuous Serulina, intended by her brother for a nunnery, but on the way has an affair with the Italian courtesan Angellica Bianca, who falls in love with him. He also plays a practical joke on another prostitute, Saretta: she finds him deeply unattractive, but he manages to sleep with her – and give her great pleasure – by disguising himself as a Spaniard. This joke is imprudent, since it invites revenge, but it is not (to Killigrew) distasteful. In another plot, the whore Lucetta and her accomplices trick and rob the Essex fool Edwardo, who revenges himself by having Lucetta’s face cut, and – now seeing all women as enemies – wishes to rape Serulina when she takes refuge with him. The virtuous prostitute Paulina, by contrast, thwarts plots to exact violent revenge for the mistreatment of Lucetta and Saretta. Killigrew portrays his prostitutes with some complexity, and allows them to criticize the anomalous male standards which condemn them, but the distinction between whores and chaste women is unquestionable, and much of the play is devoted to all-lads-together discussion of female flesh.7 In her radical tightening and varying of Killigrew’s cumbersome play, Behn alters the ratio of whores to virtuous heiresses (2 : 3 instead of 4 : 1), and takes up the slack created by the extra heiresses by splitting the character of Thomaso into two: the virtuous Belvile, and the wild, rakish Willmore. Belvile has rescued Florinda from rape at the siege of Pamplona, as Thomaso has Serulina, and Willmore has an affair with the prostitute Angellica Bianca and then rejects her for the new character of Hellena, a sprightly, virginal heiress who combines features of Serulina and another of Behn’s prostitutes, Paulina. There is also a third, not very carefully developed courtship, of the Cavalier Frederick and Florinda’s kinswoman Valeria. Although she increases the quota of marriageable virgins, however, Behn characteristically blurs the distinction between the transactions of marriage and prostitution. She also, of course, accentuates the woman’s viewpoint. As in Thomaso, an Essex fool (Ned Blunt in Behn) is robbed by the whore Lucetta. The vengeful mutilation is omitted, but the imprisonment and intended rape of the virtuous woman (in this case Florinda) is retained. What is explicit in Behn but not in Killigrew, however, is that Blunt acts on a universal and virtually ineradicable male attitude towards women. Killigrew’s play was an idealizing reflection of the cultural milieu in which it had been written: its honourable Cavalier exiles are bound together by common cause with their king, and a shared – if sometimes strained or violated – set of distinctively male codes and loyalties. (In reality, the exiled royalists of the Interregnum were as subject to faction



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and in-fighting as any group.) The European political landscape to which Killigrew repeatedly refers is one of turmoil and shifting alliances. Spain and France were at war, both on their southern frontiers and in the Spanish Netherlands, and both, like Britain, had been riven by revolt and civil war; there had, for example, been a revolt in the Spanish possession of Naples (1647–50). France had been host to Charles II during the early part of his exile, but he increasingly became a political embarrassment, leaving in 1654 and settling in Spanish territory in 1656. (Charles’s brother James, who fought on the French side against the Spanish as late as 1655, was fighting for the Spanish in 1657.) The personal bonding and unbonding of Killigrew’s play take place against a background of flux and uncertainty on a continental scale. Behn wrote twenty-three years later, in a climate that was partly the same and partly very different. Colonial instability and slippery international relations remained constants. In 1676 there were revolts in England’s foreign possessions, including a rebellion in Virginia which was to form the subject of Behn’s last play, and the to-ing and fro-ing between France and its enemies continued. In 1672–74 Charles had allied himself with Louis XIV in a domestically unpopular war against Holland. Now, the reluctant King was under increasing pressure to change allegiance, and this pressure was briefly to succeed in 1677–78 (and to result in the marriage between William of Orange and Charles’s niece, the Duke of York’s daughter Mary). The pattern of shifting political alliances in 1677 is thus broadly the same as that portrayed in Thomaso, and preserved in The Rover, as a complement to its characters’ sexual intrigues. What is different is the impact of these shifts on the men of Thomaso’s generation, some of whom were still sitting in Parliament; for the Parliament of 1677 was still the ‘Cavalier’ Parliament which, at first overwhelmingly loyalist, had been elected in 1661. Tensions had developed very early between the King and Parliament, but by the mid-1670s the relationship was very difficult indeed, one of the main points of contention being international relations and the inseparably related issue of the Duke of York’s Catholicism. If Killigrew gives a selective view of brotherhood among the exiled Cavaliers, Behn is evoking a vanished world: the world of hope prior to experience.8 In the year after the première of The Rover, James’s Catholicism rose from being a problem to a crisis, and in the following years Behn and other dramatists were to write more plays idealizing the early Cavalier ethos in an attempt to forestall a widely feared return to civil war. In The Rover, the Cavaliers are certainly glamorized, but they also reveal Behn’s habitual ambivalence towards the cause which she championed;



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her recognition that the cult of rank, male heroism, and male loyalties was one which intrinsically and inevitably produced injustice towards women.9 Even the virtuous, straitlaced Belvile shows a moment of dark machismo, and the engaging, promiscuous Willmore is a charming menace, breaking Angellica’s heart, treating every woman in the play as a whore, and constantly wrecking Belvile’s attempts to elope with Florinda (in part by twice wishing to rape her). Many of Willmore’s features are derived from Killigrew, but other characters in Thomaso are responsible for the rape attempts, and the total character is quite different from the original. Willmore constitutes Behn’s first redefinition of the kind of sex-comedy protagonist that had been introduced in Etherege’s The Man of Mode, in the figure of the destructively witty, dispassionately promiscuous Dorimant. Willmore is a woman’s eye view of such a figure. One might perhaps expect him to have been played by the actor who created Dorimant, Thomas Betterton, but Betterton in fact took the more commanding and subtly complex role of Belvile. Willmore was played by the other leading man, William Smith, who frequently played attractive ladies’ men or leading tragic figures, but who in The Man of Mode had played the foolish Sir Fopling Flutter. The role was unusual for Smith, but it does suggest that he had a lighter touch than Betterton. (Betterton’s chief role as fool was in the more coarsely buffoonish part of Sir Toby Belch.) Smith was well equipped to portray Willmore’s charm. He was equally equipped to portray him for what he intermittently is: the play’s chief fool. His mirror-image is Blunt, the fool who becomes a figure of sexual menace. Blunt was played by a primarily comic actor, Cave Underhill, who on many occasions portrayed the alliance of folly and menace.10 One overall change which Behn made was in the setting, moving the action from Madrid to the Spanish possession of Naples (in which the fisherman Thomaso Anello (Massaniello) had led a notorious revolt in 1647–50). Most of the non-English characters are Spaniards, not Italians, and one is the viceroy’s son. The shift is consistent with Behn’s frequent interest in the occupied or colonized territory, which had appeared in The Dutch Lover and Abdelazer, and was to dominate two of her late works, The Widdow Ranter and Oroonoko, and the occupation of Naples is complemented by references to other, parallel and notso-parallel, forms of occupation in other countries: there is the usurpation of power in England; Florinda’s father wishes to marry her to the elderly, repulsive Vincentio, enriched by wealth from Spanish possessions in the West Indies; and Florinda has been saved from rape by the common soldiers during the French seizure of Pamplona. The occupied



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land does not have a fixed, unchanging significance: Belvile, who was on the French side when he rescued Florinda, is now on the Spanish, and the occupying régime in Naples cannot easily parallel the usurping régime back in England. But, for all its fluidity and diversity of application, the condition of the subject in the occupied land is clearly one which for Behn has deep affinities with that of the woman in a world dominated by man, and she often establishes an immediate connection between the two states: the near-purchase of Florinda with Caribbean wealth, and her near-rape by the occupying French. At the sack of Pamplona, women are subject to the ‘Licenc’d Lust of common Souldiers’ (I. i. 67): that is, rape is part of the legally permissible order of things, and Florinda is exceptionally spared because of her social rank and because she is fortunate enough to attract a decent and high-ranking officer.11 Perhaps, however, the most striking linkage between military occupation and the treatment of women lies in the representation of the Italians themselves, who are strikingly few in number and all associated with prostitution. The prostitute Lucetta and her lover Philippo are evidently Italian (though her pimp, Sancho, has a Spanish name), but the only really important Italian character is the prostitute Angellica. In Thomaso, she is an Italian in Spain: one of the many wandering outsiders. Here, she is doubly a stranger in her own land, as a moral outsider and as member of a disempowered group. The strangeness of the native in the occupied land is the strangeness of the woman in a male order. It is one of ‘the ill Customes’ (I. i. 60) of the Spanish to treat women as slaves, and the final visual image of the play is the assimilation of Blunt, the misogynist and would-be rapist, into the male forces of occupation: robbed of his English clothes by the prostitute Lucetta, he is finally, and appropriately, clad in the garb of the authoritarian, sexually oppressive Spanish. As well as altering the place of the play, Behn altered the time, setting the action in the carnival season: a period of permitted suspension and inversion of the official order.12 A number of earlier Restoration plays had employed a carnival setting, using it to portray the conflict between healthy, exuberant desire and the oppressive laws and customs of the older generation, and often showing the triumph of healthy impulse over formalized and ritualized law; Bakhtin’s ‘temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order’.13 Dryden’s An Evening’s Love (1668), for example, is set in the Madrid carnival of 1665. At its climax, the elopement of young lovers is threatened by the approach of the chief magistrate and his officers, but the elderly patriarch who summoned him is coerced into calling him off: ‘tell him



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it was only a Carnival merriment, which I mistook for a Rape and Robbery’.14 Plays of carefree carnival, however, ceased as the portrayal of sex grew darker in the late 1670s, and the Naples carnival is, for women, an occasion both of potential liberation and of great danger, for it expresses the uglier side of male licence, its exuberance constantly spilling over into duels, and into attempted rape or battery. When Florinda ventures out into the street at night in order to elope with Belvile, Willmore automatically classifies her as a prostitute and tries to rape her. She unluckily takes refuge in Blunt’s house, to be immediately threatened with rape once again. The threat turns into one of gang-rape, as most of the male cast clamour outside the room in which she is imprisoned incognita, none clamouring more loudly than her own brother, Pedro. From the moment at which Orsames lusts for his unrecognized mother in The Young King, accidental incest was a recurrent possibility (and occasional fact) in Behn’s works. The point is almost always the same: that once the signs which define a woman’s social identity are erased, she reverts to being an unnamed, undifferentiated object of blind male lust: the blind lust of the brother for the unnamed, unknown, and unseen sister behind the door. With one exception, the categories which define a woman’s social position are those which signify her relationship to a particular man, as sister, daughter or wife. The exception is the category of whore, and that is what a woman becomes in a man’s eyes when the terms of sister, daughter and wife are erased: when, instead of being defined by her relationship to one man, she is defined by her relationship to all. The carnival, with its masks and anonymity, provides women with opportunities to escape the control of the men who define what they are; but the price of this new freedom is that their liberated and unnamed identity constantly threatens to resolve itself, in men’s eyes, into that of the prostitute. At the same cost, the carnival provides women with a freedom of physical movement. They venture outside the prison of the home far more than in earlier plays, but in doing so they enter a different system of control, for the open spaces of the city are a jungle infested with predatory males (Willmore is ‘a Rampant Lion of the Forrest’ [I. ii. 100]), ready to duel at the slightest opportunity; and all the duels are over possession of a woman. Inside the walls of their menfolk, women are commodities; elsewhere, they risk reverting to their more primitive role as prizes of the warrior. Florinda is nearly raped as she crosses the boundary from her brother’s house to the chaotic spaces outside; she is again nearly raped when she enters Blunt’s house. The witty, vivacious Hellena manages to exploit the licence of



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carnival without serious danger, pursuing Willmore in an ever-shifting sequence of disguises, and not disclosing her own name (or learning his) until the carnival courtship gives way to the socially approved institution of marriage. But namelessness can be less benign. When Willmore molests Florinda, he reassures her – as if it neutralized the intended rape – that he cannot brag, because he does not know her name (III. ii. 138). Lucetta robs Blunt with the security of anonymity, and it is because he does not know her name that he diverts his lust and rage to the equally unnamed Florinda. This incident shows with supreme clarity that, without names, all women are classed as whores. Even the imaginary pastoral landscape so insistently invoked in Behn’s works is here one of rape. Unexpectedly, the song sung from Angellica’s chamber immediately before the great courtesan makes her first public appearance is not one of female control but of female submission: a narrative of how the shepherdess Cælia was sexually initiated by ‘kind force’ (II. i. 172). The relationship of social role to specific identity is always problematic. When the first masqueraders enter, the women dressed as whores, and the men as horned cuckolds, they have texts pinned to them: very literally, their identity is externally figured and subject to interpretation by others – though, of course, they themselves wrote the texts. Yet the women apparently pretending to be whores really are whores, and the playful carnival disguise of whore and cuckold is also a representation of the most fundamental sexual fears and prejudices. Play-acting, reality, and mental sexual archetypes collapse into each other, and the boundaries of performative and essential self become indistinct. The initial image of social identity as an externally inscribed text is followed by attempts to read the body itself as a text, but both are in complementary senses associated with imposture: the heroines first approach the heroes disguised as palm-reading gypsies, and as they are fraudulently reading their palms Lucetta is accurately sizing up Blunt as a gullible victim by reading his body language. As these acts of reading reveal, the outdoor world is not only an arena of violence but one of constant surveillance and inspection. The gaze is a recurrent phenomenon in The Rover, but only in the whore Lucetta’s sizing up of the foolish Blunt is it an expression of female power, and Blunt later reclaims it when Florinda first strays into his territory, and ‘He starts up and gazes’ (IV. i. 589).15 The male gaze is not, however, primarily an expression of power, for it is frequently at images, or at absent or departing forms, and its main function is to split the socially perceived self from the personal self.16 Some dramatists of the 1670s have



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very elaborate theories of identity: for example, that the self is disunified, unstable and constantly reformed by outside pressures; or that it is impossible for the self to contemplate the self. Behn never seems to have regarded the interior self as in itself problematic, but she did constantly emphasize the gap between the female self and its public representations, and suggest that misapprehension and misrepresentation were part of the fabric of male control: Blunt’s gaze is powerful and menacing because he misconstrues Florinda as a whore. The constant inspection and counter-inspection, generally in the open spaces of the city, are intangible complements to the walls and weapons of the regulating male, and indeed women are constantly signified through forms external to themselves. Having talked to Belvile without being recognized, Florinda identifies herself by giving him her picture as she departs, and she finally saves herself from the threat of gang rape by handing over a rich jewel, which proves her social status. Most strikingly, Angellica is very calculatedly preceded by her signs, in that she advertises herself by pictures, one big one and two miniatures, Willmore making his first approach by stealing one of the latter. As it turns out, control of the sign is the prelude to control of the woman, and so it is throughout the play. One feature of Lucetta’s victory over Blunt, which is synchronized and interwoven with Willmore’s conquest of Angellica, is that she reverses the normal male and female access to signs. In addition to marking him as her gull by noticing his disorientated staring, she tricks him into misreading his own body, as something sexually inviting (‘my Waist too tolerably long, with other inviting signs, that shall be nameless’ [II. i. 78–9]), and finally robs him of wealth and signs: a diamond ring bearing his family arms, a medal of his king, his mother’s picture, and coins bearing the image of Queen Elizabeth. As far as stage decorum permits, Blunt is stripped to a naked body, and to inert, helpless matter, plummeted in his underwear through a trapdoor into the main sewer. But he emerges ready to restore male power. The disorientated stare and stripped body of the gull become the fixed gaze and stripped body of the angry rapist, threatening the vulnerably nameless Florinda with the powerfully anonymous locus of male power: the sign ‘that shall be nameless’. Blunt, however, is exceptional in falling victim to the female gaze and the female control of signs. At the other end of the scale is Willmore, also a raw bodily presence, but one of consistent power. Alone among the principal characters, he never assumes physical disguise – his habitual disguise is the false and seductive language of which he is master – and just before his first encounter with Angellica he emerges from one



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of the play’s many fights displaying that most intimate form of bodily disclosure, blood: ‘Enter . . . WILLMORE with’s shirt bloody’ (II. i. 235a). The fight has been about Angellica’s picture, so there is a complete polarity between the directess of his self-signification and the obliquity of Angellica’s. Willmore’s rough physical presence must have been an unusual and striking stage image, since the typical hero of a sex comedy was a tastefully dressed young man of means, conducting ruthless sexual warfare within respectable social and sartorial forms. Amidst all the carnival disguise, Behn literally lays bare the male body in its violence and fascination. The male and female body stand in different relations to the signs by which they are publicly represented, and for this reason the carnival masquerade offers them liberation and danger in different proportions. The carnival is not so much an inversion of the typical as a special case of the typical, and its function, therefore, is less to suspend established order than to expose the elemental patterns of power which underlie it: patterns in which the woman is likely to become victim or commodity. Florinda, who twice narrowly escapes rape during the carnival, has already narrowly escaped it in that other free play of power, war, where legalized rape (‘licenced lust’) forms another triumph of appetite over law. Even Belvile, the most decent man in the cast, who repeatedly rescues women from male violence, has an ugly moment; for, when Willmore emerges from Angellica’s house, Belvile crudely enquires how successful he has been by asking, ‘are we to break her Windows! or raise up Alters to her’ (III. i. 85–6). There is the thinnest of distinctions between adoration and violence, and indeed when Willmore attempts to rape Florinda he does so in the language of courtly self-abasement, asking to ‘salute thy Shoe-string’ (III. ii. 126) and claiming that he is compelled to molest her by the power of her eyes. In Behn’s early tragicomedies, oppression in the guise of worship is part of a phase that men outgrow; now it is a permanent part of male conduct. If war and rebellion are sinister mimicries of carnival, another mimicry is prostitution, another form of licensed lust; for the ‘fine Whores’ live ‘Where no Rogues in Office Ecliped [called]17 Constables, dare give ’em Laws’ (73–4). Whereas the carnival is a primary activity of the other characters, and is exploited by Lucetta in her deception of Blunt, Angellica takes only a cursory part in it, but attempts her own, parallel, reversal of authority, believing that she can control the marketplace in which she is sold, and the signs by which she is represented. In The Town-Fopp, Behn had implicitly equated prostitution and the trade of wives. Angellica explicitly asserts the parallel to Willmore,



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believing that she can argue the differing perceptions of the wife and whore out of existence: ‘are not you guilty of the same Mercenary Crime, When a Lady is propos’d to you for a Wife, you never ask, how fair – discreet – or virtuous she is; but what’s her Fortune’ (II. i. 357–9). She even reverses the economics of prostitution by giving the impoverished Willmore money, which he triumphantly shows to his friends, blissfully blind to the obvious: that he, not she, is now the true prostitute. Yet Angellica’s power and fascination are inseparable from her status as commodity. If men crowd ‘all gay, as on a Monarch’s BirthDay, to attract the Eyes of this fair Charmer’ (I. ii. 299–300), her allure is that of the truffle or the sturgeon roe: the expensive delicacy that few can afford. Her price, a thousand crowns, repeatedly draws gasps. But to those with the money, she is ‘expos’d to Sale, and Four days in the Week she’s yours – for so much a Month’ (I. ii. 305–6). The most serious (virtually tragic) element in the play is Angellica’s discovery that the power of the courtesan is an illusion. In the first stages of their courtship, as Willmore is veering between denunciation of Angellica’s ‘Trade’ (II. i. 390) and assurances that he is her ‘Slave’ (II. i. 396), she recognizes that he has ‘a Power too strong to be resisted’ (II. i. 422), and, when she is finally rejected for Hellena, she laments the loss of her ‘fancy’d pow’r’, and of the illusion that ‘all men were born my slaves’ (V. i. 265–78). Willmore, however, has two more substantial forms of power: language and muscle. Language is his carnival mask, and (like Dorimant in The Man of Mode) he perjures himself systematically yet fascinatingly. But Willmore also has power in the most primitive sense. When Pedro, the stock tyrannical brother, hears that his sister Florinda has taken the husband of her choice, he exclaims ‘does he not fear my Pow’r?’ (V. i. 362), only to be subdued by Willmore’s ‘Sir, my Pow’rs greater in this house than yours’ (V. i. 364–5), and by the threat of kidnapping. Inescapably, power such as this shapes events and the social order; indeed, the play portrays a largely benign reversion from the marketplace to the reign of the soldier, in which Willmore and Belvile can claim their loved ones by power and ‘Conquest’ (IV. i. 175). The less benign side-effect is that the power of words belongs to those who possess the cruder and more original power. Briefly, Angellica possesses the means, but not the ability, to exercise it, when she threatens the unfaithful Willmore with a pistol, but – unlike the habitually duelling men – she lacks the killer instinct. It is noteworthy that, as her aggression flares and quickly dies, Willmore allusively identifies himself with the most notorious embodiment of soldierly machismo on the Restoration stage, Almanzor, the boastful hero of Dryden’s two-part



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heroic play The Conquest of Granada (1670–1). Shortly after his first entrance, Almanzor exclaims that he has ‘not leisure yet to dye’,18 and as Angellica rages Willmore recalls the vaunt, exclaiming (in a line of blank verse) that ‘I am not now at leasure to be kill’d’ (V. i. 211). In her murder attempt, Angellica wears carnival guise. This is her only extensive experiment with the form of escapist disguise that the protean Hellena constantly exploits, and indeed Willmore here initially mistakes her for Hellena. The carnival masquerade is for Angellica an attempt to escape from the constraints of femininity into the boundlessness of male violence, but she remains fixed in what she is: she cannot escape from womanhood into manhood, or from the shameful transgression of the prostitute to the licensed transgression of carnival, and she cannot therefore take the final step from carnival licence to social assimilation. Finally, she remains an outsider, incapable of finding a place in the order which is chosen in the concluding marriages (whereas the wandering Willmore, the male outsider, is easily accommodated). When Hellena and Willmore agree to marry, they name themselves, in acknowledgment that they are entering a socially prescribed relationship. But, for Angellica, the saturnalia cannot end with an act of naming that reconciles her individuality and social position: as she has previously recognized, her ‘Name’ and ‘Infamie’ (IV. i. 481) are already fixed, and already damn her. One must not get the proportions of The Rover wrong: it ends in three happy marriages, and Hellena does contain Willmore with her wit (backed up, however, with her virginity and a large fortune). But the unresolved misery of Angellica remains an important element, and the actress who took the part, Anne Marshall Quin, was well equipped to capitalize on it, for her forte was in tragic and passionate roles, and Behn’s skilful splicing and juxtaposition of the plot strands continually reminds us of her equivocal relationship to the other courtships: so nearly identical, and yet so utterly excluded. For example, when the three virgins discuss their nascent love for the heroes, they do so under Angellica’s balcony. Moreover, although Florinda ultimately marries a decent and loving man, it is after a period of nightmare in which she has twice in quick succession been classified as a whore and a fit object of rape. As the experiences of Florella show, Behn is doing far more than drawing external comparisons between the woman sold in marriage and the woman sold in prostitution. She also explores the convolutions of the male mind in comprehending the two types of woman: so separate and irreconcilable, so interchangeable and synonymous. These convo-



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lutions are best illustrated in the division of sexual interest displayed by Antonio, the son of the viceroy, who has willingly been selected by Florinda’s brother as her husband, but who is in fact in love with Angellica. The misunderstandings caused by his deviousness culminate in a characteristically complex misunderstanding, which implicates Florinda in yet another intermingling of gentlewoman and prostitute. Belvile is mistakenly arrested for wounding Antonio in a duel over Angellica (the true culprit being that perpetual loose cannon, Willmore). Antonio believes that he was the assailant, and therefore that he is a rival for Angellica, but he protects him, and asks him to take his place in a duel the following morning, since he himself is too injured to fight. The duel, he says, is ‘with a Rival, Sir, / About the Maid we love’ (IV. i. 53–4). Belvile naturally assumes the duel concerns Florinda; but Antonio is in fact engaged to duel with Pedro, his own prospective brother-in-law, because they both love Angellica. The straitlaced Belvile is thus induced by his male code of honour to disguise himself as the cynically promiscuous Antonio, in order to fight a duel which he believes to concern Florinda, but which actually concerns Angellica: in this incident, opposing stereotypes of male and female conduct are simultaneously blurred and confounded; and the dissolving agent is the prostitute. Men exercise control through money, force and language, and women are consequently consigned to categories shaped by men, and to observance of their arbitrary differentiations of value between the sister sold in marriage and the stranger sold in prostitution. The order of society is founded upon natural principles, namely what Behn increasingly came to see as unalterable principles of power, but the principles of nature are not principles of justice. Florinda complains about her brother’s ‘unjust Commands’ (I. i. 22), and Angellica reproaches Willmore for his ‘unjust’ breach of vows (IV. i. 275). And, appropriately, it is Willmore himself who gives the most forceful image of a judicial order created in the likeness of male desire. Molesting Florinda, and arguing that her own attractiveness is to blame, he protests, ‘a Judge were he young and vigorous, and saw those Eyes of thine, wou’d know ’twas they gave the first blow’ (III. ii. 149–50). At the end of that early carnival play, Dryden’s An Evening’s Love, the approach of the killjoy magistrate had been halted by the message that an apparent ‘Rape and Robbery’ was ‘a Carnival merriment’. Carnival was an innocent escape from the pedantic restrictiveness of law. Here carnival, and its imagined relationship to the law, is different. Not only is carnival now dark and violent; it becomes an image of the law, the judge being invoked to turn the rape into something legal and normal:19 into another example of



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that recurrent phenomenon, ‘licenced Lust’. For women, the indignities of the saturnalia are normality. Like Abdelazer, if more implicitly, The Rover ends in a prison, with the tables turned on an original gaoler. Florinda is released from the room in which Blunt had imprisoned her, and Pedro, who has tried to confine the sisters throughout the play, finds that he is helpless before the power of Willmore and his men. The nature of the setting, and the reversal of its significance, appropriately complete a play in which Behn amplifies her interest in space as an articulation of power, and in the different ways in which men and women experience the exercise of power through space. As usual, a fundamental pattern is to compare the authority of men and women in indoor and outdoor areas, though Behn places new emphasis on the points which divide the two worlds: the door, the window, the balcony. The play opens in a chamber, with women (Florinda and Hellena) in sprightly conversation,20 rebelling against the parallel confinements of enforced marriage and a convent to which they are destined, and which are exemplified by the room in which they are enclosed. When their brother Pedro enters, his servant carries the signs that indicate his greater freedom of movement: carnival masks, representing an access to the outside world and a multiplicity of roles, both of which are denied to the women. Pedro is insistent that Callis, the governess, ‘lock . . . up’ Hellena throughout the carnival (I. i. 127), and attention is thereby, for the first time of many, directed towards the door. In the next act, Angellica’s portraits are hung outside the door under her balcony; one sign of the feminization of Blunt is that he is robbed in a room whose door is locked; Florinda tries to elope with Belvile by unlocking the garden door and entering the nighttime spaces of the streets, only to be menaced with rape by Willmore, who interprets the door as another prostitute’s entrance (‘why at this time /of Night was your Cobweb Door set open dear Spider – but to catch Flyes?’ [III. ii. 161–2]); and later, escaping further confinement by her brother, she finds a ‘door open’ (IV. i. 560) and takes refuge, only to fall into the clutches of Blunt, who promptly has her locked up, within an inner room. The final action of the scene is Blunt locking the outer door. In the following act, the lustful men successfully demand the key to Florinda’s prison. Clearly this pattern indicates that women are subject both to imprisonment inside houses, and to parallel forms of disempowerment when they stray outside their cells: there is oppression on either side of the door. There is, however, more. Women are characteristically seen, or imagined, in relation to boundaries which men pass with ease.



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Angellica’s portraits are hung beside her door, and she herself first appears (also framed) on her balcony. (Her pictures exist on the public side of the door, but when she herself ventures through it, she must – like the other women – do so in disguise.) As Angellica first appears on her balcony, so it is repeatedly stressed that the confined Florinda can only make contact with Belvile by standing in her window. Men, however, are less constrained, and treat doors with contempt. Antonio and Willmore fight outside Angellica’s door, causing Moretta to slam it shut in panic, and Willmore and his friends later break open Blunt’s door, as he tries to keep Florinda for himself. Belvile is, like his beloved Florinda, imprisoned (by Antonio, after their duel). The two imprisonments clearly invite comparison, but the outcome could scarcely be more different. Antonio gives Belvile his sword (that recurrent symbol of male selfhood), and elects him as his doppelgänger in the forthcoming duel. Florinda becomes a nameless object of universal male lust. The final setting, of Blunt’s room, completes a characteristic scenic arc, from the room in which Florinda and Hellena are confined to that where Florinda is more brutally locked up (almost certainly represented by the same set).21 In between, there have been three other indoor scenes: in Angellica’s room, in Lucetta’s (where Blunt is gulled and dropped through a trapdoor into the sewer), and in Antonio’s. All but Angellica’s are literal places of imprisonment; Angellica’s is the place where she becomes the ‘Conquest’ of Willmore. Only in Lucetta’s room does a woman imprison a man, and here the tables are turned: although she has played a leading role in the entrapment of Blunt, her booty is taken by her lover, who hands it over to her pimp, with the instruction to lock it up, before steering her into another room, for sex. Angellica’s room is, perhaps, the most interesting demonstration of female vulnerability; for, despite her seemingly immense power, she wields it only within an enclosed, purely female world. As soon as Willmore goes through her door into her room, he establishes control over her and her space. When she goes out into the street, she discovers Willmore’s infidelity. Her final recognition of her impotence occurs within Blunt’s chamber. Despite all the enclosure, however, the heroines do escape into the carnival, and the second scene of the play brings a great enlargement of space. It is ‘A Long Street’, stretching back the whole depth of the stage. It is, however, a space initially populated solely by men. The first women who enter are prostitutes, one of whom ‘puts herself into the Hands of a Man’ (I. ii. 91a) and when the gentlewomen enter they both visibly repeat the entry of the prostitutes and are accompanied by one:



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Lucetta. Only at the beginning of Act III do we see women in command of an outside space, as the three heroines enter with Callis, the governess, but without male company. Thereafter, however, the streets become increasingly dangerous for all but the invincible Hellena. Angellica steps outside for the first time and is promptly wounded by the spectacle of Willmore’s infidelity, and by the end of the act Florinda has discovered that the streets are the haunt of drunken rapists, from which her ultimate refuge is the house of the menacing Blunt. Ultimately, male lust makes all spaces alike. Behn had been criticized for failing to acknowledge the debt of Abdelazer to Lust’s Dominion.22 She nevertheless initially kept quiet about the debt to Thomaso, though she at first took the precaution of publishing the play anonymously (authors’ names did not yet appear on playbills). The borrowing and the borrower quickly became known, however, and Behn added a postscript in which (in a famous and ambiguous passage) she denied any substantial debt: ‘I might have appropriated all to my self, but I, vainly proud of my Judgment, hang out the Sign of Angellica, (the only stoln Object) to give Notice where a great part of the Wit dwelt’ (ll. 8–10). Langbaine read the passage literally, as a disingenuous statement that Angellica was the only borrowed element. More recently, however, there has been a vogue for seeing a close and almost public identification between Behn, the poetess-punk, and her creation (perhaps overinterpreting the fact that they share the same initials). It is probably unwise to attach too much significance to a plainly mendacious afterthought, extorted under pressure. There is a moment of identification with Angellica when Behn speaks of hanging out the sign, but it passes as soon as she boasts of stealing it; for the character who performs the theft is Willmore. A more important objection is that Angellica is anything but an image of the female writer. In a play which crams in every imaginable form of sign, and in which Florinda does operate through writing, Angellica remains inexpert at signification. She does not write, she is the victim of Willmore’s rhetoric and of public censure, and she is a fallen ‘Idol’ (V. i. 273). When she most signifies herself to the public, her signs are displayed by men, and they are non-linguistic: portraits, whose multiplication erases her character and defines her as an endlessly resaleable commodity, and number. When Angellica’s portrait is displayed in Part I of Thomaso, it is accompanied by discursive prose: This is the Picture of the Angellica Paduana, that was Mistress to the dead General; her friendship is not to be purchas’d under a thousand



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In Behn, the text is not directly read. We simply see a sequence of men going up to it and extracting and then obsessively repeating (ten times in all) the same numerical formula: ‘a Thousand Crowns a Month’, or even just ‘a Thousand Crowns’.24 The real sign of Angellica is a numerical formula; even her pictures are counted. This is hardly an image of the female writer, but it is an indication of the direction in which Behn’s mind was moving. In her next play, Sir Patient Fancy, she for the first time portrayed a world completely regulated by number.

Sir Patient Fancy Sir Patient Fancy (by January 1678) is Behn’s first social comedy to be set in London (for The Town-Fopp is hardly a social comedy at all). It is lighter in tone than any previous Behn comedy, with greatly reduced emphasis on male violence. There is still an intermittent sense of the vulnerability of women, but it is never potentially tragic, and there are no distressing loose ends like Angellica. In reducing the prominence of the violent male, Behn ceases for a while to meditate on the militaristic origin of male supremacy, and its relationship to the marketing of women. The mind of the foolish country gentleman, Sir Credulous Easy, does move easily between the horse he intended to sell and the woman he intends to marry, but the marketplace and the battlefield retreat, for the moment, into the background. Sir Credulous was played by the leading comic actor James Nokes, who excelled at portraying pusillanimous buffoonery.25 In her previous two comedies, Behn had created fools of unusual nastiness and violence; the mildness and manipulability of Sir Credulous is symptomatic of her changed emphasis in portraying the male.26 Like many of her male contemporaries, Behn made free use of Molière, drawing on two plays in particular. Sir Patient Fancy himself, an elderly, uxurious hypochondriac who finally discovers his young wife’s true feelings by feigning death, is based on Argan, the protagonist of Le Malade imaginaire, and the learned lady Lady Knowell is based on two elderly female pedants in Les Femmes savantes. Behn once again ran into charges of plagiarism, and in the preface defended herself by saying she had taken ‘but a very bare hint from . . . the Malad Imagenere’, which she had seen in a translation (unpublished and untraced) by ‘a



Crowns a moneth, for which her Lover is Master four days and nights each week and she his Servant. Angellica Bianca Paduana23

Gentleman’ (ll. 16–17). She understates the matter, but Sir Patient Fancy is as free, creative and original as the two recent Molière adaptations of Wycherley, The Country-Wife and The Plain-Dealer. As one might expect, Behn’s modifications include development of the woman’s viewpoint. Argan’s wife is simply a scheming hypocrite, whereas Lady Fancy is portrayed with the sympathy Behn always reserved for women in a loveless marriage. Molière’s learned ladies are caricatures, observed without any sympathy. Lady Knowell is, sometimes in a single moment, scatty, moving and humane; and she has a passion for literature (though only literature in foreign tongues). Revealingly, the part was given a really substantial actress: Anne Marshall Quin, who had created the part of Angellica. The Duke’s Company had an actress, Elinor Leigh, who for many years was to specialize in comically superannuated beauties; she had played Angellica’s over-the-hill bawd, Moretta, in The Rover, and later played in a more straightforward adaptation of Les Femmes savantes, Thomas Wright’s The Female Vertuoso’s (1693); but there was no place for her in Sir Patient Fancy. Lady Fancy was played by Betty Currer, an actress who had a talent (though it was not her only one) for portraying unscrupulous gold-diggers; the part of Lady Fancy uses this talent, but adds an unusual depth of motive. In the epilogue to The Rover, Behn had mocked the ‘Mutinous Tribe’ of ‘Conventickling’ dissenters (ll. 5–7), hostile to Cavaliers, popery and fun: to carnivals and masquerade.27 In Sir Patient Fancy she for the first time put one of this tribe on the stage, for one of her alterations of Molière was to give her hypochondriac protagonist the supplementary follies of sectarian fanaticism and political subversiveness (he denounces his son’s ‘lewd Cavaliering Opinion’ [V. i. 105]). The two forms of folly are partially linked: the sicknesses which he imagines in his own body correspond with those which he imagines in the state (his ‘Mutinous Caball’ [II. i. 50] meets in his house because of his imaginary sickness), and both follies express themselves in absurd private dialect, the ‘canting’ jargon of medicine (V. i. 524) paralleling the cant of the dissenters. The affected and self-righteous language of the dissenters was frequently mocked, and indeed found to be not only ludicrous but morally sinister, in that it corrupted the right meanings of words. To cite one example out of many, Robert South delivered three sermons on the text ‘Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil’ (Isaiah 5: 20), denouncing the rebels and malcontents who re-label ‘schismatics’ as ‘true Protestants’ and ‘the late subversion’ as ‘reformation’.28 South is not describing the inevitable treacherousness of language, but lamenting



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the ways in which its socially agreed meanings may be perverted. He is describing a right language and a wrong language: a language where the moral meanings of words are enshrined, and a subversive counterlanguage in which they are reversed. Behn, however, is not visibly interested in protecting a single, dominant language of political value; rather, she observes the endless proliferation of rival dialects. These include Lady Knowell’s frequent quotations from Latin and Greek, and the Devonshire dialect of Sir Credulous Easy, whom Lady Knowell initially favours as suitor for her daughter Lucretia. Like Sir Patient, he has a second dialect, having studied classical authors and rhetorical theorists at university, and his skill in the cant of rhetoric means that he is well equipped to shift over to that of medicine, when, as a bogus doctor, he participates in a gibberish-laden consultation scene, designed to distract Sir Patient while his daughter Isabella elopes with Lady Knowell’s son. The play, in short, portrays Babel. The restrictive, monomaniac dialects are intellectual prisons, and Sir Patient Fancy is (more exclusively than The Rover) very much a play of correspondingly limited and enclosed spaces. The action takes place in two households, Lady Knowell’s and Sir Patient’s (matriarchy and patriarchy), whose proximity to each other is emphasized. Visions of the outside world are subjective and distorted, and the familiar becomes alien when characters so much as step into the garden (the chief, very limited, representation of outdoor space). Of the four garden scenes, the first three initiate disruptive errors of identity: Lady Fancy’s lover, Wittmore, is forced into posing as a suitor for Sir Patient’s daughter Isabella; in the second, Lady Knowell’s son Lodwick is mistaken for Wittmore by Lady Fancy’s maidservant, and led to her bedroom; in the third, correspondingly, Wittmore mistakes Isabella (Sir Patient’s daughter, and Lodwick’s beloved) for Lady Fancy. In the final garden scene, the previous mistakes about partners turn Lodwick and Wittmore from friends into enemies, and they start to duel: the only outbreak of serious male violence in the play. There is, however, only one completely outdoor scene – a scene in ‘the long street’, immediately after the last garden scene – and here the streets of London are changed into alien territory by means of an elephant and oriental musical instruments, Sir Credulous having been persuaded that this is a good way to serenade his intended bride. An extra layer of alienness is provided by the Devonshire dialect of the serenade itself, and yet another by a further song that is quoted in the scene: ‘Hark how the Waters fall, fall, fall’ (III. ii. 352) – a song that had been sung by an Aztec woman to the invading Spaniards in Dryden’s The Indian Emperour.29 Babel is then piled upon



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Babel when two of Sir Patient’s servants rush out and denounce the event in contrasting vocabularies, a religious maniac referring to ‘Babes of Perdition’, his worldlier companion to ‘Sons of Whores’ (III. ii. 360–3). The result is more violence, though here performed by fools and subordinates. This scene is the one occasion on which Behn permits us to see the metropolis in which the characters live, and she portrays it as subject to multiple forms of distortion and defamiliarization: not an objectively perceived space at all. London is something about which the characters constantly talk (the word town, for example, occurs frequently), but they do not talk about its topography – the Mall, St James’s Park, the Mulberry Garden – as characters in many contemporary plays did. Rather, they discuss its ideological zones. Sir Patient’s mental world is shaped by the opposition between the city (base of the nonconformist mercantile class), the town (base of the fashionable gentry), the court, and the country, to which he wishes to retreat when the devotees of the town press in too closely upon him. Denouncing the gentrification of his nephew, Leander, for example, he complains that he has ‘grown a very t’other end of the town Creature, a very Apple of Sodom’ (IV. iii. 92–3). The ‘other end of the town’ is not only a place of alien morals and dress, it is Sodom: a place from a different map and century. Our one glimpse of the actual streets of London, made strange by an elephant and Bantamese music, confirms that London has no tangible unity or presence: it is constantly and variously being overwritten with alien customs and alien tongues. Behn thus creates a conflict between the rigorously limited physical space of the play and the multiple, but individually closed, imaginative and linguistic spaces which the characters impose on it. In doing so, she is responding (directly or indirectly) to two sets of ideas that exercised repeated influence on the drama. Emphasizing that words acquired their meaning purely from arbitrary agreements between men, Hobbes warned of the danger that each individual party to the compact might understand it differently and attach private substrata of meanings to words.30 For the sake of social and intellectual stability, Hobbes had wanted to safeguard a single, dominant system of meanings, but other Restoration dramatists had already concluded that competing linguistic systems within the same language (what Bakhtin was to term heteroglossia) were inevitable, and were a source of comic energy and playfulness. Another recurrent image in Restoration comedy was that of the city or even (as here) the household as being rather like a map, subdivided



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into separate, parochial, and sometimes contested areas, each representing a different intellectual system with its own pretensions to universality. There is no upward-reaching correspondence between the form of society and the designs of God; there is simply the horizontal proliferation of rival and arbitrary codes. Arguing that there was no such thing as a universal moral principle, Montaigne had represented moral systems as sets of local bye-laws, restricted to a particular region, yet viewed by their adherents as global truths: ‘Thou seest but the order and policie of this little little Cell wherein thou art placed. . . . This law thou aleagest is but a municipall law, and thou knowest not what the universall is’.31 Sir Patient Fancy portrays a world of little cells and municipal laws, each little cell possessing its own dialect. Even church ritual that is not specifically Puritan is treated, not as a dominant and official language, but as more mumbo-jumbo. Threatened with a forced marriage, Sir Patient’s daughter Isabella imagines the impending ritual as a superstitious and obfuscating ritual, of witchcraft and sacrifice; sacrifice conceived not, as in The Town-Fopp, as primitive violence, but as verbal imposture: ‘do, Sacrifice me, lead me to the Altar, and see if all the holy mystick words can Conjure from me the consenting syllable: No, I will not add one word to make the Charm compleat, but stand as silent in th’ inchanting Circle, as if the Priests were raising Devils there’ (V. i. 50–4). If the play affirms royalist values, moreover, it does not do so in any detail, beyond firming up what was to be her standard contrast between the glamorous, sexually dangerous Cavalier (the Willmore type), and the withered sexually barren Puritan (the actor who played Sir Patient, Anthony Leigh, was a specialist in comic and sometimes unconventional senile sexuality). If Lady Fancy’s nonconformist husband is old and sexually ridiculous, her lover, Wittmore, bears the significantly royal forename of Charles, though it has also to be said that he contradicts his surname by being distinctly dim. Although there is a world of fixed, royalist values in the wings, then, Behn chooses to highlight relativism and parochialism in religion, politics, language and medicine (several of the real and bogus doctors in the consultation scene are identified by the different European cities in which they studied). It is perhaps revealing that this is the first Behn play to make no substantial use of pastoral. Unlike her poetic pastorals, those in her plays were always ironic, but the connotation of pastoral is of a place whose ideal significance is universally known. The place with universally agreed significance has no function in Sir Patient Fancy. This is no longer the monolithic world of The Forc’d Marriage, for it is



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no longer a world governed by power. Power still was a key word in The Rover; it is rare in Sir Patient Fancy, and is used of male authority only once, when Sir Patient transfers legal power over his estate to his wife. This is a world now governed by number, measurement and time. Method is (for the first time in Behn) a recurrent word, linking Sir Credulous’s rhetoric and the procedures of the quacks, and Behn significantly varies her repertory of manual props: as the weapon is downgraded, so the watch is promoted. Tricking Sir Credulous into handing over his watch, Lady Knowell’s son Lodwick interprets it as a ‘Hieroglyphick’ for the ritual of a married woman’s day: ‘Beginning at Eight, from which down to Twelve you ought to imploy in dressing, till Two at Dinner, till Five in Visits, till Seven at the Play, till Nine i’th’ Park, at Ten at Supper’ (I. i. 317–23). Later, when Lady Fancy’s lover Wittmore conceals himself as Sir Patient enters her bedroom, he is almost betrayed by the striking of his watch, and curses ‘all invention and Mechanicks’ (IV. iii. 174). He is only saved from detection because Lady Fancy manages to represent the new, mechanical invention as an ancient, supernatural process: a ‘death-watch, a certain Larum deathwatch, a thing that has warn’d our Family this hundred years’ (IV. iii. 184–5). What is comically evoked is a contrast between an old view of the world as infused by spirit and magic, and a new world of objective, material measurement. Behn had scorned the former in the preface to The Dutch Lover, where her mockery of Henry More had glanced at his credulous gathering of ‘Apocryphal midnight tales’ (l. 12) – stories and episodes of the occult, with which he sought to demonstrate the existence of spirit. Behn’s modern, mechanistic alternative, however, scarcely constitutes a paean to modern science, or even modern watchmaking. In the second instance, the artifice of the watch perversely interferes with the laudable indulgence of natural appetite; and in the first it organizes the wasting of time. Time and number are constantly invoked to define the state of the body and the places it inhabits: their character is no longer permanent and intrinsic, but temporary, local, and contingent. Medicine becomes a ‘method’ (V. i. 402) of managing the body by time and number: ‘Twelve Purges for this present January . . .’ muses Sir Patient; ‘but Ten in all December, – by this Rule I am sicker this Month than I was the last’ (II. i. 76–8). His January body is numerically different from his December body. The mock consultation scene, in particular, is a very elaborate pretence to manage the body by numerical rule: for example, Sir Patient is told that his particular ‘Complexion and constitution’ make him vulnerable to a star that ‘has rul’d this two daies’, but whose



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influence will cease ‘within this two hours and six Minutes’ (V. i. 284–6). And, throughout this scene, the mock doctors define their imaginary competence by number and place: ‘I Commenc’t at Paris twenty years agoe’; ‘And I at Leyden, almost as long since’ (V. i. 473–4). Even the threats of violence so common in Behn’s plays can now be expressed as the scientific control of the body through space and number. Lucretia’s true love Leander tries to frighten Sir Credulous away from her by telling him that he possesses ‘specifick Poyson for all the Senses’ that works at long distance, striking only its intended target even if he is ‘in the midst of a thousand People’ (IV. i. 101–7). Sir Credulous’s terror at this threat produces the grossest subjection of the body to the structure and geometry of space, for he hides in a basket, upon which Lucretia’s brother Lodwick writes directions, and Sir Credulous is then carried away as the directions prescribe. It is a commonplace that, in the Enlightenment, an order based on enumeration and measurement grew up to challenge and edge aside older social and cosmic models based on the presumption of a natural and organic analogy between the body, the state and the cosmos. Of course, many writers before Behn had rejected the analogical model of society, but Sir Patient Fancy is, to my knowledge, the first play to observe that the old symbolic order was being replaced by one of abstract measurement and enumeration. In social models derived from the Great Chain of Being, every creature had a determinate and objective place in the total social or cosmic order, and an individual’s geographic place – the nobleman’s estate, with its attendant responsibilities, the birthplace to which the vagabond was forcibly returned – was conceptually linked to his position in the universal system of what Shakespeare’s Ulysses, contentiously, called ‘degree, priority, and place’.32 Many writers of the generation after Behn were to use the numerical universe to provide alternative figurations of place: as a morally neutral object of dispassionate measurement rather than symbolic interpretation, but also a blank area on to which men projected their own desires and symbols. So it is in Sir Patient Fancy. Most of the systems which Behn portrays are marginal eccentricities, but in portraying manifestly absurd systems she does implicitly question some plausible and authoritative ones. In particular, the satire of cant and jargon exposes problems in language itself. With his pedantic, rhetorical training, Sir Credulous has systematized language so much that he delivers to Sir Patient’s daughter, Isabella, a speech intended for Lady Fancy: ‘The Rogue has but one method for all Addresses’ observes Lodwick Knowell (II. i. 302; italics



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added). Language, however, is always a set of general signs, alien to the solid specificity of particular objects, and speeches or documents are frequently applied, or referred, to the wrong person. In one of the confusions originating in the garden, Lady Fancy sleeps with Lodwick Knowell, her step-daughter’s suitor, in the belief that he is her lover, Wittmore; she does not recognize the difference in voice (though Lodwick recognizes her voice, and takes cynical advantage of her mistake). Subsequently, Wittmore mistakes Isabella for Lady Fancy, while Isabella mistakes him for her suitor, Lodwick, though here no disaster occurs. Later, Lady Fancy bluffs her way out of an incriminating (but fortunately unsigned) letter to Wittmore by persuading Sir Patient that it was written by Isabella, and signing her name at the end. In such incidents, Behn implies that language constantly needs to be supplemented by other systems and criteria of knowledge. Her prime purpose is partly predictable and partly surprising: she questions the legitimacy of language as an instrument of male supremacy, but, by the same token, she also questions its effectiveness as a means of female empowerment. In the preface and epilogue to the play, Behn passionately asserts the woman’s right to be heard and to act: ‘We once were fam’d in story [history]’, she claims in the latter, ‘and could write/ Equal to men’ (ll. 8–9). The play in no sense contradicts this right, but it does perhaps ask how much is gained by possessing it. After all, the chief embodiment of the literary woman in the play itself is the equivocal figure of Lady Knowell. Behn certainly gives her some stature. The casting guarantees her beauty and dignity, and underlines Behn’s transformation of Molière: her chief counterpart in Les Femmes savantes, Bélise, is ageing, foolish, and vain, convinced that her niece’s lover is really in love with her, whereas Lady Knowell merely feigns affection for her daughter’s suitor in order to test his worthiness. Nevertheless, she has her ludicrous side, for she never discovers a proper linguistic decorum in which to display and communicate her learning. When she unites her daughter with her true love, for example, she pushes a dignified gesture towards farce by crowning it with a pedantic Latin cry of ‘Thalessio, Thalessio!’ (V. i. 87) the cry uttered at Roman weddings: a fragment of yet another local system, and one whose meaning has been forgotten.33 She also enthuses over the poetic resonance of a very formulaic, run-of-the-mill line of Homer: ‘Ton d’apamibominus, Prosiphe, Podis Ochus Achilleus!’ (I. i. 95).34 ‘Ah how it sounds!’ she exclaims. The line repeatedly introduces speeches of Achilles in the Iliad and (with appropriate changes in the last two and a half feet of the hexameter line) of several other heroes in both



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Homeric epics. Like the letter which Lady Fancy signs with Isabella’s name, it has a space at the end, to be filled in at pleasure. Lady Fancy, however, exploits the ambiguity and transferability of the formulaic; Lady Knowell’s mistake is to exult in its specific expressiveness. Her classical education is a system not of empowerment but of jargon, and jargon that is suspiciously co-extensive with that of the most powerless male in the play, Sir Credulous Easy: like her, he cultivates classical rhetoric; like him, she gullibly seeks proficiency in the fraudulent jargon of medicine. Her learning bestows no authority; it merely adds another dialect to Babel. It is unexpected that Behn should portray a learned lady in this way, but Lady Knowell is not Aphra Behn; nor is she the most linguistically adept woman in the cast. Like Angellica Bianca, she never writes, even though the play is full of acts of writing – often ones which help to control the male body. There is writing in the consultation scene; Lady Fancy writes and then reinterprets her ambiguous love-letter; Wittmore extends the ambiguity, discussing the letter with Sir Patient in a way that he will apply to his daughter, but which Lady Fancy will apply to herself; Sir Patient is tricked out of the writings of his estate, and when Sir Credulous hides in a basket, fearing the threats of violence from a rival, Lodwick writes directions on the basket, prescribing where it is to be carried. The male body is here, more literally than ever, subject to the control of writing; but it is notable that Lady Knowell is persuaded that the contents of the basket are, not a living male (if hardly virile) body, but a consignment of books. She lives in a world of pure text, blind to its power over the body even when directly confronted with it. As these incidents show, the play repeatedly focuses on the boundaries between language and the body. When Sir Credulous is in the basket, or Sir Patient is at the mercy of his physicians, writing acquires a puppeteering control over the body that in earlier plays belongs only to force, and Sir Patient is even orally persuaded that his body bears the symptoms of serious illness. There are also incidents in which men are made vulnerable by total linguistic deprivation. Early in the play, Sir Credulous is persuaded by Lodwick to reject the ‘Method of common Court-ship’ (I. i. 244), to abandon rhetorical system and indeed speech itself, and to court Lucretia in silent bodily signs, which are then subjected to capricious and rapidly shifting misinterpretation, as indications of willingness to surrender all his valuables (including that new emblem of virility, his watch). In comically reduced form, Behn makes two related points: that there is no such thing as a natural sign system, and that arbitrarily contrived systems can easily be used to dominate



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those who are not party to contriving them. What gives power in this play is not language as a finished system but something anterior to that: the power to determine the application of signs. If Sir Credulous gauchely employs ‘but one method for all Addresses’ (II. i. 301) when he delivers a speech to the wrong woman, others derive power from the gap between the generality of the sign and the specificity of the signified: the power, for example, to persuade Sir Patient that a declaration of love by his wife is a declaration of love by his daughter. The numerous scenes which show the power of text or speech over a helpless, unique body show varying versions of that gap and that power, but Lady Knowell does not participate in them: she merely quotes what others have written. The most basic sign-system in the play – the one which most closely approximates to a set of natural, non-verbal signs – occurs when Lady Fancy’s lover Wittmore is trapped in Sir Patient’s bedroom after the cuckold’s unexpected return. With Sir Patient overhearing, Lady Fancy successfully communicates with Wittmore by silent gestures: ‘She endeavours to make Signs to Wittmore. . . . As Wittmore goes out, he bows and looks on her; she gives him a sign’ (IV. ii. 186a, 199a). Later, when they are caught out by Sir Patient’s return, she orchestrates her lover’s escape by means of silent signs, the concluding one being ‘a little kick behind’ (IV. iii. 222b). This does come close to being a set of natural signs, since there is simply a mirroring in gesture of spatial relationships – a body, a door, a route from A to B – and it is notable that in this prelinguistic condition Lady Fancy has complete equality and power. The ‘little kick’ is, indeed, a gesture of command and superiority. In the sphere of language, however, power is slippery and insecure, and Lady Fancy’s greatest vulnerability appears, ominously, at what apparently promises to be her greatest moment of liberation. Behn’s mature plays are second to none in their explicit and polemic endorsement of adultery as a liberation from forced or loveless marriage. Yet, while adultery is always uncomplicated fun for the man, it generally creates its own kind of subjugation and indignity for the ‘liberated’ woman. Lady Fancy does eventually end up with her lover, her husband’s fortune, and the reformed Sir Patient’s surprisingly cheerful acquiescence in the new arrangement, but there is a night of trauma on the way to the happy ending. When, at night, Lady Fancy waits eagerly in the garden for her first sexual encounter with Wittmore, she seems to be on the verge of an act of self-defining escape. At this point, however, she becomes the sexual prey of a passing third party, for this is where she mistakes Lodwick for Wittmore, and where Lodwick



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(recognizing her voice where she does not recognize his) enjoys her by the time-honoured device of the bedroom trick. By all other standards, Lodwick is a perfectly decent young man, but Behn here suggests (as she had done more fleetingly with Belvile in The Rover) that even decent young men have their darker side. The deception is an act of thoughtless and repented folly rather than malice: Lodwick (a ‘dear mad Devil’ [III. i. 131]) is the successor to Willmore, and was played by the same actor, William Smith. Nonetheless, whatever the extenuation, Lady Fancy explicitly feels shocked and violated, exclaiming that she is ‘ruin’d and betray’d’ and falling ‘almost in a swoon’ (III. ii. 276). The thing which is the precondition for her violation is linguistic ingenuousness: poor control over the system of signs. The actual intercourse is, explicitly, conducted in complete silence but – unlike the later silent scene with Wittmore – Lady Fancy is here the object of control, because in the lead-up dialogue she has applied words to the wrong body, whereas Lodwick has eventually worked out the relationship. Lodwick is the play’s chief linguistic manipulator. Although he is the son of Lady Knowell, he controls the gap between the sign and signified in a way that she cannot. It is he who induces Sir Credulous to communicate in dumb gesture and to put on his oriental serenade; he persuades Sir Credulous to get into the basket, and writes directions on it; and, although Lady Knowell supplies some of her doctors for the medical consultation, it is he who linguistically orchestrates it. By contrast, Wittmore (played by the less mercurial Betterton) is ‘a Damn’d dull fellow at invention’ (IV. i. 234), and is constantly put upon. For example, he is, effectively, cuckolded as a result of Lodwick’s adventure with Lady Fancy and when, in the complementary confusion of identities, he mistakes Isabella for Lady Fancy and talks lustfully to her, the result is not a triumph to counterbalance Lodwick’s, but embarrassment. One of Betterton’s lines was in sexually commanding and ruthless roles, such as those of Etherege’s Dorimant and Behn’s own Abdelazer. He is here charming, desirable and inept. If Lady Fancy has her period of control over the silent Wittmore, she has not outsmarted the chief opposition, who is Lodwick. Male linguistic superiority is not, however, general or even normal, since Sir Credulous, Sir Patient and Wittmore all lose their grip. Sexual difference too has its municipal laws. The gathering of doctors in the consultation scene is a display of the traditions of formalized gibberish which are the public pretexts and instruments of male authority. It is the scenic equivalent to the massed



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ceremonial scenes of military power in The Forc’d Marriage, and it is, notably, a display in which the linguistically fatuous Sir Credulous participates with aplomb. In satirizing man’s linguistic supremacy, however, it also raises problems about women’s attempts to wrest it from them. There is no sense that beyond the rival jargons lies a unified, dominant language of authority whose acquisition can give power to a woman. Power in Sir Patient Fancy lies in controlling the distance between the signifying word and the signified body. Lady Fancy is both the victim and the beneficiary of this distance; Lady Knowell, with her insistence on the pure essence of the text, on the Homeric resonance that cannot be experienced in translation, is the last person to be able to exist in this linguistic shadowland. In The Rover, Behn had written a highly successful play; in Sir Patient Fancy, she had written a better one. A new sense of ease is evident in her occasional intertextual evocations of Dryden: in Willmore’s allusion to The Conquest of Granada, or the quotation here of the song from The Indian Emperour. These combine a sense of professional respect with one of professional equality: she can write her own variations on the great man’s themes. Behn also reveals her sense of ease with a theatrical injoke of a rather different effect. Nokes, who acted Sir Credulous, had two years earlier acted the part of Sir Samuel Hearty in Shadwell’s The Virtuoso. Sir Samuel is the weakest part of a good play, lamely individuated by catchphrases such as ‘whip, slap-dash’, and at the end of the play (like Sir Credulous) he has himself parcelled up in a chest, in order to be delivered to the woman he believes to love him. As Sir Credulous gets into the basket, he emphasizes the repetition of the earlier incident: ‘Whip slap dash, as Nokes says in the Play’ (IV. i. 275). When he pops out of the basket to say ‘pray take care they set me not on my head’ (IV. i. 283), he is recalling what happened to Sir Samuel. The allusion seems to invite the audience to compare and contrast the two incidents, to admire Behn’s greater flexibility of dialogue and complexity of meaning. In the closing moments of the play, Sir Credulous alludes to another, twice used, expression of Sir Samuel: ‘but as the Play says, ’tis well ’tis no worse’ (V. i. 731).35 Behn was no longer overshadowed by EpsomWells: anything Shadwell could do, she could do better. The broken triangle of the preface to The Dutch Lover has been reconstructed, and Shadwell’s point is lowest. Yet Sir Patient Fancy failed. So did Shadwell’s latest play, A True Widow (March 1678?). Dryden’s The Kind Keeper; or, Mr Limberham (Duke’s, March 1678) was quickly banned, for reasons which are now probably



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beyond discovery.36 Indeed, it is not clear that any of the twelve or thirteen comedies premièred in the 1677–78 season stayed in the repertory. In the immediate aftermath of this season, there was a sharp drop in the number of new comedies staged, and a retreat from the sexual boldness of the previous three seasons.37 In the following season only one new comedy was mounted: Behn’s The Feign’d Curtizans (by March 1679).

The Feign’d Curtizans The unpredictability of audience taste is a hazard in any period, but from late 1678 everyday uncertainties were supplemented by a grave and disruptive national crisis, initiated by Titus Oates, a disreputable ex-clergyman who had briefly wormed his way into two Catholic seminaries in Europe. In September, Oates made allegations, fabricated but generally believed, of a Popish plot to murder the king and initiate a general Catholic rebellion. His allegations produced hysteria, fear of a French invasion, and the possibility of a new civil war, and they led to the execution of a number of innocent people. In February 1679 a new parliament was elected, dominated by the opposition. In March, Charles sent his Catholic brother and heir, James, into exile, and it was generally assumed, even by James himself, that his cause was lost, and that Charles would nominate his eldest illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, as his successor. By the middle of 1679, the campaign to exclude James from the succession had become a major political issue, and by the following year Parliament was for the first time divided between two named political parties, the Whigs (favouring exclusion) and the Tories (opposing it). The leading Whigs were noblemen, such as the Earl of Shaftesbury and (at first) the Duke of Buckingham, but an important Whig power base was in the mercantile city of London: the spiritual and economic base of Sir Patient Fancy. The period of tension hit theatrical takings. The King’s Company, which had been badly managed for years, closed temporarily in the 1678–79 season: ‘So hard the Times are, and so thin the Town, / Though but one Playhouse’, observed the epilogue to The Feign’d Curtizans (ll. 1–20). For much of the crisis period, new comedies were down in number: four in 1679–80, probably two (including Part II of The Rover) in 1680–81;38 then, as the winners in the struggle became clear in 1681–82, eight comedies, four of them by Behn.39 The conflict produced an increasingly politicized and factionalized drama, though one in which the allegiances of dramatists often followed the prevailing cur-



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rents. Even Behn produced her two outspokenly Tory plays, The Roundheads and The City-Heiress, when the Tories had clearly won, and when three more of the eight new comedies were pieces of Tory triumphalism. During 1679, when the cause of James seemed lost, dramatists were disinclined to rush to his support. Only one new play was apolitical: Durfey’s The Virtuous Wife (by October 1679), a repudiation of sex comedy which perhaps confirms that audience reponses to recent comedies were making dramatists cautious. Most of the political plays, however, either attacked James’s cause or called down a plague on both houses. The only (passing) support came in Dryden’s adaptation of Troilus and Cressida (by April 1679), which portrays a reconciliation between quarrelling royal brothers and turns Achilles and his associates into caricatures of opposition figures. Apart from Troilus and Cressida, The Feign’d Curtizans is the only play to make any supportive gesture towards what was soon to be called the Tory cause: the play is set in Rome and includes a hypocritical, lecherous chaplain, Tickletext, who is absurdly hostile to all things Roman, preferring English country churches to St Peter’s, and talking in cant reminiscent of Sir Patient Fancy’s. James would not, however, have welcomed the intellectual standpoint from which Behn mocked Tickletext’s bigotry, for the play expresses a thoroughly materialist outlook. Indeed, one of the heroines, Cornelia, is indignant at the suggestion that she might have been seen in church: ‘I at Church yesterday! Now hang me if I had any such devout thoughts about me, whe what a damn’d scandalous Rascall this’ (V. i. 181–2). The church in question is St Peter’s, the object of Tickletext’s contempt.40 After the failure of Sir Patient Fancy, Behn returned in The Feign’d Curtizans to the formula of The Rover, producing another intrigue comedy of English gentlemen abroad in Italy. It is at once chaster and bolder than The Rover: a play whose trio of heroines all pretend to be prostitutes has a certain shock value, but no sex in fact takes place; like Durfey’s The Virtuous Wife, it retreats from the extremes of sex comedy. Despite the emphasis on feigned prostitution, Behn abandons not only sex but the portrayal of a monetary marriage market. The threat of forced marriage is again central to the plot, but the men who enforce it are motivated more by a sense of honour and obligation between themselves than by profit. In addition to disguising themselves as prostitutes, the heroines all disguise themselves as men, endeavouring to find some place in the male networks of control, but with little success. During her period of male disguise one heroine, Laura, successfully defends the man she loves in a fracas (as Celinda had done in The Town-



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Fopp), but the resulting friendship between apparent men cannot be symmetrically commuted into love between man and woman, and she loses him to another. Her successful rival, Cornelia, at one point threatens him with a sword, but is too obviously weak to impress him. Only one heroine, Marcella, both defends her lover as a man and gains him as a woman. The absence of sex is made up for by an increase in farce and in elaborate mistakes of identity. Farce is used to a degree unprecedented in Behn’s previous plays: one of the fools, for example, has a bass viol smashed over his head. Here she was perhaps following the lead of her friend Edward Ravenscroft, who two years earlier (May 1677) had written Scaramouch a Philosopher, Harlequin a School-Boy, Bravo, Merchant and Magician, based partly on Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin and partly on the model of the Italian commedia dell’arte. Like Harlequin, the rogue Petro (played by Anthony Leigh) dupes the fools by appearing in a constantly shifting sequence of disguises – barber, pimp, civility-master – without ever being detected. The farcical slapstick perhaps satirizes the more menacing acts of male violence, which re-emerges as a prominent issue, but Behn chiefly seems to have been trying to play safe. The mistakes of identity, however, have some serious point, in producing the usual merging and interplay of socially opposed stereotypes – whore and gentlewoman, client and husband – but the mistakes are difficult to follow and probably contributed to another disappointment for the author. The play was selected for performance at court, but according to Downes it ‘liv’d but a short time’ (p. 78) on the public stage. It was, however, the first Behn play to have been published with a dedication to a patron: Nell Gwyn, who is praised for her wit, intelligence and goodness. In Feign’d Curtizans two sisters, Marcella and the more sprightly and sceptical Cornelia, take the names of Euphemia and Silvianetta and disguise themselves as prostitutes, wishing to escape their uncle’s plans for them: forced marriage to a deformed and violent man, and a nunnery. In her character and her unwanted destiny as a nun, Cornelia parallels Hellena in The Rover, and was played by the same actress, the great Elizabeth Barry, who was soon to add more passionate and vulnerable roles to her repertory (and, at some stage, to take on the role of Angellica).41 Marcella was played by Elizabeth Currer (Lady Fancy), who was already developing a line in real, manipulative and mercenary, whores. Marcella/Euphemia loves, and eventually gains, Sir Harry Fillamour, a sober, principled English gentleman who is a somewhat more complex version of Belvile in The Rover: he is given to religious idealization of chaste love,



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with a correspondingly contemptuous attitude towards prostitutes, and is thrown into deep emotional confusion when, in Euphemia, he apparently meets a whore who is a doppelgänger of his chaste beloved. Cornelia’s eventual partner is the witty, inconstant Galliard: an equivalent to Willmore, though again with a rather harder edge, since he is primarily a buyer of sex, and combines a taste for prostitutes with a misogynous contempt for women who couple indiscriminately (‘fonder in your Appetites / Then Beasts’ [IV. i. 536–7]). On this occasion, Smith played the man of principle and Betterton the rake, reversing the allocation of roles in The Rover. Since they were both actors of considerable range, there may be no significance in this (some players specialized in particular sorts of role, but many covered a wide spectrum). Smith does, however, seem to have been the preferred actor for light, lively, goodnatured parts, and the steely ruthlessness behind Galliard’s raillery suited Betterton. Another gentlewoman, Laura Lucretia (Mary Lee)42 is also threatened by a forced marriage: to Julio, the brother of Marcella/Euphemia and Cornelia/Silvianetta. Pessimistically, however, Laura simply wants to have sex with the man she loves – Galliard – before entering a marital prison that she regards (rightly, as it turns out) as inevitable. Believing Silvianetta to be a real prostitute, she poses as her, thereby confusing everyone. As usual, the prostitute is the role that is left when those of wife, daughter and sister lapse, the only other possible disguise being that of a man (a disguise all the heroines also assume). There is no actual prostitute in the cast, but the women imaginatively identify with their roles in a way that Behn’s earlier feigned courtesans, in The Amorous Prince and The Dutch Lover, do not. In prostitution, the feigned courtesan Cornelia claims, ‘there are a thousand Satisfactions to be found, more than in a dull virtuous Life’ (II. i. 89–90). Laura Lucretia wishes to use her prostitute disguise to sleep with Galliard before her unwanted marriage to Julio, but inadvertently spends the night with Julio instead, only discovering her mistake after the event. Consummation is prevented by interruption (a sign of a new theatrical timidity about sex), but the intended night of prostitution would in fact have been a premature consummation of her marriage. Cornelia and Marcella confine themselves to the theory rather than the practice of prostitution, but Cornelia’s double, Laura Lucretia, comes closer to the reality, and Cornelia does parallel her in a number of ways: she too is the fantasy prostitute ‘Silvianetta’ and she too pursues Galliard. Indeed she assures him, after ensnaring him into marriage, that her training as prostitute will be a marital asset: she will ‘be the most



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Mistriss-like Wife. . . . I have learnt the trade, though I had not stock to practice’ (V. i. 708–10). Both Laura and Cornelia show that the prostitute is precursor and precondition of the wife, and indeed Julio psychologically unifies the two figures, since he falls in love – and spends the night – with Silvianetta-Laura without realizing that she is his designated wife. The tamest, most innocuous way for dramatists to resolve the problem of an impending forced marriage was to reveal at the last minute that the unknown, enforced partners from whom the hero and heroine have been fleeing are each other. This device had resolved matters in Ravenscroft’s Scaramouch, and in his other farce of 1677, The English Lawyer, and its normal implication is that there is no necessary conflict between individual desire and social authority. Here, by contrast, the result is to reveal the fundamental interdependence of the socially sanctioned and the socially forbidden; the wife is the prostitute. Moreover, the conflict between the enforced and the chosen partner is here only resolved for the man: if the person Julio loves turns out to be the person he is ordained to marry, the same is not true for his prostitute/bride Laura. Behn here returns to her practice in The Town-Fopp and The Rover, of leaving a poignantly unsatisfied woman who stands outside the general concluding harmony. There is also an unsatisfied male: the violent, deformed Octavio, who had been the husband originally intended for Marcella. But the balancing of Octavio’s richly merited and Laura’s totally undeserved unhappiness only emphasizes the inequity of the woman’s lot. The interdependence of wife and prostitute also appears in the courtship of the third couple, the sober, principled Fillamour and Marcella, masquerading as Euphemia, who disturbingly shows him the form of his loved one apparently replicated in that of a prostitute. It was quite common for heroines of Restoration comedy to split their identities, testing the fidelity of a lover by tempting him in the guise of a second woman (Florinda, briefly, does this to Belvile in The Rover). The ruse is often known as the Invisible Mistress trick, after the title of an episode in Paul Scarron’s Le Roman comique, ‘L’Histoire de l’amante invisible’ (I. iv),43 and its usual effect is to unify and harmonize desire by showing that it can be completely satisfied by a single object: that the hero’s divided affections for, say, a silent beauty and an unseen female wit are for a single woman. Apparently confronted with two physically identical women in radically different sexual contexts, however, Fillamour by contrast discovers the essential ambiguity of male desire. He resists temptation, but his fascination is more protracted and painful than that



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of Belvile, and he does defer an assignation with Marcella for a final meeting with ‘Euphemia’, though at the meeting he attempts to convert her. To emphasize this unexpected side of Fillamour’s character, Behn juxtaposes his vacillation with a parody of the virtuous man fascinated with the forbidden, wherein the hypocritical clergyman Tickletext tries to visit Marcella’s sister, Cornelia/Silvianetta, pretending that he wishes to convert her. His combination of bogus virtue and enthusiastic frailty reverses Fillamour’s character but at the same time emphasizes that it too is tinged the universal fascination with the prostitute. The legitimate bonds between man and woman inevitably mirror and contain their proscribed antitypes. The constant confounding of nomenclature (two Silvianettas, multiplying the confusions of gentlewoman and prostitute), the mismatch of partners, and the frequent misapprehension or ignorance of the object of desire all reduce social existence to confused patterns of lust and power, and the reduction is furthered by the farcical plot involving Tickletext and his upstart pupil, Sir Signal Buffoon, both in hot pursuit of Cornelia/Silvianetta. Here an ostensible process of social, gentlemanly education keeps resolving itself into gross corporeal action: most gross when an elegant ritual of snuff-taking is in fact conducted with powdered excrement; most corporeal when both master and pupil forget their avowed aims in the universal pursuit of prostitutes, or when the rogue Petro, in different and unpenetrated guises, serves the fools both as ‘Civility-Master’ (I. ii. 109) and pimp. It would be over-ingenious to see every detail of the farce as a specific and purposeful commentary on the main plot. There are, however, some connections, as is shown by the interplay between farcical and serious violence, and the pairing of Tickletext and Fillamour’s forms of fascination with the prostitute, contrasting yet at the same time linked. The male obsession with rituals of exchange is also parodied: in his disguise as civility-master, Petro rehearses with Tickletext and Sir Signal a scene of ceremonious gift-exchange, only to keep all that they hand over, and pick their pockets into the bargain. The most important effect of the farce, however (well illustrated by the inhalation of powdered excrement), is to illustrate the inglorious if disguised centrality of the body in the codes and rituals of society. This is particularly true of religious codes and rituals, both among fools and gentry. The chaplain Tickletext has a book which is at first mistaken for a theological work of Puritan polemic (III. i. 289–90), but it is in fact a diary, full of the pedantic temporal and numerical measurements that



Maturity


had dominated Sir Patient Fancy: ‘April the Twentieth, arose a very great storm of Wind, Thunder, Lightning, and Rain, – which was a shrew’d sign of foul weather. The 22nd, 9 of our 12 chikens [sic] getting loose, flew over-bord, the other three miraculous escaping, by being eaten by me, that Morning or breakfast’ (III. i. 296–300). The ‘miracle’ is merely the act of ingestion into the body, the good fortune of eating the chickens before they are swept away. The representation of matter as spirit is a constant theme. Turning up in a brothel at the same time as Tickletext, his pupil Sir Signal tries, in bad Italian, to evade detection by impersonating the Devil (‘Incorporalla, Inanimate, Imaterialle’ [III. i. 479]). And, when the gravitating body of Tickletext plummets into a well, Sir Signal mistakes him on his emergence for the Devil. Farce of this kind enters the main plot when the third feigned courtesan, Laura, is caught by her unwanted suitor Julio in the company of her preferred choice, Galliard, and pretends to mistake Galliard for the ghost of her brother. The repeated reduction of spirit to matter acts as a commentary on the sexual rhetoric of Fillamour and Galliard, with their contrasting fusions of the erotic and the religious. Fillamour sees pure love as holy and angelic, and cannot believe that anyone with so much ‘Divinity’ (II. i. 250) as Marcella could be a courtesan; Galliard, on the other hand, describes a brothel as a temple of love, and urges Cornelia to ‘repent’ her inclinations to virtue (IV. i. 493). These contrasting yet parallel forms of religious discourse seem not so much opposites as mirror images. After all, if the brothel is one temple of love, the other is St Peter’s, where (just before the opening of the play) Laura has worshipped in the hope of seeing Galliard, but has instead attracted the attention and hot pursuit of Julio. As Cornelia, the most outspokenly irreligious character, exclaims, ‘What Curtizan, why ’tis a Noble title and has more Votaries than Religion’ (II. i. 65–7). The Feign’d Curtizans does not portray the elaborate variety of dialects and ideologies that Sir Patient Fancy does, but it does show a variety of religious discourses, all of them fundamentally discourses of the body. It is on this basis that it rejects anti-Catholic partisanship: an Olympian detachment from a religious debate in which all dialects are almost literally parochial. The Feign’d Curtizans reveals Behn’s readiness to respond to changes in the theatrical climate, but it also shows her importance in the theatre; after the disappointments of the previous season, she was the only person to have a comedy staged. Despite its relative lightness, however, it does reveal some advances in her thinking. The deep affinity between the gentlewoman and the whore had always been part of her vision,



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but her portrayal of Fillamour attains a new subtlety in showing the psychological power exercised by that affinity even on the mind of the most principled idealist. The play also develops the materialism that had first been voiced in the preface to The Dutch Lover (where she had sided with Hobbes against the believers in spirit), and which she had first dramatized in Abdelazer. In The Feign’d Curtizans the stress, however farcical, on the corporeal nature of all experience is a further expression of her intellectual convictions.



Maturity

6

After The Feign’d Curtizans, Behn did not produce another comedy until The Second Part of the Rover ( January 1681), one of at most two new comedies of its season. She was perhaps depressed by (possibly) two successive failures, but her state of mind would have been secondary to the state of the theatrical market, for the sharp drop in the appearance of new comedies obviously meant that comedy writers in general were undergoing a change or suspension of career. Her friend Edward Ravenscroft was predominantly a writer of light farce, but between The English Lawyer (by December 1677) and The London Cuckolds (October 1681) he wrote only an adaptation of the most violent of Shakespeare’s plays, Titus Andronicus, tailored to the contemporary political situation. The usually prolific Durfey was silent between The Virtuous Wife and the boom in Tory comedies which started in mid-1681. Behn’s own next move was to exhume The Young King (discussed above, Chapter 2). This does concern an attempt to exclude a king from the rightful succession, and Susan Owen has read it as a detailed commentary on the Exclusion Crisis,1 arguing that Behn’s unambiguous statement that the play was the first she ever wrote ‘might be intended partly as a cautious (and disingenuous) denial of topicality, as was common at this early and uncertain stage of the Crisis’ (p. 45, n. 5). But Behn did not make the claim in 1679 but in 1683, the date of the first edition, when the outcome of the Crisis was known and accomplished. Stylistically, moreover, the play belongs to the era of The Forc’d Marriage, and (although a couplet in the epilogue deplores James’s exile), it is difficult to believe that a violent would-be rapist such as Orsames was intended as a supportive portrayal of him.

The Revenge It is generally agreed that the next Behn play to be premièred after The Young King was another tragicomedy, The Revenge, an adaptation of John 116



Political Crisis

Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1605).2 The play was published anonymously, but there is credible contemporary evidence for her authorship, and the internal evidence for Behn’s hand is strong, particularly in her transformation of Marston’s courtesan from villainess to a victim comparable with Angellica Bianca in The Rover. This is clearly a feminist revision of a man’s text. There is, however, much near-verbatim transcription of Marston, and this is presumably the reason for Behn’s unwillingness to publish it under her own name, given past charges of plagiarism. The play was premièred sometime between January and April 1680, a year in which Tory opposition to Exclusion was gathering strength. In January Charles felt able to recall James, who returned the following month (though he was to return to exile in September), and a few clearly Tory plays started to emerge, though all with strong criticism of the status quo.3 The month of James’s recall, moreover, was scarcely one of unalloyed good news for Catholics, for seven Catholic priests were sentenced to hanging, drawing and quartering; they were not in the event executed, and in February some alleged conspirators in Yorkshire were acquitted, but the final execution of a falsely accused conspirator – that of Oliver Plunket – was not until July 1681. The Catholic actordramatist Matthew Medbourne died in Newgate in March 1680. The condemnation of the innocent to death was a central topic in Marston, and in taking it over Behn emphasized its relevance to the climate of the time; these were not years for farcical comedy. In the main plot of each play a gentleman (Freevill, Wellman) falls in love with a virtuous gentlewoman (Beatrice, Marinda) and tires of a prostitute (Franceschina, Corina), with whom his friend (Malheureux, Friendly) falls in love. Behn’s Corina was acted by Elizabeth Barry, and is different from the lively, self-assured roles that Behn had previously written for her (Hellena and Cornelia), providing an early vehicle for her skill in portraying passionate, often unchaste, women, whether violent, vulnerable, or (as in this case) both. The role of the inconstant Wellman uses Smith in a role similar to that of Willmore. Betterton was not in the cast, and the role of Friendly was played by the company’s third choice in leading men, Joseph Williams. Marinda was the first important role for the actress and singer Charlotte Butler, who had an intermittent stage career over the next fifteen years, and her wittier sister Diana was played by another actress of secondary rank, Mrs Price (who had played the less prominent part of Lady Knowell’s daughter Lucretia in Sir Patient Fancy). The play was thus not quite as strongly cast as Behn’s most recent plays had been.



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In both plays the prostitute offers to gratify her new admirer if he kills her faithless lover (an incident Behn had already faintly recalled in The Town-Fopp, in Diana’s bargain with Friendlove), secretly planning to betray the friend and have him hanged. The two friends pretend that the murder has been accomplished (in a duel), but the ‘victim’ then teaches the ‘murderer’ a salutary lesson by disappearing and leaving him, apparently, in real danger of execution. In the secondary plot, an entertaining rogue (Cocledemoy, Trickwell), played by a specialist in low comedy, Thomas Jevon, assumes a series of different and always successful disguises in order to perform numerous confidence tricks and robberies upon a dishonest vintner (Mulligrub, Dashit), played by Anthony Leigh. Finally, he makes it appear that his victim has stolen his cloak, and has him condemned to death, though he saves his life when the victim undertakes to forgive him. Both plots, then, culminate in the near-hanging of an innocent man. In 1609 Marston gave up the stage in order to become a clergyman, and The Dutch Courtesan is heavily laden with Christian morality, all of which Behn removes so as to create a totally secular play. For example, when Freevill, Marston’s converted whoremaster, urges his infatuated friend Malheureux to overcome his passion for Franceschina, he appeals to Christian moral discipline: to ‘Discourses, meditations, discipline, / Divine ejaculatories, and all those aids against devils’,4 whereas his Behn equivalent, Wellman, appeals simply to reason, folly, and virtue: ‘Well, my dear friend, tell me with open heart, hath not my Reasoning reclaim’d thy Folly, preserv’d thy falling Vertue, and secur’d it?’ (IV. i. 127–9). Moreover, although the livelier of Behn’s two genteel heroines, Diana, is based on a Marston character, her model certainly does not prefigure her view that a man should involve himself with a prostitute since a suitor who still has his virginity is insufferably dull: ‘learn to whore betimes’, she warns (II. i. 47). Another change which Behn makes is in the trickster figure, Cocledemoy/Trickwell. Marston’s Cocledemoy is an entertaining city rogue who performs his tricks for fun and finally returns his takings. Trickwell is a gentleman, whose estate is in Dashit’s hands. The gentleman whose estate was threatened by rogues and usurers was a common figure in pre-1642 drama, but he did not figure much in Restoration drama, probably because the mortgage laws had been liberalized in mid-century. Behn’s repeated concern with such figures is exceptional, and is a sign of her class sympathies, as is her repeated concern with other forms of gentlemanly impoverishment. As well as elevating Trickwell socially, however, Behn darkens him morally. He tries to rape Corina – a crime



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for which he is later forced to marry her elderly bawd – and in the largely original final act, set in Newgate gaol, he disguises himself as a parson and picks the pockets of the wretches awaiting execution. If Behn on the whole vindicates the gentry and their values, she in Trickwell shadows them with the figure of the gentleman decayed into the rapist and pickpocket, and deglamorizes the machismo of rape by linking it to the most inglorious form of theft. Like Abdelazer (and, in a way, The Rover), The Revenge finally brings together all its characters in a prison, which provides the final image of authority and justice. We are bound to respond to the Newgate scene, with its portrayal of small-time thieves awaiting execution, with a total repugnance that Behn could not have foreseen, but she is quite explicitly concerned with unjust sentencing and capriciously allocated justice (as in Marston, Mulligrub/Dashit is condemned by a drunken judge and hasty jury). While the would-be rapist Trickwell is punished only with the matrimonial misery of marriage to a bawd, we see the courageous highwayman Shamock bravely facing the knowledge that he will be hanged the following morning, a less phlegmatic companion screaming with terror, and Shamock’s wife Nan failing in her attempt to join him on the gallows by framing herself for a robbery. The gentleman thief escapes the gallows; the lower-class thief does not. Just as the end of Abdelazer portrays freedom as a specific possession of individuals rather than a general abstraction, so justice is not impartial, but is linked to interest and contacts: even before he has certain evidence that Friendly is innocent, the father of Marinda and Diana, Sir Lyonell, has ‘Interest enough’ (V. i. 355) to secure a stay of execution. Behn probably accepted that the judicial system should take account of personal loyalties, rather than being an abstract system of uniform calculation. Nevertheless, one striking feature of her work, complementing her interest in the impoverished gentleman, is her occasional sympathy for the simply and unalterably poor. It is only occasional, but it is striking in a period whose drama rarely lifts the lid to look at the bottom reaches of society. In the mock consultation scene in Sir Patient Fancy, the doctors regard the poor as ‘the Rubbish of the Nation’ (V. i. 428), fit only for cannon fodder and (fatal) medical experiments. At the end of The Revenge the spectacle of the poor is more prominent than in any other Restoration play. The Newgate episode opens, indeed, with prisoners begging through the grate of the prison. Clearly, Behn is not recommending the political empowerment of the poor, still less of condemned criminals. Her aim is still fundamentally conservative: to assert the old role of the gentry as paternalistic protectors of the poor. A parson





gives twopence, whereas the heroines give gold; disguised as a parson, Trickwell robs the condemned, whereas Sir Lyonell gives them his entire purse. Yet a condemned cell is a peculiarly limited and ironic arena in which to display the gentry’s liberality to the poor. All that the gold can purchase is drink to drown the terror of the gallows. Behn is not writing social protest, but she does display the ugly variousness of life, and in Trickwell shows that the gentleman can be predator and rapist as well as paternalist. In 1679–80 the prisons displayed the ugly variousness of life in ways more likely than usual to impinge on a loyalist consciousness. They were receiving unjustly condemned Catholics and sometimes sending them forth to the gallows. As Diana says, ‘martyr’d Innocence does often dye where Thieves and Robbers do; a Gallows may be sanctify’d, why not a Prison?’ (V. i. 266–8). (It is, however, characteristic of The Revenge’s complex tone that these words are uttered in order to dupe a foolish gentleman into marrying the courtesan.) One significant way in which Behn alters Marston is to give foolish vintner Dashit the vehement anti-popery which was feeding the Popish Plot scare, and with which the commercial classes based in the City were becoming increasingly associated.5 When Dashit is almost hanged for a crime he did not commit, therefore, he falls victim to the atmosphere which he himself has helped to create: ‘Doubt not our diligence, Master, these dangerous times’ (IV. i. 402) says the constable to Trickwell as Dashit is arrested. The suspicion of Rome satirized in this play is far more menacing and politically specific than that in The Feign’d Curtizans. As one might expect, however, Behn’s chief modification is in the portrayal of the courtesan. Marston’s Franceschina is to some extent a victim, but she has slept with many men and becomes evilly malicious, eventually punished with imprisonment and whipping. Corina has slept only with Wellman, and is far more a passive creation of circumstances, a victim (like many Behn heroines) of signs in whose determination she had no part. As Trickwell attempts to rape her, she protests: A Whore! what tho to her that bears it ’tis a shame, an infamie that cannot be supported? to all the world besides it bears a mightie sound, petition’d, su’d to, worshipp’d as a God, presented, flatter’d, follow’d, sacrific’d to, Monarch of Monarchs, Tyrant of the world, what does that charming word not signifie! (IV. i. 182–7)



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The sign is associated with the male mentality that creates the alluring image of the prostitute; it cannot evoke the self-disgust of the woman who fulfils the fantasy. Whereas Behn’s prostitute is a victim of false signs, Marston’s is portrayed as a force of linguistic disruption: a foreigner – stranger – who speaks in broken English and whose bed becomes a Babel, her ‘virginity’ being successively sold to lovers of different nations. Behn uses the generic ambivalence of the play to stress her heroine’s limited control of signs, for the play never turns into the tragedy she desires. Like Angellica, she tries to kill her faithless lover but fails (because her pistol does not fire) (II. i. 299a–b). Then, at the beginning of the fifth act, she attempts to seize generic control: ‘’tis I / Must end the last Act of the Tragedy’, she resolves (V. i. 35–6). But, relentlessly, the play becomes a comedy. When Friendly escapes hanging, his prospective bride, Diana, makes a little theatrical in-joke, recalling a passage in a play by Behn’s friend Ravenscroft, in which a rakish character had jocularly preferred hanging to marriage: ‘wou’d you not rather cry, Drive away Carman?’ she asks (V. i. 383–4).6 There is a more substantial recollection of an old comedy when Wellman marries off Corina to the foolish gentleman Sir John Empty on the pretence that she is his sister. For in just such a manner had the comic hero of Etherege’s first play disposed of his ex-mistress to a foolish knight. What makes the allusion particularly nice is the close correspondence between the titles of the two plays: at the point at which Corina’s revenge turns into comedy, Behn’s The Revenge replays the ending of Etherege’s The Comical Revenge. As Corina’s pain in surrendering to Wellman’s language indicates, however, the comedy is darker, arising from Corina’s inability to control the genre and the signs which form other people’s perception of her. False identity is her perpetual doom: she passes from misunderstood whore to false gentlewoman, whore and gentlewoman yet again becoming ironically balanced counterparts of each other. Identical problems, however, beset the reverse of the whore/gentlewoman, the faithful plebeian wife. In the Act V prison scene, Behn adds the character of a highwayman’s wife, who has framed herself for robbery in order to be hanged with her husband. She, too, envisages her life as a tragedy, seeking a form of self-representation normally denied to women of her category: ‘my Statue and History’, she says, ‘ought to be added to the Gallery of Heroick Women’ (V. i. 452–3). But she is reprieved, and her husband attains the heroism of Tyburn without her. In her echoes of Ravenscroft and Etherege, Behn allows snatches of





earlier, more festive, comedy to be recalled under the shadow of the gallows. In doing so she recapitulated the political circumstances that were driving her and many contemporaries from social comedy. The most successful comedy of the 1679–80 season, Otway’s The Souldiers Fortune (June 1680), is a very savage affair which, like The Revenge, features a hero who pretends to be murdered, and makes prominent use of the threat of wrongful hanging. Whereas the feigned death of Behn’s Wellman leads to the moral reform of his friend, Otway’s hero uses his apparent death to cuckold his would-be murderer, and the play showed that sex-comedy could still appeal to audiences; although she portrays a prostitute in The Revenge, Behn is still steering clear of consummated sex, as she had done since the failure of Sir Patient Fancy. She now, however, returned to sex-comedy herself, in yet another study of a prostitute: The Second Part of the Rover, a bleaker play than the original Rover, and one which perhaps learns from Otway’s play.7 In The Feign’d Curtizans, the disinterred The Young King, and The Revenge, the state of the marketplace and the nation had deflected Behn from the kind of comedy she had developed in The Rover and Sir Patient Fancy. In writing a sequel to The Rover, she is obviously returning to the material of the earlier play; she is also, however, radically changing it.

The Second Part of the Rover The Second Part of the Rover was premièred about January 1681, and was one of only two comedies of the 1680–81 season. The other was Shadwell’s vehemently Whig The Lancashire Witches, which the Duke’s Company probably staged some time in the spring. Rover II appeared nearly two years after Behn’s last comedy (The Feign’d Curtizans), three years after her last sex comedy (Sir Patient Fancy), and four years after her last comic success, the original Rover. It was in part put together from bits of Thomaso unused in the earlier play. At the time of its first performance, the outcome of the Exclusion Crisis was still unpredictable. In October 1680 James had gone into exile again, fearing impeachment, and in the same month Monmouth had removed the baton sinister from his coach, unilaterally legitimizing himself. In December, the innocent Catholic peer Viscount Stafford was beheaded, and the House of Commons continued to refuse all funding to Charles unless he agreed to the exclusion of James. On 18 January Charles dissolved Parliament for the third time in the crisis, and called new elections for the following month. In March, the newly elected Parliament sat, at Charles’s insistence, in Oxford, away from the Whig



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power-base in London. When its intransigence became apparent he quickly dissolved it too, and thereafter ruled without parliaments, aided by a subsidy from Louis XIV. Charles thus bought domestic victory at the price of foreign impotence. His triumph, however, such as it was, was unforeseeable at the beginning of the year, and Behn’s epilogue to her new play (evidently written before the January dissolution) dwells on the political stalemate, comparing the stinginess of audiences to playwrights with that of Parliament to the King. The politics of theatre were at this stage complex and shifting; partisan plays continued to appear from both sides, with some dramatists changing with what they sensed to be the tide. What was new was the degree of political intervention in the repertory. Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus (December 1680), the last Duke’s Company première before that of Rover II,8 was banned after a few days. So, in the same month, was Tate’s adaptation of Richard II, mounted by the ailing King’s Company; the play was largely loyal in sentiment, but usurpation was a touchy subject. To compete with Rover II, the play was restaged under the title of The Sicilian Usurper, and banned again. There was a report in January that the King so disliked the repertory of the Duke’s Company that he was thinking of revoking its patent.9 Later in the year, Shadwell’s The Lancashire Witches was performed with heavy cuts, and hissed by Catholics and their sympathizers (as Behn was gloatingly to recall in the prologue to The False Count).10 The relatively apolitical nature of Rover II was probably a blessing. The prologue, epilogue, and dedication to James (the last being written after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament) are all polemically Tory, but the play itself does not directly engage with the crisis in the way that most recent plays had done. The emphasis on the impoverishment of loyal Cavaliers is more graphic and insistent than in The Rover, and may perhaps allude to the current tight-fistedness of Parliament, but the play also shows the Cavalier ethos in terminal decline. In Rover II the Cavalier brotherhood of the original Rover has gone. Belvile and Frederick are happily married in Paris, and their places are taken by English fools and rogues. Blunt (Underhill again) reappears and is paired by Nicholas Fetherfool (Nokes). The pair unscrupulously court two rich Jewish ‘Monsters’ (a giantess and dwarf), as do two English tricksters, Shift and Hunt, who so far forget the meaning of the word Cavalier as to become horse-thieves, stealing the mount of a Spanish nobleman from beneath his very buttocks. Hellena has died, and the courtships in this work are far less playful and affectionate than hers and Willmore’s.





Besides Willmore, there is only one Englishman of respectable standing: the English ambassador’s nephew, Beaumond ( Joseph Williams). He is at first introduced as a friend and possible host of Willmore, inviting him to dinner, but the friendship is quickly turned into bitter enmity by their rivalry for the prostitute La Nuche. Such instability of personal bonds, so different from the expatriate friendships of Rover I, is a recurrent feature of the play. When Willmore first meets Beaumond, for example, it is surprising to hear him introduce the obviously idiotic Blunt and Fetherfool as admirable friends: ‘true Blades . . . poor and brave, Loyal Fugitives’ (I. i. 91–2). The ostensible Cavalier friends are, however, quickly stabbed in the back: ‘conceited Coxcombs’ who ‘must be couzen’d (I. i. 114–16). Friendship had been an almost obsessively celebrated ideal in pre-Civil War Cavalier plays and their descendants in the 1660s, but dramatists of the 1670s had increasingly treated it as a mask for hostility, contempt and fraud: Otway’s first full-scale comedy, Friendship in Fashion (1678), is a good example. Behn follows the trend, even as she portrays the milieu which the cult of friendship had grown up. Willmore himself has declined in attractiveness. He has less redeeming comic vitality than his earlier self, and, as his determination to ‘couzen’ Blunt and Fetherfool indicates, he spends part of the play acting as a confidence trickster. In Thomaso, there is a quite separate part for a mountebank who sells miraculous cures and bodily transformations, and to whom the two monsters (who never actually appear) are brought for physical normalization, though they are dissolved during the process. In Behn, the real mountebank has not yet arrived, and is impersonated by Willmore, who in part performs his frauds for the pleasure of the fiction, and refunds his gains – money given by Blunt and Fetherfool for the transformation of the monsters – at the end. In the process, this Cavalier-turned-conman debases one of the key words of the Stuart cult, for he takes over the original mountebank’s boast that he will ‘restore’ deviations from normality. His fraud, however, has another and more lasting side. His fake skills include not only the transformation of bodies but prophecy, and, when La Nuche consults the apparent wonder-worker about her passion for Willmore, he uses his fraudulent authority to fix her character and destiny: she is ‘a Whore’ and a ‘Prostitute’ (III. i. 191, 197), and she is doomed to submit to Willmore and be ruined, though she might perhaps gain his love if she captures him tonight. La Nuche desperately protests that she can control her destiny and remain ‘Mistriss of my fixt Resolves’ (III. i. 215–16), but her feelings are, inexorably, controlled by Willmore. The male moun-



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tebank manipulates the woman through the false pretence of intellectual and verbal superiority. The power which he exercises over La Nuche’s mind mirrors that which he fraudulently claims over the bodies of monsters; male superiority is illusionism, incapable of tangible results, yet mentally compelling for those who accept the fraud. While Killigrew’s mountebank does not here appear, the monsters who are only mentioned in Thomaso become real characters. The result is a double redistribution of sympathies: Willmore is tarnished by his activities as trickster, whereas the directly represented monsters become objects of sympathy in a way that Killigrew’s unseen figments do not).11 Behn’s monsters have dignity and an interior life, and are differentiated in mind and emotion as well as in body, the dwarf being anxious to gain a normal human form while the giantess is proud of her size, scornful of her mercenary suitor, and ambitious of procreating a race of superbeings. The men’s attitude towards them – a grasping desire for their wealth combined with a contempt for their bodies and their nature – is a distorted but recognizable magnification of men’s attitude towards woman. Most of Behn’s plays explore the complex mental and social processes that both link and divide the gentlewoman and the prostitute. Rover II adds a third element to the comparison: gentlewoman, prostitute and monster. Like The Feign’d Curtizans, Rover II takes to extremes Behn’s fascination with the interchange and confusion between the gentlewoman and the whore. The difference is that, in this play, there is once more a real prostitute, and real sex. The two leading men, Willmore and Beaumond, the English ambassador’s nephew, are both in love with the courtesan La Nuche (Barry), yet both have some attachment to the beautiful gentlewoman Ariadne (Currer): Willmore because she is rich, and has fallen violently in love with him; Beaumond because she is rich, and his uncle wants him to marry her. The interplay between Ariadne and her proscribed complement, the courtesan, starts at the moment she first sees Willmore and instantly falls in love with him; for, at that moment, he is gripping the struggling La Nuche and demanding sex from her. As so often, the placing and visualization of the body is as important as anything that is said: the sight of a poor, shabby stranger sexually harassing a prostitute is a curious one to stimulate love in the heart of a sixteen-year-old virgin, and it suggests a unity of sexual drive that links her with La Nuche, despite the divide of status and morality (a unity that is emphasized by Blunt’s characteristically confused assumption that La Nuche is a gentlewoman and Ariadne a prostitute). In the last two acts (set largely in the dark) the ambiguous relationship





between the two women culminates in complex confusions of identity which determine Ariadne’s future and in the process sum up her condition: like La Nuche in desire, but imprisoned in social forms that La Nuche rejects. At the beginning of Act IV, Willmore turns up by night at Ariadne’s garden gate in order to elope with her. Her fiancé Beaumond also turns up (he is her cousin and lives in the same house), and so does La Nuche, carrying a casket of jewels and intent on fulfilling the prophecy that this is the night to gain Willmore. Encountering La Nuche, Beaumond concludes from her jewels that she is Ariadne and that Ariadne is eloping; the two women have thus become so interchangeable that Beaumond accidentally deduces the truth about Ariadne from the actions of La Nuche. For Beaumond, indeed, a gentlewoman abroad at night has necessarily turned herself into a prostitute. With the double standards so characteristic of Behn’s males, this lover of La Nuche denounces the imagined Ariadne as a whore, only to find that he is reviling the woman he loves: ‘and is a Whore – a thing so much despis’d?’ La Nuche replies coldly (IV. i. 58). This and other confusions frustrate the elopement of Ariadne and Willmore, but not before a long encounter in which Willmore holds Ariadne and demands instant sex, as though she were another La Nuche. As usual, the gentlewoman and whore are rigidly separated in theory, and thoroughly confused in practice. Ariadne’s second attempt to elope with Willmore, in Act V, clearly mirrors the first. Once more near the garden gate, a woman enters in the dark carrying a casket of jewels. This time it really is Ariadne, but (again) the man is the same: Beaumond instead of the man she wants, Willmore. Beaumond does not recognize her, but decides to have her anyway. Meanwhile Willmore encounters La Nuche instead of Ariadne and decides similarly: ‘By this Light a Woman, if she be the right – but right or wrong so she be Feminine’ (V. i. 220–1). Then he, like Beaumond earlier, is led into the embarrassment of inadvertently mocking whores to La Nuche’s face (V. i. 233). Once again, the gentlewoman and the prostitute must be separate and yet the same, and the man must proscribe what he most desires. As a result of these confusions, Willmore sleeps with La Nuche in the dark and then, seeing Ariadne, assumes that she is the woman he has slept with. Meanwhile, Ariadne has been on the point of marrying Beaumond in the belief that he is Willmore. Reluctantly and tentatively, she embraces respectability and agrees to go ahead with the marriage to Beaumond, although each has spent the play trying to escape the other. The



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social forms that separate Ariadne from La Nuche triumph over everything that unites them. At the same time, Willmore embarks on a permanent, though extramarital, partnership with La Nuche, rejoicing that she is ‘reform’d’ (V. i. 512), and reversing his choice at the end of Rover I, where the prostitute had been abandoned and the respectable virgin accepted. Critics disagree about the rosiness of the couple’s future, and much depends on production decisions. There is, however, one objective detail which we might consider. In celebrating La Nuche’s reform, he is recalling an idea that has repeatedly been used of the curing of the monsters. Throughout the play, their deform’d bodies have been implicitly contrasted with the perfect form of the heroines, and Willmore has undertaken not only to restore them but to transform them in the ‘Baths of Reformation’ (italics added) (a phrase that occurs four times,12 besides other uses of reformation). The telling recurrence of the idea here fleetingly reconnects Willmore’s twin exercises in illusionism: the normalization of the monsters and of the prostitute. If the men repeatedly mistake Ariadne and La Nuche for each other, the women equally confuse Willmore and Beaumond. As the gentlewoman and the prostitute change roles and places, so do the ebulliently domineering Willmore and the more coldly, cynically domineering Beaumond: a hint of the coldness within Willmore’s in any case coarsened charm. In the final act, indeed, Behn connects all seven male principals in an ingenious piece of double patterning which unites hero and fools in a fundamental sameness of sexual motive, and at the same time links the pursuit of the monster with that of the prostitute. When Willmore eventually sleeps with La Nuche, her diary for the night is quadruply booked: of the three other prospective clients, Blunt’s friend Fetherfool and the elderly Spaniard Carlo are put in bed with each other, and the disappointed Beaumond hopes to slake his unsatisfied lust for La Nuche on the unrecognized body of Ariadne. But there is another, overlapping, quadruple booking, in which two pairs of men (Blunt and Fetherfool, and the English tricksters Shift and Hunt) compete to marry the monsters. Seven men thus form two quartets. The one character who appears in both – the lowest common denominator – is the most foolish character in the play, Fetherfool. The confusions of identity constantly isolate the body from all the tokens by which it is socially recognized. The physical presences onstage receive the wrong names, the wrong descriptions, the wrong dialogues, the wrong social rituals, and the wrong partners. They can even be given





the wrong bodies: after sleeping with La Nuche in the dark, Willmore enters praising her ‘plump smooth round Limbs, small rising Breasts’ (V. i. 458–9), only to see Ariadne and identify her as the owner of these assets. The repeated interchange of persons and mistaking of bodies provide real equivalents to what the mountebank promises in fantasy: that the body can be endlessly transformed, and therefore completely detached from personal and social identity. Individuals are visually simplified to characterless flesh, repeatedly pushed, pulled, and clutched, unnamed, unknown, and even unseen. In his parallel meetings in the dark with Ariadne and La Nuche, Willmore wants sex simply on the basis that the unseen and unrecognized companion is a woman: ‘thou’rt a Woman . . . ; and I desire to know no more at present’ (IV. i. 130–1). Such incidents press to extremes what happens even in the visible courtship of Ariadne and Willmore, for she never refers to him by name (he is always the Stranger), and he only discovers her name in the final lines of the play. Even in the light, they are in the dark; even in the midst of society, they engage in a presocial pursuit of the unknown by the unknown. Characters in Restoration drama frequently copulate with the wrong person in the dark, but they generally have a clear idea of whom they think they are in bed with. Completely blind, anonymous copulation is a speciality of Behn’s, and it suggests more than the simplification of rational beings to mere bodies; bodies themselves lose all specificity and character. Apart from the spoken word, Rover II is a play without signs. In this it contrasts with Rover I, which had emphasized solid and tangible forms of signification: the letter, the book, the mask, the legible body, Blunt’s medal, coins, and picture, the sign of Angellica. In Rover II, however, there are no pictures, and there is only one text, by an absent author: the bills of the ‘true’ mountebank, promising reformation and restoration, which inspire Willmore to imitate him. These are texts which promise absolute male control of the female body, but they are the frauds of an absent and unknown figure, the ‘true’ liar who never appears, and who is falsely imitated by Willmore. Apart from this distinctly paradoxical text, however, there is no writing or imaging in the play at all. When Willmore, as mountebank, holds a paper, it is not a text: it contains powder for the rejuvenation of bodies. Nor, when he pretends to tell La Nuche’s fortune, does he read a text, or her palm. Rather, he looks at a ball, chosen by La Nuche from a box of balls: solid, inert matter, with no apparent status as sign, to which he arbitrarily attaches meaning. Like so much in the mountebank plot, this typifies the treatment of the body throughout the play. For, instead of being



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represented through signs, it is associatively identified with nonsignifying objects, to the point of being completely secondary to them. The objects do not signify the body; they take its place. The chief substitutes are jewels (especially pearls), which have an exceptional prominence. When Beaumond mistakes La Nuche for Ariadne in the dark, it is because she is carrying a casket of jewels: ‘Hah – a Woman! and by these Jewels – should be Ariadne’ (IV. i. 27). But, as his mistake indicates, jewels are hardly individuating signs, and to emphasize the point Behn sets up a sequence in which every normalsized woman in the cast enters carrying a casket of jewels. In the following act Ariadne does enter (again in the dark) carrying one, as does La Nuche’s elderly bawd Petronella (having stolen the casket which caused La Nuche to be mistaken for Ariadne). Clearly, the casket is not an individuating sign, or a sign at all, but Beaumond’s silly reaction illustrates a general fact: jewels override and determine the perception of the body. He himself is attractive to La Nuche because he can offer her jewels, and the two monsters are both courted for and beautified by their jewels: ‘How amiable looks that Neck with that delicious row of Pearls about it’ (V. i. 315–16) says Fetherfool of the Giant. Jewels are also prominent in Rover I, though less so than here (and they have no importance in Sir Patient Fancy or The Feign’d Curtizans). In Rover I, however, the jewels could function as signs: Florinda gives Belvile a jewel with her picture on it. Here Behn abolishes signs and replaces them by antisigns: bodies are not represented by textual abstraction or visual likeness, but are instead replaced by inert unsignifying objects. The jewels are the realistic social equivalents of the magic balls with which the mountebank reads and fixes La Nuche’s character. Behn is no longer merely portraying a trade in heiresses, for the jewels constitute an epistemology as well as an economy of the body. As is illustrated by the sequence in which three unseen women carry caskets in the dark, jewels take the place of personal identity and essence. Their importance is reflected in the obsessive fear of poverty, unusual in comedy of this period; for wealth is an insurance against physical decay. Pretending to sell bodily renovation, Willmore as mountebank again provides a farcical, magical transmutation of the real social and psychological processes whereby wealth purchases the illusion of youth. La Nuche is accompanied and shadowed by a version of what she might become: the ‘famous out-worn Curtezan’ (II. i. 278) Petronella Elenora, whose pitiful decay steels La Nuche to resist her passion for the penniless Willmore and consider the jewels of Beaumond (I. i. 269–71). Fetherfool may be purely mercenary when he exclaims ‘How amiable’





the Giantess’s neck looks with its pearls, but he is echoing a far more ambiguously motivated speech of La Nuche to Willmore, in which she expresses the fear of poverty and decay that tempts her to prefer Beaumond, treating both Willmore’s body and the words he utters as inferior versions of the jewels which entwine her: ‘will not these Pearls do better round my Neck than those kind Arms of yours? these Pendants in my Ears than all the tales of Love you can whisper there?’ (V. i. 131–3). Willmore in one of his nastiest denunciations of La Nuche’s prostitution describes a woman hugging the stinking, ‘dismember’d Carcase’ of a man of quality, even though prior to sex he leaves ‘his Teeth, an Eye, false Back and Breast, sometimes his Palate too upon her Toylite’ (I. i. 420–2). This is a common enough satirical picture, though it is normally an elderly woman who takes herself apart in this way. Behn, however, gives it more point than usual: without its artefacts, the body is not a body; its trappings are its essence. Like the fictions of Willmore the mountebank, this satiric distortion reflects a serious social reality. The final marriage of jewel and body occurs shortly after Fetherfool has admired the jewels on the Giantess’s neck. He admires them so much that he decides to steal them, and to evade detection by swallowing them. When he is, nevertheless, detected, he is commanded to ‘Restore’ them (V. i. 597): the final occurrence of this much abused word. After a threat of dissection, he is instead condemned to the milder restoration of an enema. Heidi Hutner regards the eating of the jewels and their recovery as symbolic rapes,13 but this is to make the jewels signify the body, which is precisely what they do not do. In the ingestion and restoration of the jewels – far more even than in the dismemberment of the elderly lover – the most intimate of bodily processes become subservient to these nuggets of precious, insensate matter. The play portrays or mentions six wealthy women: Hellena, about whom Willmore reminisces, the two monsters, Ariadne, La Nuche, and Petronella, temporarily enriched by La Nuche’s jewels. As scholars have noted, the wealth of each is expressed in the same number: one hundred thousand. The currency is not always the same: the monsters are ‘worth a hundred thousand pounds a piece’ (I. i. 171), whereas the other women are each worth a hundred thousand crowns. The number thus unites and almost merges the women without possessing any consistent, concrete meaning or value: it is a free-floating abstraction. ‘[M]oney speaks sense in a Language all Nations understand’ says Willmore (III. i. 343–4). So do numerals, which tantalized linguistic theorists with their ability to cross barriers of language.14 But a sign which lacks consistent meaning



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of its own, yet is interchangeably applicable to all comers, is (like the interchangeable caskets of jewels) scarcely a sign at all. The assimilation of all six women into this inexpressive numerical formula completes the erasure of bodily character and uniqueness. Jewels are the real-life baths of reformation in which the body is dissolved, and the jewels in turn disappear into the magical universal solvent of one hundred thousand. Less variously, but perhaps even more decisively, than Sir Patient Fancy, Rover II portrays a world in which the rule of the number replaces that of the sign and the image. As so often, the farcical elements in the play duplicate and illustrate the serious ones. Hiding from his rivals in the Giantess’s bedroom, Fetherfool clambers into the case of a clock and imitates its mechanism, indicating the hours and minutes with his hands. The timepiece dominates even more than in Sir Patient Fancy. The body becomes an artefact whose function is to indicate numbers; so it is throughout Rover II. Willmore and La Nuche are the universal objects of sexual desire, yet desire is repeatedly complicated and deflected by questions of wealth and status, and at no point in the play is there any straightforward love talk. Although embarrassing things are said during the mistaken encounters in the dark, worse are said in broad daylight. Beaumond has an extraordinarily frank and brutal exchange with Ariadne, the woman he eventually marries, acknowledging his indifference and certain infidelity, but undertaking to service her in bed; Willmore’s conversations with Ariadne are never more than cynical and condescending demands for sex; and La Nuche alternates between erotic obsession with Willmore and rejection of him, inspired by fear of poverty and shame at her enslavement. The omission of intimate, affectionate dialogue is remarkable even in a dramatic culture noted for its cynical and materialistic interpretation of the sex drive. Indeed, there had been only one previous Restoration comedy to infuse erotic dialogue with similar pain and resentment: Otway’s The Souldiers Fortune, the previous new comedy to be staged ( June 1680); yet even Otway does not go as far as Behn. The mixture of erotic indifference, obsession and hostility is the more remarkable because it violates the expectations aroused by the casting. Betty Currer’s previous record in sprightly and indeed tarty roles emphasizes the anomalousness of the figure that Behn creates: a beautiful, rich, sixteen-year-old virgin whom nobody quite wants. Behn emphasizes the surprise by a subtle reversal of a popular dramatic motif. Like many previous comic heroines, Ariadne disguises herself as a man, and tries to outwit Willmore by capturing La Nuche’s affections for herself. It is normal for the woman to succeed in such ruses. For example, the dis-





guised heroines of both Ravenscroft’s The Careless Lovers and Shadwell’s The Woman-Captain attract a number of prostitutes away from the men. Ariadne, however, fails utterly, only inducing La Nuche to use her in order to provoke Willmore’s jealousy. Whether in breeches or skirts, no one wants her. Almost equally remarkable is the lack of interest in Beaumond. In comedy, Joseph Williams usually played eligible bachelors; here he plays a rich, handsome no-hoper. La Nuche and Ariadne each try to give him to the other, reversing the normal rule that men give and women are exchanged. Yet he lacks all the standard features of the unacceptable lover: ugliness, cowardice, folly, age (Williams was eighteen). Nor is the poor, promiscuous, devious Willmore an obviously suitable choice. With both sexes, Behn avoids the normally clear distinction between the attractive and unattractive lover, portraying love as an unreasoning obsession. Despite the attractions of Ariadne/Currer, the two men are united in their fascination with the mesmeric figure of the courtesan, embodied in that greatest exponent of menacing and overpowering eros on the Restoration stage, Elizabeth Barry.15 Indirectly, La Nuche influences even Ariadne’s affections, since they ignite when she sees Willmore manhandling her. La Nuche herself is constantly torn between attraction and resistance to a suitor who really offers her very little. Whether their final union invites rejoicing is a decision for the director rather than the critic. It could be cheerful and carefree, but Behn has amply stressed the terrors of poverty, and La Nuche’s resolve to ‘live and starve by turns as fortune pleases’ (V. i. 504) could therefore permit a darker reading. Whatever reading is chosen, Rover II is the first play in which Behn portrayed sexual obsession: a major theme in the great sequence of prose fiction, from Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister to The Fair Jilt, on which she was shortly to embark, though one from which she retreated in her next two plays, when, after ten years of complex support for an embattled régime, she found herself part of a triumphalist chorus of celebration.



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7

The False Count Once Charles II had defeated the Exclusion movement by dissolving the Oxford Parliament in March 1681, the changed political climate permitted a revival in the demand for comedy: Rover II had been one of only two new comedies in the 1680–81 season; Behn’s next comedy, The False Count, was one of eight in the following season, four of which were by her. The False Count was performed by (and probably in) October 1681.1 By this time, Charles II had for some months been moving against his leading opponents in the courts. Irish perjurers imported by the Whigs were now committing perjury against them, but Charles was hindered by the determination of London grand juries (dominated by Whigs) to deliver verdicts of ignoramus: declarations that there was insufficient evidence to warrant trial. Behn’s prologue dwells both on the pliable witnesses and the verdicts of ignoramus, concluding with her habitual parallel between the theatrical and political nation: the audience’s ‘Verdict will be Ignoramus still’ (l. 56). The most famous beneficiary of the ignoramus verdict is Shaftesbury (24 November), but the probable allusion here is to that upon Francis Rouse, the under-sheriff of London (18 October).2 Unsurprisingly, drama was now overwhelmingly Tory. Tragedians tended to execute in fiction the Whig leaders who were, at first, escaping in reality. In comedy, the mode which was already emerging was Tory triumphalism combined with gestures of reconciliation and comprehension. The hero of Durfey’s The Royalist ( January 1682), for example, marries the daughter of one of the regicides, and the play has a small part for an honest citizen. Triumphalism dominates Behn’s other 133



Political Triumph


two surviving plays from this season, The Roundheads and The CityHeiress,3 but she avoids it in her first offering, steering clear of overt politics, and appearing unusually conciliatory to the mercantile classes. In contrast to Rover II, the play also portrays strong male and female bonding, including a close friendship between a nobleman and a merchant. Her experiment in social inclusiveness did not, however, succeed with audiences, and it was not repeated. The action of The False Count consists of two parallel disguise plots centring on the family of Francisco (Nokes), an elderly Englishman who started as a leather-seller, became a wealthy merchant, and set up as a gentleman in Spain, admiring (and indeed outdoing) Spanish strictness towards women. His beautiful young wife Julia4 still loves the man she really wanted to marry, Don Carlos, governor of Cadiz (Smith). Francisco’s affected daughter, Isabella (Currer), rejects the rich, sensible merchant whom Francisco designs for her, despising her own class and determined to marry into the nobility. One of the plots is the humiliation of Isabella by her rejected suitor, Antonio, who at Carlos’s suggestion employs the chimney sweep Guiliom (Leigh) to impersonate a count and court her. This plot is taken from Molière’s Les Précieuses ridicules, in which two bourgeois girls reject sensible suitors because they want life to be like the stilted fictions of literary romance; in revenge, the rejected suitors get their lackeys to impersonate noblemen, court the girls, and win their affections, though the joke stops short of marriage. In Behn, it does not. The other disguise plot is dependent on the first, and concerns Carlos’s cuckolding of Francisco. The chimney-sweep count treats everyone to a pleasure trip in a galley, which is captured by Carlos’s servants, dressed as Turks, and taken to Antonio’s villa. Francisco is easily persuaded that this is the Great Turk’s palace in Constantinople, and in order to save his life he is eager that his young wife Julia should enter the Sultan’s seraglio, and indeed quite willing to renounce Christianity for Islam, just as he has already renounced England for Spain. His insistence finally overcomes Julia’s scruples, and she leaves to cuckold him with the false Sultan immediately before Isabella leaves to consummate her marriage with the false count. The close linkage between the two sex plots, and the close juxtaposition of their fulfilments, is unsettling, since one is a plot of sexual humiliation and the other, apparently, of sexual liberation. It is noteworthy that the false Sultan is an important figure in both. Isabella believes herself to be in the Sultan’s palace when she solemnizes and consummates her marriage, and indeed it takes place with the ‘Sultan’s’ permission. Her union with the false count



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is thus, apparently, authorized by a greater and more despotic male authority. The Turkish Sultan is the archetype of male sexual omnipotence, and the association of this iconic figure with Isabella’s humiliation perhaps emphasizes that, however stupid and affected she may be, she is the plaything of a male power that is not entirely attractive. Her punishment may be individually merited, but the tyranny that enforces it is general. More unsettling, however, is the connection between Isabella’s humiliation and her step-mother Julia’s liberation. Whereas Isabella’s marriage punishes her presumptuous desire to escape from Francisco’s milieu, Julia is being liberated from a marriage in which Francisco treats her as his ‘Slave’. Yet she gains her liberation in the guise of another slave, to the pseudo-Sultan. Even in the aftermath, where Julia is permanently united with her lover Carlos, she is a piece of passive property to be negotiated over by her lover, her husband, and her father. ‘I but Seiz’d my own’, says Carlos (V. i. 319), while her husband shrugs off her father’s objections by saying he can surrender his ‘Goods and Chattels’ to whomever he pleases. She’s ‘my Lumber now’, he argues (V. i. 323). The union of true lovers thus turns out to be a union of male owner and female property, and it is striking that, to the end of the play, Carlos remains dressed as the Sultan: as the absolute despot. The False Count is a play in which women have very little initiative, and in which successful suitors are (once again) confidence tricksters. Even the third heroine, Julia’s sister Clara, is subjected to inconsiderate deception; for, in order to gain access to Julia, Carlos pretends – to Clara’s dismay – that he is a suitor for Clara herself. If Julia’s liberation is unexpectedly qualified, however, so is Isabella’s humiliation. In her spirit of social inclusiveness, Behn treats the nongentle classes with great respect. The merchant Antonio is indistinguishable from a gentleman (as are the sensible bourgeois offspring in Sir Patient Fancy), and even the chimney sweep is engaging and (it is stressed) intelligent: according to Carlos when he first suggests the plot, Guiliom is ‘too mean to be converst with, by almost any humane thing’ (I. i. 107–8); but, Carlos adds, he is ‘of a quick Wit and good Apprehension’ (I. i. 110). Guiliom certainly lives dangerously during his impersonation, ignorantly reversing the sexes of classical deities and excessively associating love with the metaphor of the chimney. He extricates himself, however, with great inventiveness and wit, and to some extent satirizes the class which he is impersonating. ‘[A]s if’, he exclaims, ‘a Lord had not more privilege to be more sawcy, more rude, impertinent, slovenly and foolish than the rest of his Neighbours, or



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man-kind’ (III. i. 103–5). When he rantingly waves his sword and threatens to ‘unpeople Spain’ (III. ii. 189) rather than tolerate rivalry, he parodies the feudal violence that Behn had so repeatedly associated with the heroic male. The chief surprise about Guiliom is, however, reserved for the end. When the imposture is revealed, and he reappears in his sweep’s guise and blackens Isabella’s face with his sooty kisses, there is a surprising mitigation to her downfall. Guiliom is a wealthy man. Carlos, who had initially described him as almost beneath human attention, now says that he is so ‘honest, witty and hansom’ (V. i. 370) that he can easily pass for a lord in Isabella’s home town, where he is not known, and Francisco adds that Guiliom may, in time, become a real lord: he, after all, rose from leather-seller to gentleman. In the penultimate speech, Antonio (now united with Julia’s sister Clara), denounces the ‘base born Beauties, whose Ill manner’d Pride, / Th’industrious noble Citizens deride’ (V. i. 383–4). In this play Behn is presumably courting as wide a constituency as possible, mindful (as she clearly is in the prologue) of the reception of Shadwell’s anti-Catholic The Lancashire Witches, which was hissed by the ‘Popish Crew’ (l. 52) in its audience (who did not, however, prevent its success). But is she doing more? Does this play reflect specifically upon the recent crisis? One reading, by Ros Ballaster,5 has suggested that it does: that the social aspirations of Isabella mock those of Monmouth and of Shaftesbury, who was alleged by the Tories to have sought election to the Polish throne (Ballaster mistakes this fabrication for historical fact). In this reading, Francisco’s eminently justified fears of cuckoldry somehow correspond to the false fears current during the Popish Plot years, as do his fears of castration during his fake captivity. This seems rather forced. The ambitions of a leather-seller’s daughter cannot readily suggest those of a king’s son. Nor can the largely beneficent Turkish Plot, orchestrated by a handsome young hero, easily correspond to the Popish Plot, orchestrated by one who was weak, elderly and (by Behn’s lights) villainous. If Behn were directly satirizing Whig fears of popery, it was almost perverse to portray an English citizen who has embraced the culture of Spain: she seems, rather, determined to avoid the Tory stereotype of the ‘cit’, and to make other points about class and authority. Imaginary danger certainly plays some role in the play, but it is a secondary one, a by-product of something far more prominent and pervasive: imaginary difference. Despite her extraordinary productivity, Behn was still writing plays of specific and unique nature, arising in part from specific and unique nuclei of images. Jewels, so prominent in her



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previous play, Rover II, have no importance here. Conversely, difference and otherness here assume an importance which they did not have in the earlier work, despite its concern with the monstrous. Rover II only uses other in a fairly neutral sense: more, extra, another. Other in The False Count, however, is used to polarize. ‘All other Beauties are but Soot to her’ says Guiliom of Isabella, with risky reversion to the dialect of his tribe (III. ii. 132; italics added); a little later, he entertains Francisco and Isabella with songs in alien tongues: mock-Greek and real French (‘an other Language’ [IV. i. 44; italics added]). Difference, moreover, is Isabella’s ruling passion: the ‘difference between a Citizen and a true bred Cavalier’ (I. ii. 328–9; italics added); ‘the difference between [Guiliom] and a filthy Citizen’ (III. ii. 97; italics added). Later, during their apparent captivity to the Turks, Guiliom with justice suspects that Isabella might prefer to be a Sultana rather than a mere Viscountess: ‘but when thou seest the difference, alas, I am but a Chimney – hum, nothing to a great Turk’ (IV. i. 137; first italics added). The obvious point is that the differences are illusory. The Turks are Europeans, the palace in Constantinople is a merchant’s house in Cadiz, the chimney sweep has every chance of becoming a lord, and as Antonio says, ‘wore I but a Sword, I see no difference between your Don and me, onely, perhaps, he knows less how to use it’ (I. ii. 319–20; italics added). (The only character who in fact draws a sword is Guiliom.) Behn extends her confounding of difference to that most archetypal of polarities, black and white. Disguised as a Turk, Carlos praises Julia’s whiteness, and with his face scrubbed clean Guiliom proclaims that other beauties are ‘Soot’ to Isabella. Yet, at his first and last entrance, his face is black, and at his first appearance as nobleman he has forgotten to wash his hand. In his final appearance, he blacks Isabella’s face with the very soot to which he has earlier contrasted it. The make-up that in Abdelazer signifies immutable differences of body can here be assumed and washed off at will. Difference is a compelling yet empirically insubstantial fiction, and it is always something which applies to other people (as in Isabella’s contempt for her own class). The principal men shift roles with protean freedom, yet use ideas of difference to enforce strict distinctions and limitations on others. This is obviously true of Guiliom’s and Carlos’s disguises as lord and Sultan, but it is more subtly true of Francisco’s transformation from an English merchant into a Spanish gentleman, which has been largely motivated by his sense of sexual difference: his desire for greater culturally approved control over women, whom he regards as alien, lustful beings through whom ‘the Devil rides once a





day’ (I. i. 238–9). Just as revealing is his willingness during his Turkish captivity to make another change of culture and religion, and become a Moslem. The motive remains the same: to preserve his masculine identity; for although he has slept with Julia only once, he fears the unmasculine otherness of eunuchhood.6 Sexual identity and difference are absolute: all other differences mutate and dissolve before their demands, and sexual difference remains a constant structuring element in all the fictions that are enacted. Pliable though Francisco may be in his own national and religious identity, he jealously guards sexual distinctions, and has nightmare visions of a world without them. He has ‘heard of two Women that Married each other’ (II. i. 54–5),7 and when he learns that Carlos is now (apparently) courting Julia’s sister, he offensively instructs the sisters’ father about the chaos which will ensue if Carlos has access to both women. He is bound to sleep with both, and all the differentiated criteria of patrilineal descent will disappear: and haveing under the Cloak of a Husband both Sisters at command, one for a Wife, t’other for a Mistress, hoyte toyte, there will be mad work i’faith; What a Mixture of Brother by the Fathers side, and Uncle by the Mothers side there will be; Aunt by the Mothers side, and Sister by the fathers side; a man may find as good kindred amongst a kenell of Beagles. (I. ii. 115–19) The fictions within the play transform Guiliom from a chimney sweep to a lord, and Carlos from a Spanish governor to a Turkish emperor. Julia, however, is transformed only from a Spanish slave to a Turkish one. For women, the rules are different; only men can play Proteus. The woman who tries to alter the rules is Isabella, who, if not a complex character, is at least a complex case. She is foolish, but she is reacting against a foolish and oppressive background, prescribed by that most insistent and underqualified exponent of masculine privilege, her father Francisco. She must ‘wear me your best Cloaths a Sundays, and brush ’em up a Munday Mornings, and follow your needle all the week after, that was your good old Mother’s way, and your Grand-mother’s before her’ (I. ii. 296–8). Behn would normally have encouraged the repudiation of such stultification, but Isabella does not know the proper way out. She never considers a skill of her rejected suitor Antonio which might possibly profit her. Indeed, she directly mocks and repudiates it: ‘you understand your Pen and Ink’ (I. ii. 313). She wanted someone as different as possible from her father, but she ends up with a parallel case:



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a man who may ascend from chimney sweep to lord, as Francisco has from leather-seller to gentleman. It is unwise to look for too many dark complexities in this short farce. Nowhere is there the lonely rage of Angellica Bianca; yet in no other recent Behn play had women been such pawns. If the sense that boundaries can be crossed, invented, and dissolved attempts a benign exorcism of factionalism, the chief beneficiaries in Behn’s political vision are – as always – men. Chimney sweeps may become lords, but women remain women.

The Roundheads After the failure of The False Count, Behn adjusted to the prevailing trend in comedy, which was to celebrate the defeat of Exclusion and to portray the Tory victory as a re-enactment of the King’s restoration in 1660. In reviving the Restoration theme, dramatists appropriated and updated celebratory plays contemporary with the original event, regressing to the earliest evolutionary stages of Restoration drama. Durfey’s The Royalist ( January 1682), for example, is clearly indebted to Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee (1662), in which two royalists recover their estates and loved ones from the hands of grasping Puritan bureaucrats. Behn’s The Roundheads also takes hints from Howard’s plot, but chiefly it reworks the first Restoration comedy of all: John Tatham’s The Rump (1660), performed even before the return of the King, when the Parliamentary general George Monck had paved the way for the Restoration by reinstating to Parliament the members who had been purged in 1648. (The depleted Parliament – ‘The Rump’ – had itself only been restored in 1659, after its dissolution by Cromwell in 1653.) This extremely recent event forms the climax and subject of Tatham’s play, which satirizes the main contenders for power in the aftermath of Cromwell’s death (Lambert, Fleetwood, Desborough), primarily portraying them as upstarts who have risen far beyond their station, and showing their final demotion to street-vendors. There is no sense that the King is about to return, and references to him are very sporadic. The Rump is a sometimes funny and energetic topical skit, responding to events as they happened and telling a story that had not yet ended. Behn, by contrast, is treating 1659–60 as a foreshadowing of events twenty years later, and as a key to them. Her Puritan grandees are modelled, often verbatim, on Tatham’s, but she alters her source in a number of ways. Under the influence of The Committee, she adds two handsome, impoverished royalists, Loveless and Freeman; and, whereas





Tatham satirizes the ambitions of his female characters, drawing crude and commonplace analogies between insubordinate subjects and insubordinate women, Behn more sympathetically examines the role of women within a male political order; she makes good Tatham’s neglect of monarchy; and she treats Oliver and Richard Cromwell with great respect. She also has an interest, entirely lacking in her source, in the interior human impulses that shape public conflict, and cause one historical crisis to resemble another. Tatham has three main female roles: the ambitious, absurdly arrogant, Lady Bertlam (Lambert), who has been Cromwell’s mistress; her sexually manipulative maid Prissilla, who mirrors her ambition at a lower social level; and Mrs Cromwell, a vulgar, hectoring has-been. There is also a small part for the Cromwells’ daughter, Lady Woodfleet (Fleetwood). Behn adds a new female lead, Lady Desbro (Desborough), a virtuous royalist who has married major-general John Desbro in order to recover the estate of her lover, Freeman. Behn complicates and finally redeems the character of Lady Lambert, ambitious for female command but finally reformed by love for the Cavalier Loveless. Whereas Tatham’s Lady Bertlam has a maid who duplicates her insubordination, Lady Lambert’s maid, Gilliflower, is an unwavering royalist whose husband died in the king’s cause and who retains the political virtues from which her mistress has deviated. This does not, however, stop her cheerful cooperation in her mistress’s love-affairs (she was rewarded handsomely by Cromwell), and she is wonderfully ambivalent about her late husband: ‘a Captain for his Majesty of ever blessed memory’, who was ‘kill’d at Naseby, God be thanked’ (IV. ii. 4–5). Behn even elevates the character of Mrs Cromwell, here given the title of Lady. She retains her hectoring tone and bitter sense of marginalization, but she is allowed forceful repartee, and her imagination is rather touchingly dominated by the lost strong men in her life: Oliver, Richard, and her daughter’s first husband, Henry Ireton, for whom Fleetwood is a most unsatisfactory replacement. Steadfastly loyal to her lost king, glad to be rid of her lost, loyal husband, profiting from the sexual disloyalties of Cromwell and Lady Lambert, Gilliflower shows in miniature the untidy relationship between sex and politics that always emerges in Behn’s plays: the imprecisions and downright contradictions in that traditional and seemingly perfect analogy between the relationships of king and subject and of subject and wife. Such imprecisions permeate the play. Domineering, over-reaching, using her weaker husband as a tool for her own ambitions, Tatham’s Lady Bertlam is, simply, a female insubordinate. Behn’s



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Lady Lambert retains some of her model’s characteristics, and lines, but there is an inevitable shift of emphasis: the collapse of natural authority has created a hypothetical space in which female power might expand, but which remains morally and psychologically out of her or any other woman’s reach. This is shown in one of the most compelling scenes in the play, in which Lady Lambert handles the symbols of power, but cannot herself acquire their potency. She is alone with Loveless, ‘tying a rich Diamond Bracelet about his Arm’. There is ‘a Table behind with Lights’, on which there is a covered Velvet Cushion (IV. ii. 126b–d). The bracelet was given by Cromwell, who had told her to wear it until she found a still greater man, so that Loveless is here invested with the signs of Cromwell’s potency. There are, however, greater signs on offer. Lady Lambert then uncovers the cushion to reveal the crown and sceptre, and Loveless kneels to them as to religious relics. For Lady Lambert, however, they become props in a sexual ritual: whereas Loveless wishes to retire from the awesome relics into the bedroom, she wants him to put on the crown so that she can have the aphrodisiac fantasy of coming to his arms as a queen. It is a complex fantasy: in part one of female empowerment, but empowerment that very obviously depends on the greater authority and sexual magnetism of the male. This is one of many episodes in which Behn evokes, and distorts, received analogies between political and sexual authority. It plays with the analogy between husband and king, appropriately enough, since Lady Lambert’s husband desires the crown, and she is attempting a hand-over of his sexual and political roles; but it requires some lateral thinking to transform the husband–king analogy into a ritual of extramarital crown fetishism. This unsustainable identification of the lover with the king is framed by episodes displaying the political role of the husband. The previous scene depicts a meeting of the Committee of Safety, in which all the powerful men are gathered, already half drunk. It is the equivalent of the great feudal assemblies of Behn’s early plays, except that here women – Lady Lambert and Lady Fleetwood – are initially part of the group. Both leave (Lady Lambert in order to keep her assignation with Loveless), and when they have gone the gathering of solemn, canting Puritans descends into complete drunkenness, silly dancing, and cushion throwing. This is the reality of male political authority; the authority from which the superiority of the husband is derived, and which Lambert is about to assert. For, in this state, the Puritans start dancing their way to Lady Lambert’s apartment, so that the entire scene with the crown is acted before an audience conscious that it is about to





be invaded by another false ceremony of male power: Lambert, the rightly suspicious husband, with his ungainly entourage of dancing drunkards. The crown episode is the point at which the signs of rightful power are most directly and reverently displayed; yet we know that it is going to be comically interrupted, by a man who is both wrongful ruler and rightful husband. When the Committee arrives, the mystery of male authority vanishes, for Loveless hides ingloriously under a covering on the couch, with Lady Lambert sitting on him. Lambert then sits on him as well, and in alarm proclaims a Popish Plot. Loveless’s body, so recently nearly adorned with the crown, is now forced into comic, passive, indignity, and indeed the crown itself becomes a comic instrument in Lady Lambert’s manipulation of her husband. First, she feigns fear that it may be stolen in order to create a diversion enabling Loveless to escape. Then, she uses it to ensure that she can sleep apart from her husband (and therefore with Loveless):8 ‘retire, as ’ere you hope to have my Aid in your Advancement to the Crown’ (IV. ii. 300–1). The crown has become a prop in a bedroom farce, in which all customary patterns of sexual authority are suspended. The altercation between Lady Lambert and her husband suggests, for a moment, that the traditional political and military basis of male supremacy has gone, for Lambert owes his power to his wife, and another of her tactics for cowing him is to threaten that the army shall know of the Committee’s drunken antics. ‘So, this fighting Fool, so worshipp’d by the Rabble’, she reflects, ‘how meanly can a Woman make him sneeke’ (IV. ii. 303–4). The warlord’s power has shrunk and the woman’s increased, yet Lady Lambert’s effectiveness as power-broker derives from the fact that she slept with Cromwell; that, like many another Behn heroine, she has been a pawn in a sexual transaction. The ascendancy that she enjoys in overtopping the warlord creates no pleasure or satisfaction – merely contempt for his weakness – and it was gained through the old paths of submission. Indeed, the power that seems tantalizingly within women’s grasp is always compromised by paradox, as even the gentler, more virtuous Lady Desbro finds. Freeman, her lover, has been fraudulently deprived of his estate, becoming an economic and social cipher, and she has therefore used her body as security for her lover’s estate, marrying Desbro in order to return it to Freeman after her husband’s death. Early Restoration comedies (such as The Committee) sometimes paralleled the hero’s marriage to the heroine with restoration of his lost inheritance or kingdom, her body standing analogically for the estate or the realm. Behn, as usual, complicates the



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analogy. The relationship between Lady Desbro and Freeman’s estate is not a symbolic but an economic one: her body is its price, not its image. If she has unaccustomed power over the transmission of property, it is power acquired at the cost of slavery, and she falls victim to a very unexpected version of the ruler-husband analogy, which pairs Desbro with the King. ‘I’m true to my Allegiance still, true to my King and Honour. Suspect my Loyalty when I lose my Virtue’ (IV. i. 48–50). Though Freeman vigorously disputes her notion of honour, we are, certainly, to admire it, and she is quickly rewarded, for her husband conveniently (and unhistorically) drops dead at the moment of Restoration. If her sense of honour is flawless, however, there are indelible anomalies in the proposition that Desbro and the King exert parallel claims on her. Analogies between political and sexual authority are imprecise and full of difficulties, and they assume a different form every time they appear (even Lady Desbro later justifies female sexual freedom by borrowing the Whig slogan of liberty and property [V. i. 267]). In particular, Behn uses the interplay of sex and politics to show how irrationally, yet how inevitably, the woman’s honour is bound up in that of the man. At the other extreme from Lady Desbro’s royalist chastity is Lady Lambert’s attempt to use the crown itself as an aid to adultery, yet this incident highlights still more the incongruities which beset the derivation of the woman’s honour from her man’s. Outfacing her husband’s accusations after Loveless’s escape, she threatens to tell the army of his drunkenness: – Nay, I’ll do’t; d’ye think to take away my Honour thus? I, who by my sole Politicks and Management, Have set you up Villain of Villains, Sirrah. (IV. ii. 282–4) If Lady Desbro insists on loyalty even to a rebel, Lady Lambert exposes its irrationality, since any honour or authority that her accuser possesses comes, in equal measure, from her intelligence and her adultery. In such moments, the analogy between the husband and the ruler is pushed to extremes of unexpectedness or unfamiliarity. Honour is a key term in both passages, Lady Desbro confirming and Lady Lambert denying that the woman’s honour consists of wifely fidelity. Honour is, indeed, a remarkably frequent word throughout the play, but it is devalued almost as often as it is uttered, since it primarily expresses the social pretensions of the upstarts. The term which implicates the values of the woman’s life in that of the male is repeatedly exposed as non-





sense, and the implication itself is ridiculed in the greatest exploration of the relationship between female and male power: the Ladies’ Council (adapted from Tatham), in which the ladies act as a lower house, passing on proposed measures for consideration by the Committee of Safety.9 In Tatham’s version of the scene, Lady Lambert enquires superciliously into the titles of ladies whose husbands have been ennobled by Cromwell, and steals a petitioner’s idea for cosmetics research, while the ladies in general protest against the laws prohibiting fornication and adultery. Behn shifts the scene to a later and more climactic stage of the play, so that it becomes the final display of the female power-drive, has Loveless present in drag, and darkens the atmosphere by having women boast of past acts of disloyalty and violence, normally by their husbands. The episode starts in a fairly light vein, with Lady Lambert’s enquiry (reworked from Tatham) into the validity of the noble titles – honours – assumed by her petitioners; the honours are derived from the husbands, but (as the ladies themselves confess) the husbands are ‘Of no long standing’ (V. i. 185). The pun creates another misconnection of male and female honour: the male from whom the honour is derived has little maleness. The scene then darkens considerably, moving right away from Tatham’s light sexual satire, for Behn inserts an episode in which women (and the disguised Loveless) boast of former acts of disloyalty in an attempt to gain present profit, and in the process show the corruption of old systems of symbolism and analogy. The husband of one woman, for example, ‘headed the Rabble, to pull down Gog and Magog, the Bishops, broke the Idols in the Windows, and turn’d the Churches into Stables and dens of Thieves; rob’d the Altar of the Cathedral of the twelve pieces of Plate call’d the twelve Apostles, turn’d eleven of ’em into Money, and kept Judas for his own use at home’ (V. i. 223–5). True symbols are melted and false ones are forged: Gog and Magog, the idolatrous lands denounced in Ezekiel (38:2, 39:6) and Revelation (20:8), are arbitrarily nominated as signs of the episcopal hierarchy, while the images of the eleven loyal apostles essentially and unalterably exemplify loyalty to a divinely anointed leader. Yet, even in this literal dissolution of authority, the women are with only one exception boasting of crimes committed by their husbands, and claiming honour therefrom. Female subordination psychologically survives the melting of the symbols which traditionally support it, and ‘Honour’, even that of crime and betrayal, is still derived from the man. Only one woman boasts directly of her own deeds. Chief among them is that ‘at the Tryal of the late Man, I spit in’s Face’ (V. i. 217). The ‘Man’



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is the derogatorily deconsecrating term which the Puritans used for Charles I. The woman who defines herself directly, without constant reference to her husband, is the woman who struck directly at the person and symbolism of the King, and in doing so re-enacted the first indignity inflicted on Christ after his condemnation: ‘Then did they spit in his face’ (Matthew 26:67). The analogy between king and Christ survives, but Behn seems to shy away from dependent analogies likening the subordination of the subject, or the woman, to that of the creature to the creator. If the killing of the King clearly conforms to that of Christ, the many other acts of betrayal mentioned in the play are generally less clear in their issues. For example, the spitting woman immediately goes on to boast that she betrayed the Earl of Holland: the Earl was, certainly, executed for leading a royalist rebellion, but he was a triple side-switcher, a martyr to a cause which he had himself betrayed. A more comically complicated contrast of treachery and loyalty occurs when Gilliflower promises Loveless that she will not betray him (IV. ii. 3). At this point she is leading him in for an adulterous assignation with Lady Lambert, and it is in this rather special and less than ideal context, in order to confirm her assurance that his adultery will be safe from detection, that she boasts of her own loyalty to the King, and her husband’s seemingly unlamented death at Naseby. The next woman in the council scene to boast of disloyalty reverts to taking pride in the achievements of her husband, who ‘made Libels on the Man, from the first Troubles to this day, defam’d and profan’d the Woman and her Children, printed all the man’s Letters to the Woman with Burlesque Marginal Notes’ (V. i. 227–9). The reference is to The Kings Cabinet Opened, an annotated publication of Charles I’s correspondence with Henrietta Maria, captured after the Battle of Naseby. Royalists idealized Henrietta Maria’s initiative in raising money and troops during the Civil War; Charles I’s opponents mocked him as a hen-pecked husband, dangerously controlled by his wife, and the annotations in The Kings Cabinet open with the complaint that ‘the Kings Counsels are wholly managed by the Queen; though she be of the weaker sex’.10 The primary marriage of the realm, the strong, cooperative union of ruler and queen, has been debased according to the crudest assumptions of male supremacism; and a woman exults in the achievement. This female congress is Behn’s most direct representation of female authority since The Young King, and it is very pessimistic. The women simply continue to produce new versions of female subordination, even as they tear apart the symbolism that has justified it, and indeed when the husband of the realm has been desecrated.





Almost immediately, however, male power makes the whole scene redundant. News comes that Lambert’s army has deserted him, Lady Lambert is left to curse the cowardice of the men on whom her dreams of majesty depended, and the unleashing of military power brings in the extreme analogy of female passivity, rape: ‘How, ravish’d! oh, monstrous!’ cries a joiner; ‘was ever such a Rape committed upon an innocent City? lay her Legs open to the wide World, for every Knave to view her Nakedness?’ (V. i. 438–40). The image is taken from Tatham, though the stress on penetration is greater in Behn, and threats to the female body soon become literal. As in The Young King, the Restoration is partly accomplished by the mob, who clamour to have the ‘Sorceress’, Lady Lambert, delivered into their hands (V. i. 471). Then Lady Desbro enters, having narrowly escaped being ‘pull’d to pieces’ (V. i. 483) by them. Celebratory treatments of the Restoration tend to treat it as an intervention of divine providence in history: a correspondence between the order of the human world and of the divine mind. Behn, however, uses the word ‘Providence’ only twice, on each occasion to express Puritan hypocrisy,11 and here we see unflinching historical realism. For Behn shows how the great event is carried forward by a sacrificial mob baying out one of the darkest and most ignorant terms of misogynous hatred, in their denunciation of Lady Lambert as a witch. The Ladies’ Council is in fact preceded as well as followed by a mob scene. As in Lady Lambert’s other scene of power, with the crown and sceptre, the prelude alerts us to the aftermath, and tells us that the spectacle of female power is an illusion on the point of male disruption. The anti-feminist howls of the restoring mob again demonstrate Behn’s uninterest in the sacred and symbolic bases of authority, and further her exploration of the unstable, accidental relationship between monarchic and sexual authority. The former implies the latter, but the processes that link them are tangled and heterogeneous: king is to subject as man is to woman not because such parallelism is determined by the chain of being but because, as the mob scene shows, the power that establishes the king threatens to dismember the woman. The fundamental point is that the power-drive of the human mind makes no system other than monarchy imaginable, and no system other than hereditary monarchy workable. In contrast to those of The Rump, the characters of this play are obsessed with monarchy, for political conflict always resolves itself into a single question: who will be the next ruler? There is no sense that non-monarchic forms are imaginatively possible. Republicanism and gynocracy are, alike, tantalizing mirages. Despite the dark moments in the Council and mob scenes, however, the



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woman’s lot is portrayed with some equanimity, in that the relationships of the principal couples are problem-free. Several critics have remarked on Behn’s association of royalism with figures of flamboyant sexual potency, and the association is nowhere less complex than it is here, for Loveless and Freeman do not have the destructive side of the two Willmores, or of Tom Wilding in Behn’s next Tory play, The CityHeiress.12 They are, indeed, Behn’s most attractive and uncomplicated heroes, and we certainly do not see here what we are to see in The City-Heiress: a heroine betrayed and humiliated by a virile embodiment of Tory values.

The City-Heiress The Roundheads elaborates and alters the emphasis of The Rump while working within the structure and conception that Tatham had provided. By contrast, The City-Heiress; or, Sir Timothy Treat-all (April 1682) – one of the masterpieces of Restoration comedy – is highly innovative, its debts to two earlier plays (Middleton’s A Mad World My Masters and Massinger’s The Guardian) entirely assimilated within a new conception. In her dedications to The Roundheads and The City-Heiress, Behn claims that both plays had succeeded, and the latter was performed on 17 May 1682 before the Moroccan ambassador. In Roscius Anglicanus, however, John Downes pairs it with The Feign’d Curtizans as a play that ‘liv’d but a short time’ (p. 78). Both could well be true: initial success does not guarantee long-term survival. The Dedication of The City-Heiress, to Henry Howard, Earl of Arundel (later seventh Duke of Norfolk) is a passionate Tory polemic, deploring the madness of the Popish Plot years. One innocent victim of the plot, executed in December 1680, had been Arundel’s Catholic kinsman, William Howard, Viscount Stafford. Even members of his own family had voted for his execution, but Arundel is praised for his ‘resolute bravery of Mind, and heroick Honesty’ in resisting the tide and crying ‘Not guilty’. The play itself, Behn claims, is ‘in every part true Tory! Loyal all-over! except one Knave’ (ll. 38, 53–4), and from a political standpoint this is certainly true. From all other standpoints, however (particularly those of the three heroines), it is more ambiguous, for Behn’s Tory blades are a motley crew, bullying, coarse, and manipulative, and the play constitutes Behn’s greatest exploration of the ugly side of Cavalier glamour. The ‘one Knave’ is the Whig demagogue Sir Timothy Treat-all (Nokes), grasping, treacherous, impotent and old: an utter negation of the vital-





ity and virility that Behn habitually associated with the Royalist cause. Various identifications have been proposed for him, but the likeliest is the most obvious: the Earl of Shaftesbury, who entertained lavishly, as Treat-all does both in name and deed, and who was satirically rumoured to have sought the elective crown of Poland, as Treat-all does. Like recent British history, the play repeatedly reverts to questions of inheritance. The Tory hero, Wilding, is Sir Timothy’s nephew, his heir, and a former Whig, whose conversion to Toryism has deprived him of his uncle’s financial support. Like many Behn heroes, he is hard up. In a plot taken from A Mad World, he enters his uncle’s house disguised as a lord: here, a Polish lord, bringing the offer of the Polish crown. During the night, he and his companions redisguise themselves as burglars, steal the writings of Sir Timothy’s estate, revert to their Polish disguise and tie each other up, as if they too were victims of the burglars. Sir Timothy soon discovers the ruse, but since Wilding and his friends have discovered treasonable documents during their robbery they have the old man at their mercy. Wilding retains control of the estate and Sir Timothy is to receive an allowance, conditional on his future political loyalty. By 1682, other dramatists were consigning the Whig leaders to severer forms of imaginary justice. Wilding does, harshly, say that the foolish rabble who follow Sir Timothy deserve to be hanged, but the ending shows Behn’s characteristic distaste for political brutality. Sir Timothy’s chief punishment is to be tricked into marrying Wilding’s lower-class mistress Diana (Betty Currer) in the belief that she is Charlot Gettall, the city heiress of the title, whose father has recently died; here, Behn reverses the dénouement of A Mad World, whose protagonist, having robbed his grandfather, is himself tricked into marrying his grandfather’s whore. Diana engineers the deception herself, but out of bitter and distressing necessity, and she painfully reflects that she is exchanging Wilding’s kisses for ‘A hollow pair of thin blue wither’d Lips’ (V. i. 237). Lower-class mistresses had been palmed off on the actor Nokes ever since his Sir Nicholas Cully had married Sir Frederick Frollick’s mistress in Etherege’s The Comicall Revenge, but Behn is unusual both in the initiative she gives to the woman and the distress which her success causes her. She comes off rather worse than her Middleton counterpart, and Behn takes her side completely. When Sir Timothy discovers, with outrage, that he has ‘married a Strumpet’ (V. i. 553), her reply is dignified and persuasive: ‘You give your Nephews Mistriss, Sir, too coarse a name: ‘Tis true, I lov’d him, onely him, and was true to him’ (V. i. 554–5). Diana’s fate creates a new version of a familiar Behn formula-



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tion: the political triumph of the men is inseparable from the sacrifice of the woman. Behn concentrates as much on the Tories’ treatment of women as on their treatment of the great Whig villain, indicating that the two are deeply linked, and that the mentality that humiliates the villain is identical with that which conquers the heroines.13 Wilding is Behn’s least attractive rake-hero. Like Willmore in The Rover, he is a response to Etherege’s ground-breaking portrayal of the heartless, manipulative seducer Dorimant in The Man of Mode. Willmore, however, was thoughtless rather than heartless, and the buffoonery of his actions to some extent mitigated their menace; several plays by men, such as Otway’s Friendship in Fashion and Durfey’s Trick for Trick; or, The Debauch’d Hypocrite (both 1678, both by future Tories) portray the ruthless rake in a far harsher light. Wilding, however, is totally ruthless, and it is noteworthy that he was played not by Smith, the creator of Willmore, but by the darker talent of Betterton, who had created Dorimant and a number of completely unattractive rakes.14 Wilding is even, possibly, suffering from syphilis: he has certainly done so in the past, his cure financed by his not entirely unaccommodating uncle; but, as Sir Timothy observes, pox-doctors pretend ‘to cure incurable Diseases’ (I. i. 14).15 If Willmore is a reaction to Etherege’s Dorimant, Wilding is a critical re-creation of him. During the course of The Man of Mode, Dorimant abandons an old mistress, seduces and abandons a new one, and marries an heiress. Wilding does the same, though more unpleasantly, and there are times when he specifically recalls Etherege’s hero. For example, when Dorimant’s rejected mistress, Loveit, bursts into tears before his heartlessness, he responds with coldly detached aestheticism: So thunder breaks the cloud in twain. And makes a passage for the rain.16 Wilding recaptures the cruelty of the gesture but not its stylishness, for when he responds in this way to female tears, they are the hypocritical tears of a Puritan bawd, Mrs Clacket: ‘So Tempests are allay’d by showers of Rain’ (II. i. 95). Wilding has eloped with the bourgeois heiress Charlot Gettall, whose father had recently died. Although he has not seduced her, he has as good as done so; for, as Clacket points out, her ‘Reputation’s gone’ (V. i. 307–8). Wilding has lodged Charlot with Clacket (with whom he himself lodges): a decisive way of destroying her reputation, reminis-





cent of The Dutch Lover, where Antonio heartlessly lodges his deceived mistress in a brothel. Wilding has also lied to Charlot about his finances, concealing his poverty and his rift with his uncle. When we first see her, at the beginning of the second act, Clacket is disillusioning her about Wilding’s wealth and fidelity, revealing that (as we already know) he is campaigning to seduce the beautiful widow Lady Galliard. Clacket’s purpose in exposing Wilding is to interest Charlot in a young Tory friend of Wilding’s, unflatteringly named Fopington, and the double-dealing between the Tory comrades is another unexpected dimension of the play. The genuine comradeship of Loveless and Freeman in The Roundheads has been superseded: we are back to the fractured brotherhood of Rover II. In the midst of all this, Wilding intrudes by violence, breaking open the door, discovering Fopington, delivering his poetic insult to Clacket, lyingly saying that he has access to his uncle’s writings and equally lyingly denying his interest in Diana (his mistress) and Lady Galliard (his imminent conquest). It is in order to make good the former boast that he plans his burglary of Sir Timothy. As his forcible entry into Charlot’s room hints, however, there is a strange symmetry between the way he treats his uncle and the way he treats his women, despite their vast differences in desert. The theatrical care with which Behn develops this symmetry tells against the more enthusiastic scholarly evaluations of Wilding’s glamour.17 Nevertheless, by the end of the play Wilding has secured his marriage to Charlot, palmed off Diana, and obtained Sir Timothy’s writings. He has also seduced the rich, respectable widow, Lady Galliard, who is tormentedly in love with him. Lady Galliard was played by the great Elizabeth Barry, who was well equipped to bring out the tragic force that is so clearly latent in the role. Wilding has two rivals for her. One is Sir Timothy, though this strand of plot remains formulaic and undeveloped. More extensively developed is Wilding’s rivalry with another – and richer – young Tory, Sir Charles Meriwill, who treats Lady Galliard with a timid deference which contrasts with Wilding’s arrogant boisterousness, and at first alienates her. The deference is, however, largely to her social quality: whereas Wilding addresses Lady Galliard as ‘Madam’ and ‘Widow’, Sir Charles addresses her as ‘Madam’ and ‘your Ladyship’. In other circumstances, however, as his spirited uncle Sir Anthony Meriwill reminds him, he can ‘be lewd enough’ (I. i. 447). In Lady Galliard, Behn again shows how slight is that seemingly immense boundary between the lady of quality and the common



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whore. Though she loves and desires Wilding, Lady Galliard initially has a firm sense of her virtue and social dignity, of the unbreachable distance between her and the common strumpet. Desperate to believe that Wilding could not net a catch such as Charlot, she demands to hear a song which Wilding has written for his last mistress. The song is certainly inappropriate for a great heiress – ‘In Phillis all vile Jilts are met ’ (IV. i. 42) – but it was plainly written for his lower-class mistress Diana, not Charlot (it is sung by Diana’s maid). Not realizing that there are two rivals in the case, however, Lady Galliard conflates Diana and Charlot and consoles herself that the heiress is a fiction: the song, she smugly asserts, is ‘not like the description of a rich Citizens Daughter and Heir, but some common Hackney of the Suburbs’ (IV. i. 34–5); and, even if the addressee is a gentlewoman, many gentlewomen live ‘as rank Prostitutes’ (IV. i. 39). How secure and immense the boundary between respectability and whoredom seems; yet how impulsively she is herself shortly to cross that boundary. Unknowingly merging the figures of Charlot and Diana, she prefigures her own impending fall. As soon as the song is over, Wilding enters, seizes, and is explicit (if lyrical) in his expectation of instant sex (‘Opprest with a vast load of longing Love; / Let me unlade me in that soft white Bosome’ [IV. i. 71–2]). At this point, Lady Galliard is quite clear in her sense of which side of the boundary she is on: [If] I ever suffer you to see me more, Then think me what your Carriage calls me, An impudent, an open Prostitute. (IV. i. 84–6) But then, shockingly, her world falls apart: she sleeps with two men in quick succession, and all the hierarchical differences between her and the common mistress disappear. By the end of this very scene, Wilding has brow-beaten her into sexual surrender, and her words specifically erase the distinctions she had so confidently drawn between Diana and herself: have I promis’d then to be A Whore? . . . The Slave, the Hackney of his lawless Lust! (IV. i. 227–31; italics added)





There is, however, still worse to come. Sir Charles’s timid respectfulness has not only alienated Lady Galliard but infuriated his roistering uncle, Sir Anthony, whose heir he is. In the following scene, the hitherto deferential Sir Charles turns up in a mood of ugly macho aggressiveness, inspired by wine and his uncle’s goading. He then bullies her into sexual surrender18 in an episode that is made none the more attractive by the enthusiastic commentary of the concealed Sir Anthony. Still more than Belvile, Sir Charles shows that within every man of principle lurks an ape. Unlike Wilding, Sir Charles has marriage in mind, but the close juxtaposition of the two overbearing seductions seems designed to make us wonder whether this really makes any difference. Sir Anthony, the indulgent, fun-loving Tory uncle and guardian, obviously forms an antithesis to Wilding’s uncle, the cold, furtive Sir Timothy: the latter’s endless party-giving (‘every day mighty Feasting’ [II. i. 213]) corrupts festivity into venal political junketing, whereas Sir Anthony is a more traditionally festive character. Yet, if exuberance by definition exceeds the limits of the normal, Sir Anthony exceeds the limits of exuberance: in particular, his approving commentary on the manhandling of Lady Galliard is an ugly display of voyeurism; like the Neapolitan carnival in The Rover, this one-man carnival has his ugly side. The actor who played Sir Anthony, Anthony Leigh, was good at playing old men of excessive and unattractively misdirected sexual enthusiasm (such as Sir Patient Fancy). Otway had recently created two such characters for him: Antonio, the flagellant foot-fetishist in Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (February 1682), and Sir Jolly Jumble, the voyeuristic bisexual pimp in The Souldiers Fortune ( June 1680). Both the Otway characters are placed in contaminating association with young, attractive lovers, and Sir Anthony’s concealed participation in the seduction scene clearly has a comparable effect. If the Whig uncle is completely without merit, the Tory one has marked defects. Sir Anthony’s immediate source is Durazzo, the titular character of Massinger’s The Guardian. Like Sir Anthony, he is dismayed by his charge’s timidity in courtship, but he is a problem-free character, apart from some lax views on the seduction of tenants’ daughters: he does not gloatingly spy on physical and emotional intimidation. If Sir Anthony is directly modelled on Durazzo, however, the contrast between strict and indulgent father-figures in which he participates goes back far further, to Adelphi (The Brothers), a comedy by the Roman dramatist Terence. In Terence’s play, a boy is brought up strictly by his father, while his brother is brought up more indulgently by his father’s brother. Indulgent upbringing is shown to have some limitations, but



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the adopted son is good-natured, eager to marry a penniless Athenian girl he has made pregnant. This play had already been used by Sir Charles Sedley in The Mulberry Garden (1668), a play which (like Tatham’s The Rump) portrays the collapse of the Puritan régime. Sedley, however, had simply contrasted a benignly festive royalist parent with his oppressively Puritan brother, each representing in miniature the régime to which he adheres; one is right, the other wrong.19 Behn’s contrast between the joyless Puritan and the roistering Royalist is, however, far more problematic, and it reveals more clearly than ever how keenly she felt the conflict between political obedience and sexual dignity. Obviously, the main problems lie in the actual conduct of Sir Anthony and his associates, but there is one smaller yet important detail that is worth mentioning. Terence had contrasted a strict father with an indulgent uncle. Sedley, treating the brothers primarily as symbols of political authority, had turned them into two fathers. Behn turns them into two (unrelated) uncles: a fact that is consistent with the absence of unambiguous familial or moral authority throughout the play. For one odd, and rather enigmatic, feature of the play is that it combines a politically topical interest in inheritance with a complete absence of patrilineal succession. In differing ways, Wilding and Sir Charles strive to be nominated as heirs by substitute fathers. Wilding and Sir Timothy compete for the inheritance of Charlot’s father, and the absence of real or living fathers is repeatedly stressed. Masquerading as Charlot, Diana cannot answer questions about ‘her’ father. Wishing to get Lady Galliard’s woman servant, Closet, out of the way so that he can proceed with his seduction, Wilding claims that a kinsman has arrived with news of an inheritance: ‘your Fathers own Mothers Uncles Sisters Son; what d’ye call him?’ (IV. i. 95–6). The lie, however, does not work, for Closet is an orphan, with ‘no neer Relation living that I know of’ (IV. i. 98). Ineffective for different reasons is Sir Anthony’s mendacious attempt to commend Sir Charles to Lady Galliard as the father of his county: ‘There’s never a Maid within forty miles of Meriwill-hall to work a Miracle on, but all are Mothers. He’s a hopeful Youth’ (II. ii. 289–91). Fatherhood appears only as a fiction, and inheritance is contingent, proceeding neither from birth nor merit, but force and fraud. The absence of patrilineal principles in a play celebrating their triumph in the political arena is remarkable but perhaps not overtly striking: in watching a play, one is rarely directly struck by what is not there. What is striking, however, is the intimate connection between the young Tories’ treatment of Lady Galliard and their treatment of the





Whig villain, Sir Timothy. In browbeating Lady Galliard, they veer between ironic reproduction of Whig rhetoric – ‘I’m resolv’d to discover the Hellish Plot’ (when Sir Charles suspects the presence of a rival) (IV. i. 431) – and equally ironic reproduction of Tory rhetoric: when Sir Charles abuses Lady Galliard’s servant as a ‘Domestick Intelligence’ (IV. i. 451), he is giving her the title of a Whig newspaper. Political language becomes confused, corrupted, and misapplied to the domination of women. More tellingly still, Behn’s characteristic use of scenic and corporeal cross-reference creates an intimate visual and structural connection between the humiliations of Sir Timothy and Lady Galliard. For example, she interweaves and superimposes Wilding’s burglary of Sir Timothy and seduction of Lady Galliard to the point of identifying them. The burglars are to assemble at eleven; the assignation with Lady Galliard is at midnight. Wilding takes time off from the burglary to accomplish the seduction, and then returns to his original task. The fraudulent acquisition of Sir Timothy’s estate becomes disturbingly linked with that of Lady Galliard’s body. In this combination, each appears less high-spiritedly innocent than it might have done on its own. As always with Behn, we must consider physical sequence and visual juxtaposition as well as mere words. The manner of Sir Charles’s assault on Lady Galliard is even more tangibly and visibly linked with the humiliation of Sir Timothy. Sir Charles gains the courage to intimidate Lady Galliard through drunkenness, and we have seen how he got drunk: forcing Sir Timothy to kneel in front of his own guests and drink the king’s health, and drinking along with him. A ritual of loyal toasts gives this timid Tory the courage to be a sexual tyrant: the manhandling and forcing of Sir Timothy’s body is replicated in that of Lady Galliard’s, and the replication leads in turn to another ritual of loyal toasts when, after his conquest of Lady Galliard, Sir Charles throws money to a group of musicians and bids them ‘drink the Kings Health, with my Royal Master’s the Duke’ (V. i. 339–40). This is a gesture both of loyalty and of sexual triumph: he is, in full public view, ‘undrest’ (V. i. 338a) on Lady Galliard’s balcony, and he is paying off serenaders sent by Sir Anthony to hymn his victory. Behn had always implied that Tory principles were allied to, at best, a thoughtlessness towards women; here, thoughtlessness becomes arrogant contempt. There is one further way, perhaps not readily noticed today, in which Behn emphasizes the contradictions and latent sexual oppressiveness in the Tory outlook. A regular complaint against the Parliamentary rebels and their Whig successors was that they destroyed loyalty at the most microcosmic level, dissolving the bonds between masters and servants.20



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For example, Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee, which influenced The Roundheads, portrays a society in which gentlemen are oppressed by upstart former servants. Here, however, the corrupters of trust and service are Wilding and Sir Charles, who bribe Lady Galliard’s servant into assisting their campaigns against her. In the aftermath of her surrender to him, Sir Charles turns into a domineering household tyrant, conducting, and winning, a battle for control of her servants. Desperately, Lady Galliard commands her footman to ‘run to my Lord Mayors and require some of his Officers to assist me instantly’, and to prevent Charles’s ‘mad Crew’ from entering, but Sir Charles countermands the orders and gets the footman to acknowledge him as his ‘Lord and Master’ (V. i. 367–72). It is not only Sir Robert Howard’s Puritan subversives who dissolve the old bond of service. In the failure to summon the Lord Mayor, Behn reworks one of the favourite tropes of festive comedy: the halting of the killjoy forces of justice by vivacious youth. Behn had echoed the convention more fleetingly when Willmore had evoked the image of a compliant judge to bless his intended rape of Florinda. Here, the intimidation is more sustained, inappropriate and comprehensive. The city officers whom Lady Galliard wishes to call were, of course, Whigs: after Shaftesbury’s escape from prosecution, Charles II had let off steam by standing side by side with Thomas Durfey, singing a ballad by the latter which abused the Whig sheriffs ‘(among other things) as thieves, rats, baboons, cuckolds, and Jews’.21 Behn, however, creates another reversal of partisan expectation. The play offers two conflicting yet simultaneous prospects: that festivity will triumph over pedantic legalism, and that Tory order will triumph over Whig subversion; yet law is here protective and ordering, not restrictive, and its representatives are Whig. In the first description of Lady Galliard, Wilding complains that she ‘is much govern’d by Honour, and a rigid Mother, who is ever preaching to her against the Vices of Youth, and t’other end of the Town Sparks; dreads nothing so much as her Daughters marrying a villanous Tory’ (I. i. 147–50). In a play in which patrilineal principles are pursued in the absence both of principles and fathers, Lady Galliard’s formidable Whig mother seems to have her strong points. It is an odd manifesto which portrays the favoured party as burglars, rapists, Fopingtons and voyeurs, yet such is The City-Heiress. Sir Timothy’s joyless and treacherous lifestyle has nothing to recommend it, whereas that of Wilding and Sir Anthony has an undeniable vitality. But that vitality has its unacceptable side, and Behn combines clear support for the establishment with gloomy recognition that women are excluded from





its workings. For a fallen woman, Lady Galliard makes what is socially a good marriage, to Sir Charles: indeed, she is one of only three fallen women in late seventeenth-century comedy to marry a desirable husband who was not her original seducer. Yet respectability is a poor compensation for the crushing of the personal life, and our final glimpse of her is of a divided and unhappy woman, the visible sadness of her body contradicting the grateful words which she mouths: No, your unwearied Love at last has vanquisht me. Here, be as happy as a Wife can make ye – One last look more, and then – be gone fond Love. Sighing and looking on Wilding, giving Sir Charles her hand. (V. i. 586–8) This moment is the more poignant because it closely recapitulates a moment earlier in the act in which Wilding’s less exalted ex-mistress, Diana, joins hands with Sir Timothy and disingenuously renounces her affection for her lover (V. i. 286–9). The Lady and the ‘common Hackney’ remain linked, even in the moments which restore their respectability. The four comedies of the 1681–82 season which were not by Behn were all lightweight anti-Whig satire, three of them involving cuckolding; the most lastingly successful was Ravenscroft’s The London Cuckolds (October 1681), in which three elderly aldermen formulate contrasting yet equally futile plans for ensuring their young wives’ fidelity. Crowne’s cuckolding comedy City Politiques, ready this season though delayed until the next, is a straightforward celebration of Tory sexual vigour. The other three non-Behn comedies (including two cuckolding comedies by Durfey) were similarly lightweight anti-Whig satire.22 Although Durfey had written sensitively about sex in the past, he did not do so in these two plays. In the first of the pair, Sir Barnaby Whigg, a woman is disappointed in her secret hope that her lover will ravish her, and humiliates him by having him publicly suspended in a bed on his own. If the woman triumphs over male rakish pretensions, her desire to be ravished is very much the fiction of a man’s mind, and she is a far cry from Lady Galliard. Since Durfey’s play had a Tory hero called Wilding, Behn may have had it at the back of her mind, but she was in a different class, both in the thoughtfulness of her response to the Tory triumph and the artistry with which she conveyed it. Ever since Abdelazer, she had been interested in the symmetry of opposites: the way in which male orders that were opposed in relation to each other could be



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identical in their oppression of women. The City-Heiress is her greatest exploration of this paradox; it is one of the two finest theatrical products of the Exclusion Crisis (the other being Otway’s similarly ambivalent Venice Preserv’d ); and it is, without any qualification of period or context, a fine play. She was at her peak, but she then experienced the ultimate disaster for a writer dependent upon the marketplace: her marketplace disappeared.




8

The Luckey Chance Behn’s next stage venture was short but sobering. In August 1682 she provided a prologue and epilogue for the anonymous tragedy Romulus and Hersilia, and in the epilogue offered severe criticism of Charles II’s errant illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, who had aspired to replace James in the succession. Though angry at Monmouth’s ambition and treachery, the King was still a protective father, and the Lord Chamberlain ordered the arrest of both Behn and Lady Slingsby (formerly Mary Lee), the actress who had delivered the epilogue. We do not know the outcome, or whether Behn was arrested at all, but there is no evidence that (as has been suggested) she was banned from the stage for the next four years;1 indeed, we know of a performance of The Rover in 1685. What blighted her career as a dramatist was a collapse in the demand for new plays that affected everyone. Paradoxically, the cause was the success of the company for which she wrote. The King’s Company had always been less professionally managed than the Duke’s, and was less able to withstand the distractions and falling demand of the Exclusion Crisis years. In November 1682, the company was absorbed by the Duke’s, and the absence of competition lessened the need to take risks with new plays. In the remaining seven years of her life, Behn had only two further plays premièred. When her next play reached the stage, Charles II had died (in February 1685) and been succeeded by James; in June of that year, Monmouth invaded, hoping to gain the crown which had eluded him during the Exclusion Crisis, but was defeated, captured and beheaded. As a result of the King’s death, Behn deferred completion of The Emperor of the Moon, which she had started in the hope of appealing to Charles’s taste for farce; and the 158



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United Company suffered heavy losses with the lavish opera Albion and Albanius, by Dryden and the Spanish composer Luis Grabu, in which they had invested the vast sum of £4,000. Albion and Albanius was the last theatrical celebration of Charles’s victory over the Whigs, extensively paralleling it with the earlier triumph of the Restoration. As a result of Charles’s unexpected death, Dryden altered the opera to conclude with the apotheosis of James II, but the first (and only) run on the public stage was cut short by Monmouth’s invasion, and the company spent the next two years recouping its losses. During these difficult years, Behn diversified, publishing the bulk of her poetry, realistic short fiction of a kind and quality that has no precedent in English literature, and the first full-scale realist novel (LoveLetters between a Nobleman and his Sister [1684–87], a roman à clef inspired by a sexual scandal involving one of Monmouth’s supporters, and concluding with the Duke’s execution). She also did some substantial translating work, including French works which seemed designed to appeal to a sceptical and free-thinking audience. La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes was translated as Seneca Unmasqued (1685); by mocking the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca, the title suggested the fraudulence of stoic claims to dispassionate virtue. It was followed by translations of Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur La Pluralité des Mondes and L’Histoire des Oracles (1688),2 of which the latter follows a procedure, common among freethinkers, of mounting a coded attack on Christianity by satirizing the absurdities of paganism. Perhaps Fontenelle inspired a character in one of Behn’s last and best works, the novella Oroonoko: the free-thinking French tutor whose pupil, the African prince of the title, finds the doctrine of the Trinity irresistibly ludicrous. If this immense, high-quality productivity shows fertility and talent, it also shows continuing financial need. In August 1685, Behn borrowed £6 from Zachary Baggs (probably sub-treasurer of the United Company), and in the same period she wrote a desperate letter to her publisher, Jacob Tonson, begging that the fee for her Poems upon Several Occasions be increased from £20 to £25: ‘I want extreamly or I wo’d not urge this’, she pleaded.3 Behn’s next new play, The Luckey Chance (prob. April 1686) thus appeared in a period of considerable tension, activity and desperation. ‘Dire is the Dearth and Famine on the Stage’ (l. 36), she lamented in the prologue: so dire that her friend Otway had died in extreme poverty. The Luckey Chance has three interwoven plots, all concerned with forced or mercenary marriage. One of the heroes, Belmour, has had to flee to Holland after killing a man in a duel. During his absence, the



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rich, elderly citizen Sir Feeble Fainwou’d has faked news of Belmour’s execution abroad, and Belmour’s beloved Leticia decides to marry Sir Feeble for his wealth and status. Sir Feeble has also bought a pardon for Belmour, in order to prevent him from getting one himself, but he inadvertently hands it over to Belmour when the latter impersonates Sir Feeble’s nephew, Francis. The play starts on the wedding day of Leticia and Sir Feeble, and portrays Belmour’s successful attempts to prevent the consummation of the wedding, and to claim the bride for himself; in his first ruse, Sir Feeble is lured away from his marriage bed by a fictitious message that there is a meeting of Aldermen to discuss ‘some damnable Plot’ (III. i. 129). The other heroine, Julia, is already married to another elderly citizen, Sir Cautious Fulbank. Her young lover, Gayman, has ruined himself by showering her with gifts, has mortgaged his estate to Sir Cautious, and is staving off total ruin by sleeping with his landlady in return for loans and indefinitely protracted credit. Julia secretly supplies Gayman with money stolen from her husband, under the improbable pretence that it is being supplied by the Devil, and, unrecognized amidst all the demonic flummery, she gets Gayman into bed with her, though the encounter is apparently interrupted and unconsummated. Later, Gayman redeems his estate from Sir Cautious with money stolen from Sir Cautious himself, and uses the surplus to play dice with him, winning the right to a bedroom trick in which he impersonates Sir Cautious in Julia’s bed. In a far more formulaic and undeveloped plot, Sir Feeble’s lively daughter Diana has been contracted in marriage to Sir Cautious’s nephew, the foppish Bearjest, who regards the marriage as a mere profitable transaction. Diana really loves Bredwel, a gentleman and the brother of Sir Feeble’s new wife, to whom she was originally promised; but Bredwel has lost caste to the point of becoming Sir Cautious’s apprentice, and Sir Feeble is in no mood to link his daughter to such a man once Leticia has (as he thinks) been secured. Finally, Bearjest is tricked into marrying Lady Fulbank’s maid Pert, to whom he is contracted, and who is also a gentleperson fallen on hard times. Although there are downwardly mobile gentlefolk in some earlier Restoration comedies, the total social picture in this play is unusual in its balance and proportions, harking back to the Jacobean city comedies which Behn, more than anyone else, had helped to revive and reconstitute for the Restoration stage. Behn had always associated the bourgeois with age, impotence, miserliness and dreary unflamboyance. Here, grasping bourgeois senility rules the world. The gentry initially skulk in holes and corners, in garrets, nocturnal disguises, and menial



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employments, outmanoeuvred both financially and intellectually, their alien and marginal status inducing their values to be presented with still greater ambivalence than was usual for Behn. Gayman’s final enjoyment of Lady Fulbank has all the nastiness of Wilding’s treatment of Lady Galliard, but none of the domineering virility: it is accomplished by a backstairs financial deal. His earlier lavish gift-giving certainly has an ostentatious, gentlemanly open-handedness that the penny-pinching old men lack, but it is economically insane – probably the first occasion on which such a judgement is made in Behn. The way up for a socially ambitious young woman is to marry titled money. Once Belmour was apparently dead, Leticia accepted Sir Feeble not because she was coerced but because he seemed the best option. The play is highly eclectic,4 but Behn nevertheless again wrote an original and unique work, distinct from all her others in its texture and symbolic organization. Along with the changed constitution of the social world goes a corresponding change in that constant but multiform social mechanism, the exchange of women. The dice game for Lady Fulbank’s body is one of the most ruthless rituals of womanexchange in Behn, equalling the one at the beginning of The Forc’d Marriage but entirely without its military and aristocratic rationale. Indeed, The Luckey Chance resembles Sir Patient Fancy in its complete erasure of both military and aristocratic power. Here life is organized as a sequence of often paradoxical transactions, and the sword, ever-present in so many Behn plays, all but disappears. Gayman, indeed, has been forced to pawn his silver sword – his ‘Badg of Manhood’ (II. i. 78), his landlady calls it – and buy a cheap replacement, and the other hero, Belmour, has had to flee abroad after killing a man in a duel. His future depends on the question of who buys, and owns, his pardon. In both cases, the sword itself becomes subject to economic forces, and the chief spectacle of armed force is the ludicrous scene in which Sir Feeble is diverted from his marriage bed by the fictitious report of a plot, going to Sir Cautious’s house ‘arm’d Cap-a-pee with a broad wa[i]st Belt stuck round with Pistols, a Helmet, Scarfe, Buffcoat and half Pike’ (III. i. 265a–b). Significantly, however, the sign which persuades him to make the trip is that manual prop which has also taken over from the weapon in Sir Patient Fancy, the watch: Sir Cautious has left his watch behind at Sir Feeble’s wedding party, Belmour finds it, and pretends that it is a token to verify the summons to Sir Cautious’s house. The watch and the purse now have power that the weapon lacks. Indeed, the reason that Belmour is in such legal peril after his duel is its timing: he is ‘the first Transgressor since the Act against Duelling’ (I. i. 246).





The power of temporal measurement is shown in an almost obsessive concern with the day–night cycle. This once more illustrates Behn’s ability to create a new and distinctive texture in each play, for the day–night motif is unique to The Luckey Chance, yet all-pervasive in this single work. The play opens in ‘The Street at Break of Day’, outside Leticia’s house, and Belmour enters, apparently hailing the dawn: ‘Sure ‘tis the Day that gleams in yonder East’ (I. i. 1). Dawn, however, turns out to be an enemy, since lovers are ‘blest by Shade’ (I. i. 2), and Belmour is in any case on the run, having returned from his exile in disguise in order to see Leticia. What he hears is a nuptial serenade, revealing that she is to marry another and claiming that she outshines the dawn. The statement that associates Leticia with the day is also a statement that separates her from Belmour. Then Gayman enters, also fearful of being seen by daylight, since his poverty has made him pretend to Julia that he is out of town. The day belongs to those who can pay for it: money is thrown to the serenaders who compare Leticia to the dawn, and Belmour hopes that ‘a thousand Guyneys’ (I. i. 245) will buy a pardon and end the need for concealment. The fundamental imaginative conflict of the play – highly original, as is usual with Behn – is between a world governed by the primal cycles of day and night and one in which these are overridden by the cycles of economic exchange. The movement from day to night is not an exchange, but an alternation of polarities. The aim of the rich is to make day and night interchangeable, to subject this fundamental cycle of nature to the economic cycle. Having monopolized the day, with its roles and codes, they are mounting a takeover-bid for the night, with its secret and unsanctioned desires, and the play is a struggle to keep the night from their grasp. When Sir Feeble looks forward to his wedding night, he regards night as a recreational activity of the day-god: But when Bright Phœbus do’s retire To Thetis Bed to quench his fire, And do the thing we need not name, We Mortals by his influence do the same. (I. iii. 7–10) A little later, he invites his guests to ‘share to day my Pleasures and Delight’, adding that ‘they must be all mine own at Night’ (I. iii. 167–9). Belmour’s task is to keep cheating Sir Feeble of his wedding night, and in this he succeeds (for example, by means of the bogus story about an



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uprising). In frustrating the old man’s expectations, he drives him to use increasingly proprietorial language about night: ‘a man’s couzen’d of half his Night’ (I. iii. 167–9), and Leticia ‘shall not cheat me of another Night’ (V. i. 43). Gayman’s contest with Sir Cautious is also a struggle for control of the diurnal cycle. When his mistress Julia mysteriously supplies him with money stolen from Sir Cautious, her intermediary is, ostensibly, the Devil: ‘The Prince of Darkness does abhor the Light’ (V. ii. 50). The culmination of Julia’s scheme is a nocturnal ceremony in which Gayman is given valuable gifts and then received into her bed, without realizing who she is, and in expectation that she will be a crone buying the favours of a toy boy. The proceeds of this night-shift, he exults, will enable him to re-enter the lifestyle of day: And for the Price of the dull drudging Night, All Day I’ll purchase new and fresh Delight. (II. i. 185–6) In the counterbalancing trick, when Gayman wins the bedroom deception of Julia in his game of dice with Sir Cautious, what is explicitly wagered is a night: ‘three hundred pounds for a Night! . . . for a Night say you?’ (IV. i. 386–9). Of course, as is frequently stressed, the wager makes the female body a passive object of transaction; but, in the verbal formulation, what is staked is a night. If the dice game is one of the crudest exchanges of a woman in Behn’s plays, it also exposes in elemental form the numerical systems which now govern life. The contest is a matter of time and money, of the watch and the purse, the determining factor being the numbers on the dice that the combatants roll. The decisive game is a frenzied ritual of counting, as the numbers of the throws are called out, Gayman’s chances of winning become slimmer and slimmer, until he needs a double six off his final throw, and turns the tables by getting it. Yet the prize at the centre of this numerical ritual is, literally, a cipher. Sir Cautious stakes his wife Julia because she is ‘worth nothing’ (IV. i. 367): that is, as a married woman she has no value in any other marketplace. When she approaches and asks what they are playing for, Sir Feeble (who is watching) replies ‘Nothing, nothing’ (IV. i. 423).5 Indeed, in a play in which men count repeatedly and obsessively to express power, desire or poverty, women scarcely count at all beyond the number one. The one exception is the Landlady, who counts furiously in enumerating Gayman’s debts to her, but is easily persuaded by drink and sexual blandishments to relinquish





her calculations. Otherwise, there are only three occasions on which a number passes a woman’s lips, and one of these occurs when Julia is reading aloud a letter penned by Gayman. Later, she tells Sir Cautious that he would be more desirable ‘if forty Years were taken from your Age’ (V. ii. 95–6). The number here expresses immutable biological fact and difference: it is a form of measurement that the old men seek to erase by solidifying number into interchangeable currency, or rarefying it into pure, universal abstraction. But the counting of the body cannot be erased or silenced: ‘How now Rag, what’s a Clock?’, Gayman asks his famished servant; ‘My Belly can inform you better than my Tongue’, Rag replies (II. i. 12–13). Genuine exchangeability – the economic equation of things which are individually and essentially different – turns out to be an illusion. Money goes round in paradoxical and deceptive circles, returning to its origin, creating a sense of legerdemain, of something incomprehensibly being generated from ‘Nothing’. Gayman mortgages his estate to Sir Cautious in order to lavish gifts on Sir Cautious’s wife. Julia then robs her husband of money which he has received from Gayman, and returns it to him. Gayman then redeems his land from Sir Cautious with the money of which Sir Cautious has just been robbed, and further uses it to win the night with Julia. Leticia steals jewels from her husband and inadvertently returns them to him (thinking that he is Belmour). The money goes back and forth in a series of illusory increments, irrationally generating a surplus which in monetary terms is worth ‘Nothing’. It is notable, however, that numerically monetary transactions only take place by day. The night has not yet been economically mastered, and it is the scene of transactions whose point of reference is the body rather than the abacus: Leticia attempts to steal the gifts of jewels that she has earlier been wearing on her person; Sir Feeble inadvertently hands over to Belmour the pardon that he has bought, and which ensures his bodily survival; during the nocturnal demonic ritual in which Julia involves Gayman, a ring is placed on his finger, symbolizing the eternity of love; and, in the bedroom trick, Gayman claims Julia, who has become synonymous both with nothing and with night. The transactions are not necessarily benign, and they are often rooted in the commerce of the day, but they do keep confirming that monetary structure has not yet dominated the more amorphous and carnal commerce of the night. If Julia presents Gayman with moral symbols by night, she sends him money by day. The arrival of her gift, robbed from her husband and carried by the Devil, follows and mirrors another transaction in which a



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wife robs her husband in order to send money in confusing spirals. In the only scene of female counting in the play, Gayman’s old, smelly landlady duns him not only for arrears of rent but for the return of loans he has wheedled out of her, but is calmed down with sexual blandishments and with drink (bought, of course, with her own money), and agrees to give him ten further shillings and to pawn an heirloom. Meanwhile, the anvils of her blacksmith husband clatter deafeningly offstage, in the only image of economic productivity in the play. Catherine Gallagher describes this episode as an ironic alchemical ritual, in which base metals are transmuted through sexual transaction into metals of higher value: ‘Gayman describes [the Landlady] as an iron lady’ (Nobody’s Story, p. 41), and then strokes her into yielding metals of increasing value. But Gayman nowhere describes the Landlady as an iron lady, and the ritual is not one of elevating transformation but of sheer, non-cyclic consumption and waste: of gold and silver disappearing in the purchase of ale, candles and soap-suds, of wine being poured down the Landlady’s throat in order to persuade her to forget what she is owed, and dispense more money to subsidize Gayman’s consumption. While the offstage artisan forges more and more objects of solid iron, the product of his labours is simultaneously disappearing into the froth of washtubs and of ale. If the joke, and tragedy, of the main plots is that, in the endlessly circular flow of money, ‘Nothing’ is really exchanged, here we have an economic process of opposite kind but equal irrationality: the one-way conversion of solid metal into bubbles. This encounter immediately precedes the arrival of Bredwel, disguised as a devil, bringing Gayman money and inviting him to a nocturnal assignation with the unnamed benefactress. We, though not Gayman, know that the money is from Julia and that it has been stolen from Sir Cautious, so the parallel with the Landlady’s defalcations from her husband is obvious, though Julia’s sense of her status and reputation prohibits her from the Landlady’s direct sexual commerce: ‘I wou’d not have him think it comes from me, for all the World’ (I. ii. 103–4). Accordingly, she disguises her theft and infidelity as what many would have thought them to be in earnest: intercourse with the Devil.6 Like many characters in Restoration drama, she feels such a conflict between her social role and her private desires that she has to split herself in two, using the popular plot of the ‘invisible Mistress’ (IV. i. 158)7 in order to appear to Gayman in two separate guises, and thereby trying to create an anonymous, sexual self that is independent of her public identity. For Gayman, however, women only have sexual selves, and he crudely





assumes that, since the Unknown dare not show herself, she must (like the Landlady) be ugly: she cannot wish to protect her honour, but only to conceal her repulsiveness. Later, still not realizing what has happened, Gayman describes to Julia his night with the ‘rivell’d, lean, and rough’ hag (IV. i. 83–4), causing her such mortification that she half wishes that she had been detected: ‘Now tho I know that nothing is more distant than I from such a Monster – yet this angers me’ (IV. i. 86–7; italics added). The word nothing here is one of several anticipations of the nothing that Julia is to become; for, like Rochester’s poem ‘Upon Nothing’, the play constantly creates paradoxes from the way in which its mere status as a noun elevates nothing to conceptual equivalence with things. Throughout the play, nothing is a constant term of mental comparison and exchange. Economic insignificance, unsurprisingly, brings proximity to nothing: in his garret, Gayman has ‘nothing left to save his Eyes from the Light, but my Land-ladies Blew Apron’ (I. ii. 88–9; italics added), and his rusty sword ‘will sell for nothing but old Iron’ (II. i. 81–2; italics added). The decayed gentleman is sinking to the state of the Popish Plot witnesses, who ‘got nothing’ (I. iii. 76; italics added) by their testimony. Julia’s ‘nothing is more distant than I’ is obviously quite different: a defiant, if nervous, assertion of quality and value. Yet the paradoxical existence which language bestows upon nothingness is already edging her towards that final, humiliating erasure of character: she does not say that nothing is more distant from her but that nothing is more distant than her; she uses nothing as a criterion with which to define the self. In her later shame and disillusionment after discovering the bedroom deception, she demands of Gayman: ‘Cou’d nothing but my Fame reward your Passion?’ (V. ii. 232; italics added). The answer is yes: he was rewarded not with her fame but with nothing, with its confirmation of her numerical and economic insignificance. One feature of Julia’s first, nocturnal and pseudo-demonic, encounter with Gayman is that it attempts to create an alternative economy. Once he has parted from his apparently demonic guide, Bredwel, he is led into Julia’s apartment, where he is made to participate in a pastoral masque. The pastoral in Behn’s plays always represents the impossible dream of a world prior to military and monetary economies, and nowhere more elaborately than here. Love is a ‘useful Passion’ (III. i. 198), bringing out the best in all levels of society and restraining alike the excessive hoarding of the miser and the excessive consumption of the drunkard and the glutton. Then, in the closest approximation to a night-time exchange of money, Gayman is presented with gold. The



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gold, however, belongs to a different symbolic order from that of money. He is presented with a number of objects and asked to swear upon them because they imply a moral structure which he must replicate. He must swear ‘by the Gold that’s try’d / For Love all Dangers to abide’ (III. i. 236–7). Gold is significant not because it has been coined but because it has been tried in the fire. He must swear on a ring: ‘By the Figure which is round, / Your Passion [will be] constant and profound’ (III. i. 230–1). Numerically, ‘the Figure which is round’ is zero. Nonnumerically, its endlessness represents the opposite of zero: infinity. ‘By the Adamantine Stone’ on the ring, Gayman must swear ‘To be fix’t to one alone’ (III. i. 232–3): to renounce the world of proliferating number that he later embraces in the dice game. Gallagher argues that Julia here relies on the nature of gold ‘as a universal equivalent for desire, universal and anonymous precisely because it does not resemble what it stands for and can thus stand for anything’ (Nobody’s Story, p. 43). But Julia is trying with some explicitness and detail to create a resemblance between gold and that which it symbolizes. As always, however, the pre-economic pastoral is a mirage, and the encounter is cut short by the arrival of that absurd regressor from the marketplace to the camp, Sir Feeble, armed to the teeth, ready to perform another numerical act of exchange: the return to Sir Cautious of his watch. The pastoral gift-ritual and the return of the watch are among four transactions that take place on Sir Feeble’s wedding night: the other two are Sir Feeble’s inadvertent handover of Belmour’s pardon to Belmour himself (who has persuaded Sir Feeble that he is his nephew Francis), and the eloping Leticia’s inadvertent return to her husband (Sir Feeble) of the jewels she is stealing for her lover (Belmour); for, in the dark, she mistakes Sir Feeble for Belmour. None of the transactions is quite monetary, though their origins are in the commerce of the day (Sir Feeble has tried to buy a kiss from Leticia with the jewels), and they share the circular nature of monetary flow: the pardon, the watch, and the jewels all return to their proper owner. More elaborately, Julia’s benefaction to Gayman returns to its source: he plans to use the money given by the imagined crone to lavish on her, and does indeed give the ring (back) to her; but he also uses the money which she gives to win the night with her. She attempts to divert the economic current, but is simply dissolved within it. By contrast, the transference of the five-hundred-pound pardon restores to Belmour the control of his bodily destiny. Five hundred pounds is also the sum which will redeem Gayman’s estate, which Julia steals from Sir Cautious,8 and which Leticia is worth per annum. Unlike





Rover II, where everything becomes signified by one hundred thousand, The Luckey Chance does not collapse everything into a single, iterated number, but it collapses much. Belmour may emerge with greater economic control of his life than Julia, but he too must live by numbers. As Gallagher has already partially shown, Behn shows the specific and unlike being simplified to general, interchangeable ciphers; like Adorno, she associates the rise of abstraction and numerical classification with the refusal ‘to comprehend the given as such’.9 Belmour has been condemned for the mere act of killing, with no enquiry to its specific circumstances; for the laws ‘put no Difference’ (I. i. 5) between drunken murder and killing in self-defence. Here, depending on its owner, the pardon is either a text which guarantees mercy or one which ensures execution. The power of pardon, one of the supreme and most god-like attributes of kingship, has become like a note of credit, which can be exchanged by different owners for different commodities. The intervention of money disrupts a specific natural equilibrium: justified mercy for a justified slaying. As with the attempt to colonize the night, it shows the erasure of a natural cycle by an economic cycle. As always, Behn writes out of intellectual conviction, but here she also writes out of economic befuddlement: she cannot understand surplus value. She puts her confusion to good artistic use, however, creating aesthetically intricate paradoxes out of the incomprehensibility of economic transactions. The products of the blacksmith’s anvil disappear in froth. Elsewhere, money goes round and round in confusing and unproductive circles, with gains emerging irrationally, through fraud and sleight of hand. The one occasion on which something new and extra emerges from the cycle of exchange is Gayman’s night with Julia: a night which only happens because Julia counts as ‘Nothing’. The surplus here is the ‘Excess of Love’ (V. ii. 242) which makes it clear that Gayman is not Sir Cautious, and which also makes it clear why men are economically different from women: fundamentally, the primal economic act is the spending of the male; it has been superseded by the monetary power of the old and impotent, but it remains the archetypal model which distinguishes the economic power of men and women. What is most subject to the monetary economy, however, is identity itself. Economic vulnerability brings insecurity of self-representation. Gayman borrows money from Sir Cautious under the pseudonym of ‘Wastall’, and when Bearjest and his crony Noyse describe to Sir Cautious the shifts to which poverty drives ‘Wastall’, they list a proliferation of mendicant disguises: ‘a lame Souldier with a wooden Leg’ (IV. i. 185), a blind switch-seller, a gipsy fortune-teller. Belmour skulks



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at night, assuming the day-disguise of Sir Feeble’s nephew, and finally frightening Sir Feeble into penitence by posing as his own ghost (a pose that Gayman has also employed). Bredwel disguises himself as the Devil and a ghost, and also controls the ambiguous courtship conversation in which he seems to be speaking for Bearjest but is in fact speaking for himself. Gayman impersonates Sir Cautious in Julia’s bed, and during an elopement attempt Leticia mistakes Sir Feeble for Belmour. The maid Pert traps Bearjest into marriage by impersonating Diana. The road of the disempowered to recovery is thus regularly achieved through theft of the roles of the wealthy, while disempowerment itself is expressed in simple loss of the daylight self. The exception is provided by Julia, economically and socially secure, but deriving her security from her husband’s monetary power rather than her own; she too, therefore, cultivates a new night-time identity, hoping to liberate herself by pursuing that perpetually tantalizing mirage of the primitive pastoral economy. But that pursuit leads, with direct and baleful logic, to her next night-time identity, as ‘Nothing’. Economic forces are all-pervasive: even the traditional spiritual system of gods and devils is (in another hint of Behn’s materialism) a disguise for monetary transaction. As always, there are contradictions in the very process of female self-representation, since all the signs – the sword, the coin, the watch – express the martial, commercial, or intellectual systems created by men. While the Landlady is dissipating coins, apostle spoons, and caudle cups on Belmour, her husband is – more literally than anywhere else in Behn – forging new forms. We do not know how long the initial run of The Luckey Chance was, or how frequently it was revived. The next known performance after the première was in July 1718, when the play was described as ‘Not Acted these Twenty Years’.10 Certainly, the surviving evidence does not support the frequent claim that it was a roaring success. Behn’s defensive preface suggests a mixed reception: she was irked by what was obviously considerable criticism of the play’s morality, but was certainly not putting a brave face on total failure. Wits and poets, she claims, rail ‘at everything they find with pain successful’ (ll. 5–6). A particular grievance is that she was criticized for bawdiness while the men got away with it, and Jane Spencer regards the criticism as unfair ‘considering the standards applied to male-authored plays’.11 Yet new sex comedies by men were receiving far more unequivocally hostile receptions. The Luckey Chance was one of three sex comedies to be premièred in 1686–88, the other two being Sedley’s Bellamira (May 1687) and Durfey’s A Fool’s Preferment (March/ April 1688), both of which were condemned for obscenity; in the preface





to each the aggrieved author complained that much dirtier plays had been cheered to the rafters. Sex comedy had already peaked. It was not killed off until Jeremy Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), but in the twelve years between The Luckey Chance and Collier’s polemic only six sex comedies clearly succeeded, and in them the sex was generally either light-hearted or peripheral. I do not wish to underestimate the difficulties under which Behn laboured, but the fact is that none of the failures which she attributed to her sex need be explained in this way. The days of the comedy to which she was accustomed were passing. What was now succeeding was farce, and to this she next turned – successfully.

The Emperor of the Moon After the probably mixed reception of The Luckey Chance, Behn made a very different sort of appeal to audience favour, completing a work which she had begun before Charles II’s death in 1685: The Emperor of the Moon (March 1687), a musical farce with some elaborate scenic effects. This was derived from Arlecchino, imperatore nella luna, a farsa by Nolant de Fatouville which had been performed in 1684 by the Italian comedians in Paris (and which, via Goldoni, was to be the ultimate source of Haydn’s opera Il Mondo della luna). Much of the play is devoted to the mock-heroic rivalry of Harliquin (played by Jevon) and Scaramouch (Leigh) for the hand of Mopsophil, played by the bulky and unattractive Katherine Corey, and resolved in Harliquin’s favour by a pseudo-chivalric joust: a caricature of the militaristic rituals with which women had been gained in Behn’s earliest plays. The more elevated plot concerns a typical Behn situation: the thwarting of an elderly patriarch, Doctor Baliardo (Underhill), who denies his daughter and niece any freedom of choice or even movement, allowing them to travel no further than the garden, while – with the aid of his huge telescope – his imagination roams freely over the moon, whose literature, geography and politics are more important and real to him than those of the earth. The heroines’ two suitors persuade Baliardo that they are Iredonozar, Emperor of the Moon, and the Prince of Thunderland, and he easily consents to marry his charges to these distinguished planetary emissaries. Equally easily, he decides to burn his books and renounce his folly once the deception is revealed. After The Rover, The Emperor of the Moon was Behn’s most successful work, being frequently performed until 1750. Its charm lay not only in



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The Scene in the Front draws off, and shews the Hill of Parnassus; a noble large Walk of Trees leading to it, with eight or ten NEGROES upon Pedestals, rang’d on each side of the Walks. Next KEPLAIR and GALLILEUS descend on each side, opposite to each other, in Chariots, with Perspectives in their Hands, as viewing the Machine of the Zodiack. Soft Musick plays still. . . . Next the ZODIACK descends, a Symphony playing all the while; when it is landed, it delivers the twelve Signs: Then the Song, the Persons of the Zodiack being the Singers. After which, the Negroes Dance and mingle in the Chorus. (455a–e, 479a–c) The Emperor of the Moon was nothing like a full-scale opera, but it was the best the company could do at the time, in the wake of the Albion and Albanius disaster, and was part of a recovery plan of attracting audiences with affordable mini-spectaculars.12 The play must not be overinterpreted. In Rover II and The Feign’d Curtizans farce is an integral part of a more elaborate whole, but here it is so dominant that there is little with which it can interact: although Behn imports formulae from her earlier works and preserves their customary connotations, they are not developed or elaborated. As in The Rover, the setting is Naples: a territory under an occupying power, like the settings of her more substantial late works, The Widdow Ranter and the novella Oroonoko. Here, however, the theme of occupation is little more than the repetition of a habitual gesture. The lovers of the (Italian) heroines are nephews of the viceroy, and do at first behave with brusquely oppressive jealousy. By gaining their ladies in the guise of beings from other worlds, they amplify an alienness which they possess in truth, and which Behn repeatedly in some form attributes to the male. One can hardly, however, claim that the point is forced home: Behn built a farce around the patterns that shaped her more serious plays, but their significance diminishes in proportion to the lightness of the work. Another familiar, and perhaps slightly more developed, element occurs in the portrayal of the elderly patriarch Doctor Baliardo, another late Behn male whose authority is associated with measurement. When he first enters, he has ‘all manner of Mathematical Instruments, hanging at his Girdle’ (I. ii. 0a–b), is accompanied by ‘SCARAMOUCH bearing a Telescope twenty (or more) Foot long’(I. ii. 0b), and is obsessed with enumer-



its (slight) plot, but also in its spectacle and its music (now largely lost). At the descent of the Emperor and his entourage, for example,


ation, classification and cartography (he is promised a map of the moon and even of Terra incognita). He never shows, however, any interest in symbols, and one feature of the final musical ensemble is that it reinstates the function of the sign: Baliardo is persuaded that the Emperor must talk to him through an interpreter, and the various astral signs sing (sometimes with great sexual frankness) about the ways in which they symbolize aspects of human sexuality: The wanton Aries first descends, To show the Vigor and the Play, Beginning Love, beginning Love attends. (III. i. 511–13) Still franker is the opening song, which laments that women once enjoyed the male right to promiscuity: Born free as Man to Love and Range, Till Nobler Nature did to Custom change. (I. i. 3–4) Doctor Baliardo guards the heroines with an obsessive folly equal to that with which he observes the moon, and the two follies are linked, in that his lunar philosophy involves denial of human, and especially feminine sexuality. ‘I am of that opinion, Sir, Man was not made for Woman’ (I. ii. 45). His chief enthusiasm is for intercourse between human beings and elemental spirits (he believes that the material bodies of the two celestial bridegrooms will be mere disguise), and in mapping the moon he is translating into the male discourse of spatial measurement something that was traditionally interpreted as a symbol of the feminine. One of the functions of the climactic ensemble is to permit the celestial to symbolize the carnal instead of erasing it. In their rivalry for the corporeally gross Mopsophil, Scaramouch and Harliquin introduce a counterbalancing emphasis on crude bodily process. Posing as an apothecary, for example, Harliquin talks alchemical jargon, emphasizing the sexual, procreative, and excremental potential of the alchemists’ language. He even invents a blacksmith who has grown rich through gaining the power to excrete iron, which he then fashions in his forge. The figure recalls Gregory Grime, the blacksmith who constituted the main economic creator in The Luckey Chance, and the satiric image of excrement being forged into wealth shows a flash of Behn’s uncomprehending impatience with the bourgeois



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economy. It is an isolated jibe, hardly central to the whole play, as Grime perhaps was, but there is much satiric stress on social mobility, including a scene (inspired by the source) in which Harliquin bewilders a toll official by shape-shifting between a gentleman farmer driving a coach and a baker driving a cart. Again, the point – such as it is – is lightly developed. The imaginary lunar world into which Baliardo projects himself is never more than an exact but unreal replica of the world he is repudiating, yet that world is itself being shadowed by another, in which the familiar forms of the past are retained, but contain new inhabitants: in which the rituals of male combat are performed by Harliquin and Scaramouch.




9

Aphra Behn died on 16 April 1689, after witnessing the collapse of the régime to which she had given such sustained support. Her Tory plays are, as is widely recognized, ambivalent. Starting with an ode on the death of Charles II, however, she embarked on a sequence of political poems that were unqualified in their support for a régime whose apparent victory over its opponents turned out to be short-lived and unstable. Little more than three years after his succession, James II was deposed. His confrontational approach to extending the powers of the crown, and to the advancement of his fellow-Catholics, alienated a critical number of his natural supporters, and the birth of a male heir, raising the prospect of a perpetual catholic dynasty, prompted seven members of the nobility to invite William of Orange (the husband of James’s eldest child, Mary) to intervene to protect the religion, liberty, and property of the nation. William invaded on that auspicious day for the defeat of popery, 5 November; rendered powerless by mass defections from his own forces, James fled to France the following month. A sense of impending disaster infuses Behn’s late masterpiece, the novella Oroonoko, about an African prince sold into slavery, but drama was by now at the margins of Behn’s activity. At her death, however, she did leave two unperformed plays, both of which received unsuccessful premières during William’s reign.

The Younger Brother Behn’s career as a comedy writer had a postlude that was unsatisfactory in almost all senses. In February 1696 a further Behn comedy, The Younger Brother, was brought to the stage by Charles Gildon, a minor writer and member of a free-thinking circle who had befriended Behn 174



‘Tho she is now no more’1

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towards the end of her life. Janet Todd suggests that the staging of The Younger Brother was prompted by the success of Southerne’s Oroonoko, staged in November 1695. This explanation is no doubt substantially true, but there were additional factors at work. The slump in the demand for new plays that had blighted Behn’s last years eased after the Revolution, though realistic sex comedy was no longer in fashion: the most successful new sex comedies of the early nineties, Southerne’s Sir Anthony Love (1690) and Congreve’s The Old Batchelour (1693), are fairly light and festive. The demand for new plays, however, really rocketed after April 1695, when London again had two theatre companies, engaged in hostile, cut-throat competition. The new manager of the United Company, Christopher Rich, had treated its personnel with such cheese-paring oppressiveness that a group of senior actors, led by Thomas Betterton, had formed a breakaway company, performing in the old Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre, which the Duke’s Company had vacated in 1672 (for Rich retained control both of Dorset Garden and the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, the former theatre of the King’s Company). After this both companies lived dangerously, their existence sometimes saved, or threatened, by the fortunes of a single play, and the demand for novelty soared, especially in Rich’s initially less successful venture. Whereas nine new plays had been mounted in the 1692–93 season, and seven in 1693–94, there were twenty-six in 1695–96: nine by the actors’ company, seventeen by Rich’s. Several unperformed older plays received their first and only outing in this season, and the change in demand coincided with, or facilitated, the arrival of a new generation of woman playwrights. No new woman’s play had been staged since Behn’s The Widdow Ranter. Six, by four different writers, appeared in this one season. One was Catherine Trotter’s Agnes de Castro (December 1695), taking (like Southerne’s Oroonoko) both its plot and title from a Behn novel. No wonder conditions seemed right for a Behn première. There are doubts about the authenticity of some of the novels posthumously published as Behn’s,2 but Behn herself alludes to The Younger Brother in Oroonoko, where she claims that she celebrated the Surinamese land-owner George Martin ‘in a Character of my New Comedy’ (p. 111); the hero of The Younger Brother is George Marteen. But is the play unadulterated Behn? In the Dedication Gildon confesses to adjusting the politics of the play by rewriting the second scene of act one, inserting satire of rakery and ‘removing that old bustle about Whigg and Tory’ (ll. 69–70) – highly relevant in the later years of James II, but scarcely to the point in 1696. Some features of the play seem unlike Behn



‘Tho she is now no more’


(though, of course, she might simply have changed her style again). She had, for example, never crudely mocked amorous old women (Petronella in Rover II is treated with some understanding), but here the ante-diluvian Lady Youthly is ridiculed not only for amorousness, but for infirmity and near-blindness. One plot features a couple, Olivia and Welborn, who fall in love in defiance of the arranged marriages to which each has been committed, but finally discover that each is the other’s designated partner. This is quite a common device for suggesting that sexual desire is fully in harmony with social authority, but such harmony was not normally a Behn theme, and her previous use of the device, in The Feign’d Curtizans, had been ironically skewed. The Younger Brother is both coarser and tidier than other Behn plays. It also lacks their elaborate texture of metaphor and symbol. One feature which it shares with The Luckey Chance, however, is its horror of the gentleman’s descent into the abyss of trade. Like Bredwel in the earlier play, George has been indentured as an apprentice, instead of being ‘train’d up to the Exercise of Arms’ like younger brothers in other countries (I. i. 158). Yet more characteristic of late Behn is the sympathetic interest in the amoral female manipulator, an interest already displayed in her novels The Fair Jilt, The History of the Nun, and Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister. Here, the heroine Mirtilla has betrayed George Marteen and married the wealthy, oafish Sir Morgan Blunder. She sleeps with George’s friend, Prince Frederick, attracted mainly by his title, but is really attracted to the youth Endimion, actually George’s sister Olivia in disguise. George’s attempts to expose Mirtilla to Frederick are at first comically frustrated, and when she is finally caught she remains, from a man’s point of view, unpunished. Whether she is so from a woman’s is more debatable. Another feature which the play shares with earlier Behn works is its intertextuality. Although Behn stole liberally and furtively from her predecessors, we have seen that she also positioned herself in relation to her male contemporaries – especially Dryden – by open and significant allusion. Here, there are echoes of two more Dryden plays. When George rebels against the mercantile role prescribed by his father, he resolves on a life of gentlemanly pleasure: ‘I’le Use the Sprightly Runnings of my Life, and not hope distant Pleasures from its dregs’ (I. i. 122–3). The image is of drawing wine from a barrel,3 and it transforms a famous expression of pessimism in Dryden’s heroic play AurengZebe (1675), in which the hero (another younger brother with a tyrannic father) describes life as a sequence of endlessly deceived hopes, of bad debts never repaid, in which men nevertheless



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For Aureng-Zebe, life itself is a cycle of bad debts. George, more literally, applies Aureng-Zebe’s vision to the merchant’s life, and resolves triumphantly to ‘Use’ his youth in another social arena, of gentlemanly style. The problem here is not life itself; it is the class in which that life is lived. This allusion, however, is a decorative flourish. More central is an exchange when George is attempting to disillusion Frederick about Mirtilla. To Frederick’s ‘I speak of my Mirtilla’, George replies: ‘Why so do I – of yours, of mine, or any man’s Mirtilla’ (IV. i. 168–9). The immediate precedent for this is a moment in Dryden’s play about Antony and Cleopatra, All for Love (1677), in which Antony’s second-in-command, Ventidius, tries to persuade him that Cleopatra (here a slandered innocent) is unfaithful: Your Cleopatra; Dollabella’s Cleopatra: Every Man’s Cleopatra.5 This in turn reworks an incident from Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, in which the villain tries to persuade the hero that his loved one is false: ‘Leonato’s Hero, your Hero, every man’s Hero’ ( III. ii. 88–9).6 In both earlier instances, the accusations are false yet, temporarily, persuasive. Here, George is desperately and vainly trying to get Frederick to see the truth. What is false is not the charge of infidelity, but the word that climaxes each of the three accusations: ‘Man’s’. Mirtilla is her own agent: she is not defined by her dependence on men. This double allusion – a reworking of a Restoration reworking of Shakespeare – is replicated in the design of the whole play. Primarily, it reacts to Wycherley’s last comedy, The Plain-Dealer (1676), which in turn conducts a dialogue with a yet earlier play, Twelfth Night. In Shakespeare’s play Viola, disguised as a youth, helps Orsino’s courtship of Olivia, despite her own love for him. Olivia falls in love with the disguised Viola, but mistakenly marries her twin brother, and Orsino eventually recognizes Viola’s true sex and reciprocates her love. Wycherley’s play is a worldly reconstitution of Shakespeare’s romance. Its hero, Manly, returns from war to find that his idealized Olivia has stolen his money and (like Mirtilla) married another. He is followed by the loyal Fidelia, disguised as a boy, and despite her own love for Manly she aids



from the dregs of Life, think to receive What the first sprightly running could not give.4


his continuing pursuit of Olivia, who is sufficiently deceived by her disguise to fall in love with her. Fidelia even assists Manly to impersonate her in order to sleep with Olivia in a bedroom trick, and the sexual humiliation of Olivia is followed by the recovery of Manly’s property, his realization of Fidelia’s true sex, and his acceptance of her love. Wycherley gives the name ‘Manly’ to his protagonist not because he is celebrating masculinity but because he is treating it as a problematic and ambiguous category. Nevertheless, the play encourages no discomfort about the rape of Olivia, or about the implied equation between possession of her body and repossession of Manly’s wealth. Behn provides a feminist reworking of Wycherley’s manly plot. Mirtilla is patently modelled on Wycherley’s Olivia and, like her predecessor, falls in love with an exemplary heroine in male disguise: George’s sister, who dresses as a man in order to escape the ‘Prostitution’ (I. ii. 42) of an arranged marriage, and who serves Mirtilla as a page. Yet she is far more ambiguous than Wycherley’s villainess, for she has caused George neither financial nor emotional ruin (he quickly falls for another woman), and she comically thwarts George’s attempts to unmask her, until he himself is lost in admiration for her skill: ‘thou hast jilted him so handsomly, thou’st vanquish’d all my Rage’ (V. ii. 144–5). Such persistently thwarted detection inevitably creates sympathy for the triumphant deceiver, and it is very different from the exposure and humiliation of Wycherley’s Olivia. Whereas Willmore in The Rover had presented a woman’s-eye view of the insouciant male rake, Mirtilla translates the insouciant rake into a woman. How different the rake’s conduct looks, at least to men, when it is displayed by the wrong sex. And how different the rake’s irresponsibility with language. Like Willmore, Mirtilla is constantly portrayed as a linguistic transgressor, as a perjurer, but the charges against her carry more social force and consensus than those of Angellica against Willmore: Angellica’s is a lone and marginal voice, outside the social conventions of language, but Mirtilla is judged by the sex that creates those conventions, and their charges therefore carry more plausibility, though not more real weight. Her rash intrusion into male territory is emphasized by a small, subtle detail. Although plainly modelled on Wycherley’s Olivia, Mirtilla is – obviously – not called Olivia. That name is reserved for the Fidelia-like heroine, the woman who spends the play in male disguise and excites Mirtilla’s love. That Behn should give the name of Wycherley’s villainess to her own heroine clearly implies a challenge to Wycherley’s categories, and it also implies a parallel between Mirtilla and the pseudo-man who has stolen her name: the woman with



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the name of Wycherley’s villainess assumes male clothes; the woman with her character assumes male mores. Indeed, when Olivia resumes female dress, the clothes she puts on are Mirtilla’s. If social convention attaches more opprobrium to Mirtilla’s perjury than to Willmore’s, she does not – at any rate from a male viewpoint – experience any retribution. Frederick does eventually see Mirtilla’s nature, but we do not witness the scornful rejection which the allusions to Wycherley make us expect. On the contrary, when the various united couples enter at the beginning of the final scene, the first in line is ‘PRINCE FREDERICK, leading MIRTILLA’ (V. ii. 241a). He then proceeds to agree with Sir Morgan an arrangement whereby he can periodically cuckold him. If this is not the expected rejection, however, it is still humiliation on a grand scale. The lover who had earlier proclaimed himself Mirtilla’s ‘Slave’(III. I. 18) is now in total control, leading her by the hand, and negotiating over her favours with her husband – her other male owner – as the proprietor males had negotiated over the two Julias in The False Count and The Luckey Chance. The virago’s reign is over and, as so often, the language of courtly love cedes to that of ownership. As at the end of The Young King, the Amazonian protagonist becomes subject to the timeless rituals of woman-exchange. We do not know how Twelfth Night was interpreted in the late seventeenth century, or indeed how widely it was known. It was available only in the Folio, and there is no record of a performance after 1669, when Pepys called it ‘one of the weakest plays that ever I saw on the stage’.7 Wycherley perhaps saw himself as replacing Arcadian romance with Hobbesian realism. Behn shares Wycherley’s Hobbesian realism, but she gives it a feminist slant, and in the process conducts her own dialogue with Twelfth Night, for she includes an allusion to Shakespeare that has no precedent in Wycherley. In addition to recreating Wycherley’s recreations of Shakespeare’s Viola and Olivia, Behn combines elements of both Shakespeare heroines in a third character, Teresia, who parallels Viola in her (brief) assumption of male disguise, and who finally marries George. She also, however, takes over one of the best speeches of Shakespeare’s Olivia. When Viola first approaches her on Orsino’s behalf, urging her in poetic cliché not to die without leaving the world a ‘copy’ of her graces, Olivia responds by literalizing Viola’s textual metaphor, reducing the icon of the sonneteer to a mere passive list of uncommunicating generalities: I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried and every particle and utensil labelled to my will, as, item, two lips,




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indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth.8

Faith my Inventory is but small – Let me see – First, one Pretty well made Machin[e], call’d a Body, of a very good Motion, fit for several uses – one Pretty Conceited Head-Peice, that will fit any bodies Coxcomb, . . . Item, one Tongue that will prattle Love. (II. i. 50–7) The woman is no longer a text but a machine. Like Wycherley, Behn reinterprets archaic romance through the medium of mid-seventeenthcentury materialism, but the materialism is here harnessed to the cause of assertive female self-definition; although she sees her assets as ‘Commodities’ (II. i. 58), Teresia is spiritedly determined to market them herself. It is now the man who is the text (and, likewise, a commodity): when Teresia first starts her pursuit of George, at a masked ball, he has a sign on his back declaring him ‘To be Lett Ready Furnish’d’ (III. i. 38). The context is a masquerade, but the play as a whole is a masquerade, with women assuming both the clothes and the more internalized roles that social prescription reserves for men. Normality is resumed, oppressively in Mirtilla’s case, but not before it has been shown to be merely another form of fancy dress. The Younger Brother was staged by Rich’s company. The actors who had created Behn’s major roles were either dead, retired, or with the rival company, but the play was quite strongly cast. Mirtilla was played by Frances Maria Knight, the company’s counterpart to Barry (who had defected with Betterton), and Olivia was played by Susanna Verbruggen (née Percivall, and formerly Mountfort), who was one of the leading comediennes of the decade. Frederick and George were played by the company’s two leading men, John Verbruggen (Susanna’s second husband)9 and George Powell, though Verbruggen for some reason had to read his part. Yet tastes were changing. The only real comic successes of the season were Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift, an emotive rakereformed play, and Peter Motteux’s lightweight romance Love’s a Jest, and it is not surprising that The Younger Brother was among the failures. Such sex-comedies as were still succeeding lacked the harshness of Behn’s late work, and Mirtilla was too bold an innovation. Seven years after her death, Behn was already speaking from a vanished age.



Teresia too catalogues herself, but in a confident and active affirmation of her intelligence and charm.


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By 1688, Aphra Behn knew that she had not long to live,10 and spent her last year revisiting her past. Her best novellas, Oroonoko and The Fair Jilt, are derived from the experiences of her twenties; the hero of The Younger Brother is, as she reveals in Oroonoko, a tribute to an early friend; and The Widdow Ranter; or, The History of Bacon in Virginia has clear imaginative links with Oroonoko in its portrayal of corruption and rebellion in an English colony whose governor is absent. Perhaps because of the uncertain fortunes of new comedies, Behn also revisited and transformed the tragicomic genre of her earliest plays, while retaining the overriding preoccupation of her late work: the portrayal of a world where the gentry is losing its grip. The play also continues her lifelong interest in the occupied territory as a site for examining and symbolizing the place of women in a patriarchal world. The rebellion of the settler Nathaniel Bacon in Virginia took place in 1676. Bacon was a university-educated gentleman from Suffolk who led an unauthorized campaign against the Indians, because the government were failing to protect the settlers, and were indeed selling arms to the natives. The rebels refused the orders of the governor, Sir William Berkeley, to disband, and were attacked. Their resistance collapsed when Bacon died of a fever, and – in reality though not in Behn’s version – his followers were ruthlessly punished. Bacon was thus not a rebel in the sense that Monmouth was; nevertheless, it was a remarkable departure for Behn to give such centrality to a heroic malcontent, though she does diminish his subversiveness by removing his original opponent, the governor, from her play. In her version, the new governor has not yet arrived: Bacon challenges a power vacuum, not established government. The play depicts three conflicting areas of male authority. In the absence of the governor, the ruling council of Virginia is run by wellborn but calculatingly pragmatic gentlemen and coarse, drunken, illiterate upstarts, boasting of fictitious genealogies back home. The settlers are menaced by the native Americans, anxious to recover their lost ancestral territory. Their warrior culture recalls those portrayed in Behn’s earliest plays, though the militaristic world is now placed side by side with a trading society from which military values are disappearing. The two cultures are, indeed, both opposed and deeply linked, for the English traders have sold to the Indians the weapons with which they are now attacked. At odds with both groups is Bacon (Joseph Williams), a heroic dreamer who longs to equal the great conquerors and city-



The Widdow Ranter


builders of antiquity, but is in reality a mere dispossessed English gentleman, since his inherited American estate has been recaptured by the Indians. Though he wars against the Indians, he is in some ways closer to their culture than his own: he has a long-standing heroic friendship with the Indian king, Cavarnio, but this is complicated both by the territorial dispute and by his (reciprocated) love for the queen, and ultimately he kills both his friend and his loved one in battle. As so often in this play, affinity and conflict, interest and principle, prove deeply intertwined. The Indian Queen, Semernia (played by the rising star Anne Bracegirdle), is a partial throwback to Behn’s earliest heroines, given (like Erminia in The Forc’d Marriage) as an unwilling bride to a warrior-hero, and (like Cleomena in The Young King) experimenting with an Amazonian role in battle, to the point of fighting the man she loves in male disguise, as Cleomena had done. Here, however, the result is fatal. The contrasting monetary culture of the settlers produces a contrasting Amazonian figure in the Widow Ranter, a hard-drinking, pipe-smoking, but attractive woman (Betty Currer), who had been bought as an indentured servant (a virtual slave), and had been married and quickly widowed by her owner, who left her the enormous sum of £50,000. She gains the affections of Bacon’s ally, Dareing (inappropriately played by the middle-aged and misshapen Samuel Sandford), by disguising herself as a youth (like Semernia) and (unlike Semernia) defeating him at swordplay (though he has seen through her disguise and seems to be complying with the joke). She cannot, however, hold her own in the wilder conflict of battle and is captured immediately after the death of Semernia, and in significant juxtaposition to it. Nevertheless, if Ranter reverts to vulnerability on the battlefield, and if the monetary economy which produced her at first relegates her to commodification and nearservitude, it gives her a sequence of roles and possibilities that is denied to Semernia: Ranter spends her griefless widowhood in festive liberty; the narrower imperatives of Semernia’s society force her, self-destructively, to attempt to avenge the husband she did not love upon the man she does. Yet another widowhood plot features the fortune-hunting of the newly arrived Hazard (Verbruggen), the man who defeats Ranter in battle. He is a younger brother who has ruined himself by gaming, has a genteel contempt for work, but seeks to make his fortune by courting Mrs Surelove (Knight): a married woman, like Semernia, and one who is also – as is known in advance – soon to become a widow. Widow-



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hood for the European women is a condition of economic power rather than (as it is for Semernia) passive moral paralysis. Nevertheless, all the women are ultimately distributed via the network of military rivalry and brotherhood, and it is while the women are the captives or protegées of Bacon that the various sexual conflicts are sorted out. Surelove is captured, as is her friend Chrisante. Capture places Chrisante at the mercy of Dareing, the man who eventually marries Ranter, but who was initially in love with her. He treats both her and his preferred rival honourably, however, and both are rescued by Hazard, who in the process confirms the martial talents of the male by defeating Ranter. His heroism is immediately and conveniently rewarded with news of the death of Surelove’s husband. The women thus circulate and find their mates within a system of male bonding and shared manly values that transcends military hostility. Benignly as female chastity is protected in Bacon’s camp, however, the death of Semernia shows that male power is as dangerous as it is protective. Yet it is also desired. When Surelove is captured by Bacon’s forces, she rejoices in the fact: ‘If seizing us Sir can advance your Honour, or be of any use considerable to you, I shall be proud of such a slavery’ (III. ii. 228–9). Ranter’s Amazonian credentials are qualified not only by her vulnerability on the battlefield but by an earlier and more surprising development: the resemblance of her hard-drinking insubordination to that of the drunken upstarts who run the colony. A punchbowl, for example, is a prominent prop both in her house and in the privy council (which, indeed, votes itself a larger one during its deliberations). Though outrageously unique, she is also a perpetual doppelgänger: her defeat reenacts Semernia’s very different defeat; her festivity prefigures, in its very iconography, the very different festivity of the drunken councillors. Such doubling is a constant feature of the play, creating a multivalency of outlook, a lack of any fixed and central point of reference (for the governor, after all, is absent). Time and again, events which seem simple on their own are complicated and defamiliarized by being reproduced in an altered and alien context, which gives them a puzzlingly different colour and value.11 The boisterous transgressiveness of the upwardly mobile serving girl is mimicked in the drunken incompetence of the upstart males. In addition, the scene of merry-making at Ranter’s house, rendered exotic by bag-pipes and highland dancing, immediately follows a scene of Indian dancing, with which the Indian King and Queen entertain Bacon during the expiring moments of a





truce, and where festivity and hospitality are compromised by a danger and desire that are made the more pronounced by the simple boisterousness of the ensuing festivity at Ranter’s. When her celebrations are in turn replicated in the judicial drunkenness of the council scene, however, the festivity becomes more sinister again. An archetypal expression of carnival is the burlesque or inversion of judicial ritual: for example, the happy ending of Sir Francis Fane’s carnival play Love in the Dark (1675) proceeds directly from a bogus trial in which the hero impersonates a judge and the real judge is arrested as an impostor. In The Widdow Ranter, however, the burlesque of justice is perverse and murderous, as the rogues plot to ambush Bacon with the aid of a false safe-conduct. Like The Rover, The Widdow Ranter juxtaposes festivity with the darker disorders which it so closely imitates. The other element in the dispersed social picture consists of the female upstarts, covering unglamorous promiscuity with unconvincing pretences to honour and threats of actions for slander. They too are doubled in a surprising quarter, for preoccupation with honour is, overwhelmingly, divided between them (and their men) and Bacon. Although Bacon’s well-born opponents on the council are largely decent, they oppose him for complex and self-interested motives, and rarely talk of honour. In an endless circle, Bacon and the rogues each parody the other, without any reference to a fixed moral norm. The centre is hollow; for the true governor is absent. In this moral and political vacuum, the rebellious Bacon of history becomes a misguided yet largely admirable proponent of decaying ideals. He is a rebel only in that he engages in unsanctioned self-defence, and the question is less whether his rebellion is justified than who has the right to call it rebellion. ‘[T]ho’ he fought like Alexander, and preserv’d the whole world from perdition’, says one of the upstart councillors, ‘yet if he did it against Law, ’tis Lawful to hang him’ (I. ii. 108–10). Chrisante dissents: ‘What pity ‘tis there should be such false Maxims in the World, that Noble Actions how ever great, must be Criminall for want of a Law to Authorise ‘em’ (I. iii. 124–6). Behn is here addressing one of the most crucial political questions of the seventeenth century: should the power of law be absolute, or does it need to be tempered by the prerogative of a monarch not subject to it? Is a legislature without the countercheck of a separate executive itself a form of tyranny? For the opponents of James II (and, still more, of his father), the king was subject to legal compulsion. For Tories, it was both impossible and dangerous to bind the king by law, and the royal prerogative of mercy provided a necessary mitigation of the mechanical rigour of



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law. In his coded Whig comedy of 1688, The Squire of Alsatia, Thomas Shadwell had celebrated the triumph of law; in his coded Jacobite comedy of 1690, Amphitryon, Dryden was to portray law as both ineffectual and corrupt. So it is in The Widdow Ranter. During the Exclusion Crisis, the Tory propagandist Roger L’Estrange had argued that, while ‘it is the Law that marks out the Metes and Bounds both of King and People’, the people are bound to law by penalty, whereas kings are – by contrast – bound only by honour and conscience.12 Elsewhere, he argued that the king can mitigate the impersonal mechanism of law by hindering ‘the stroke of Justice with his Pardon’, and that democracies never remain in the control of the gentry: to agitate for democracy is ‘to aspire from our present Glorious State of King-ship, to a Free-state in Clown-ship’.13 In The Widdow Ranter, Behn contemplates exactly such a range of possibilities. Honour and law become separate and uncoordinated, law becomes pedantically merciless, and the government becomes ‘Clown-ship’. With authority corrupted and debased, the simple opposition of governor and rebel becomes blurred and complicated. What is at issue is not only the authority of law, but the social and sacred authority of language itself. Documents among the settlers are fraudulent and treacherous, though the seriousness of the fraud is variable, encompassing both the benign evasions of courtship and the murderous deceptions of the council. When Hazard introduces himself to Surelove, for example, he presents a forged letter to identify him as a kinsman of her husband. Far more sinister is the rogues’ deception in sending Bacon disingenuous terms in order to lure him into an ambush. The decay of textual authority is accompanied by a descent into a slippery oral culture. Justice Boozer is illiterate, his warrants merely notched sticks, his legal training coming by word of mouth: ‘tho I can’t read my self, I have had Doltons Country-Justice read over to me two or three times, and understand the Law’ (I. I. 51–3). The lower-class women defend imaginary chastity with false accusations of slander, and it is striking evidence of the decay of linguistic authority that nowhere in the play is there a single oath. In contrast to the governing rogues, who exist on the boundaries of literacy and illiteracy and use writing only to deceive, Bacon is always reliable in his proclamations and offers, and ingenuously ready to believe the writings and statements of others. His archaic code of honour is linked to a simple faith in the identity of sign and signified. Yet texts have an insidious and ambiguous role even in his formulation of his own identity. Initially, he envied Alexander and Romulus, wishing





to conquer universes like the former and found a city like the latter. Imagining that he has been defeated, he poisons himself to avoid capture, explicitly re-enacting the death of Hannibal, the arch-enemy of Romulus’s city. But, when it turns out that the defeat was not real, he – and his death – are redefined again: ‘So fell the Roman Cassius – by mistake’ (V. i. 310), says Dareing. Bacon is, at various points, the founder of Rome, the failed destroyer of Rome, and the failed preserver of the Roman republic. Although his career and identity are shaped by texts, the textual point of reference changes as he declines. Even immutable historical texts have their own instability, because their application is contingent and capricious. Bacon is thus not only socially but historically deracinated. Exploration and conquest had been one of the great topics of the Renaissance epic, but Behn was suspicious of conquering heroes and, as Janet Todd has shown,14 Bacon can only play theatrically and ineffectively with roles that the downward march of history has denied him. In his fictionalized relationship to the past, he again unexpectedly recalls the rogues, with their invented English pasts: Flirt, for example, daughter of a tailor ruined by unpaid bills for Cromwell’s funeral, claims that ‘my Father was a Barronet, but undone in the late Rebellion’ (I. i. 187–8). Not only does Flirt alter her status, but her relationship to history, and her place in the dialectics of order and transgression that permeate the play. The point is not, of course, that Bacon is like the rogues. Quite the reverse: we again see a fundamentally similar configuration taking shape in strikingly different moral and social contexts. Historical deracination is the ultimate cause of all the mergings and collapses of cultural and social opposites, as we can see in yet another example of the process. The British colony of Virginia is an area where texts lose their authority, orality regains control (the word hear is a very prominent one), and legal warrants become notched sticks. In these respects it mirrors the native Indian culture, which has never advanced beyond orality. ‘[I] oft have heard my Grandsire say’, complains the Indian King to Bacon, ‘That we were Monarchs once of all this spacious World; Till you an unknown People landing here, . . . Usurp’d our Right’ (II. i. 11–14). The Indians have no Romulus or Cassius. History is oral narrative from within the lifespan of three generations, yet it resembles the remoter narratives of ancient heroes in the contingency and ambiguity of its application: ‘I will not justify the Ingratitude of my fore-fathers’, replies Bacon, ‘but finding here my Inheritance, I am resolv’d still to maintain it so’ (II. i. 15–16). The ambiguities of history deny the land a single territorial identity, just as they



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deny a single identity to the colonizing culture, and the competing yet strangely similar identities are contested in the three-cornered military struggle of the play. Despite the uncertainties of tradition and history, language among the Indians retains a primitive magical power, though the power is uncommunicable to us, because the language is incomprehensible. In an Indian temple, ‘Priest[s] and Priestesses Dance about the Idol, with ridiculous Postures and crying (as for Incantations.) Thrice repeated, Agah Yerkin, Agah Boah, Sulen Tawarapah, Sulen Tawarapah’ (IV. i. 0f–i). Yet, despite the ludicrousness of the ceremony, it culminates in a genuine if riddling prophecy: Bacon ‘shall be, / A Captive to his Enemy’ (IV. i. 3–4), and the King ‘from all your Toyls be freed’ (IV. i. 5). That is, as Semernia tells the King, Bacon loves her, and will kill him. She is guided in this interpretation by a recent dream of Bacon as a hungry lion, bearing off her husband. The oracle and its fulfilment combine two of Behn’s characteristic images of the lover: as a violent stranger and a destructive predator (Abdelazer and Willmore in The Rover had also been like lions). Yet here the image is particularly forceful: the European in the primitive land is the one most like the creature of the wilds. It is also the European who conducts that most stereotypical example of New World barbarity, the human sacrifice. Reading the riddling prophecy optimistically, Cavarnio decrees a sacrifice for the evening, at which he himself will officiate as priest. ‘Oh Sir’, replies Semernia, ‘I fear you’l fall a Victim first’ (IV. i. 11). He does, and the sacrificer is Bacon. As in The Town-Fopp, the economy reverts to the most primitive of all exchanges of the body. Yet, if the European performs the human sacrifice, the Europeans cannot access the occult linguistic power harnessed in the Indian rituals. In yet another doubling, the wife of Whiff, one of the rogues, dreams that she sees her husband hanged. The dream clearly parallels Semernia’s, yet it is unfulfilled. Even the sacred power of prophecy is a local, untranslatable dialect. The Europeans do not have prophecy; they have history, and its decay. One moment of doubling which holds the key to all the others is the exchange between Cavarnio and Bacon in which each claims the same role: true heir of the disputed territory. Have not the British, as Cavarnio complains, ‘Usurp’d our Right’? This fundamental question overshadows all other questions of rebellion, legitimacy, and rightful authority. As in The City-Heiress, inheritance is a constant interest. Friendly has inherited land from his uncle, Hazard has squandered his younger brother’s inheritance, Flirt glamorously fictionalizes her genuinely lost inheritance, Ranter and Surelove inherit money from their husbands,





and Cavarnio and Bacon dispute over their ancestral territory. In The City-Heiress, inheritance from father to son had simply been absent. Here it is present, but problematic: the dispute between Bacon and Cavarnio is comically mirrored in the disagreement between Hazard and his elder brother over the proportions of their inheritance. In 1688–89, as in 1682, inheritance was a topical issue, as the forces opposed to James II gathered and then overwhelmed him. As Todd has suggested, The Widdow Ranter is born from this moment of danger and transition, when an inflexibly and stupidly idealistic king was about to become an enemy and alien to his hereditary kingdom. Bacon is neither James II, nor Monmouth, nor the Nathaniel Bacon of history. The play offers no coded representations of real persons or events, but it does reflect a sense of dissolution, in which history offers no guide to the present, and in which a vacuum of authority and collision of cultures create a confusion of criteria, whereby every configuration of authority or disobedience is replicated in contradictory variants, which demand separate and irreconcilable judgments. Behn always refused to unify her domestic and political systems of power and submission by analogy. There was always a tense interdependence between the just authority of the king and the unjust subjection of the woman, and the tension remains here. Ranter’s insubordination is not parallel to Bacon’s, and Semernia is not a symbol of the disputed continent but a woman bandied about by male lust and ambition. Sir Patient Fancy had portrayed a proliferation of dialects and bogus intellectual systems: of little cells with their own municipal laws. The proliferation now affects the political world: in no earlier play had Behn shown basically good men taking opposite sides out of selfinterested motives, and in no earlier play is there the murkiness of issue and injustice of outcome that characterizes the conflict of Bacon and Cavarnio. The cowardly upstarts, who change and rechange sides to save their own skins, clearly invite condemnation, yet they also highlight the constant unclarity of boundaries. Gayman’s lodgings in The Luckey Chance contain ‘a broken six-penny Looking-Glass, that show’d as many Faces, as the Scene in Henry the Eighth’ (I. ii. 90–1). The Widdow Ranter reflects and fragments royalist values in a similar way. At the end of the play, class order is restored (though the rogues are pardoned) and the new governor is awaited. L’Estrange’s ‘Clown-ship’ has been averted, and the reconstructed order is more simply benign, especially towards women, than that of Behn’s recent plays. Ranter has got her man, and although Surelove is about to marry a fortune-hunter with a bogus identity, there is no indication that he will make her unhappy. Yet the final



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picture of matrimonial happiness is possible only because Semernia and Cavarnio have been eliminated – by Bacon, Semernia’s lover. Conversely, Bacon’s own death shows that the increased latitude given to women is made possible by the extinction of that brash machismo that Behn had always found in equal measure attractive and dangerous. If Bacon is more honourable than Willmore or Wilding, he is also more destructive. Behn’s males had often been menacing aliens to their women, but none more so than Bacon: no earlier hero of a Behn play had killed the woman he loves.15 The Widdow Ranter is neither a valedictory play nor a particularly good one, but Behn’s reversion to the tragicomic mode does, accidentally, provide a convenient coda to her career, transmuting elements of The Young King and The Forc’d Marriage in the light of nearly twenty years’ further thought about the ways in which male ambitions ordered society and limited women. Her first play, The Young King, had reconciled an Amazon with her femininity and with her enemy lover. Semernia is a more ineffectual Amazon than Cleomena, and Bacon a more dangerous enemy than Thersander, yet the martial society that had been the only possibility in The Young King is now restricted in confined and sometimes exotic limits of place, time and class: America, the classical past, the gentry. Even the sword, that almost natural symbol of virile soldiership in early Behn, is now a localized cultural artefact: the Indians did not have swords until the arrival of the Europeans, and Cavarnio, who dies by Bacon’s sword, also learnt swordsmanship from him. If the unsoldierly upstarts are contained, they continue to prosper, and indeed are born survivors. Shortly before Bacon’s histrionic mimicry of Hannibal’s death, we see a theatrical death of another kind, when two fools from the ruling council, Timerous and Dullman, lie down and feign death on the battlefield and then, Falstaff-like, rise to run away again another day. Immediately afterwards, Bacon performs his unnecessary suicide. Yet, although Dullman and Timerous have escaped death, they experience another kind of disaster on the battlefield, in that Ranter robs their apparent corpses. Characteristically, this re-enacts an earlier incident, in which Timerous himself had appeared with spoils robbed from a dead Indian: ‘with Battle Ax, Bow and Arrows, and Feathers on his Head’ (IV. ii. 104a). These, however, are the trappings of war. Timerous’s own losses are very different: rings, money and that characteristic Behn symbol of mercantile calculation, the watch. But these, unlike life, are retrievable. When the fools are demoted from the council (their places taken by Bacon’s former allies), Timerous is not brutally returned to his origins, like the upstarts in Tatham’s The Rump, but





remains upwardly mobile ‘Gads zoors I never thriv’d since I was a Statesman, left Planting, and fell to promising and Lying, I’le to my old Trade again, bask under the shade of my own Tobacco, and Drink my Punch in Peace’ (V. i. 395–7). This is the penultimate speech of the play. In the last, Wellman, the deputy governor, takes up the theme of prosperous repose: Come my brave Youths let all our Forces meet, To make this Country Happy, Rich, and great; Let scanted Europe see that we enjoy Safer Repose, and larger Worlds than they. (V. i. 398–401) For the first time, we have a vision of the future, an escape from history. It is not a magical prophecy but an economic forecast; and, despite the accommodation of Timerous, it is certainly not a forecast that is imbued with class comprehensiveness. Behn never rejects the view of one of her gentleman colonists, Friendly, who declares that ‘This Country wants nothing but to be People’d with a well-born Race to make it one of the best Collonies in the World’ (I. i. 105–6). Of Behn’s prolific contemporaries, only Thomas Shadwell was as serious and unremitting as she in analysing the class tensions, political convulsions, and gender inequities of the late seventeenth century. Though now much underrated, however, he was a more limited writer than Behn; and, perhaps because he more correctly spotted and sided with the future, he was more repetitive and ultimately more complacent. Behn’s works show a constantly shifting interplay of nostalgia for Cavalier glamour, recognition of its harsh militaristic roots, enthusiasm for the nobility and potential magnanimity of kingship, and pessimism about the place of women in any patriarchal order. Her enthusiasm for the bourgeois in The False Count was a blip caused by miscalculation of theatrical trends, and elsewhere she always resents the competition of moneyed vulgarians with the gentry. Yet she nowhere (not even in The Roundheads) portrays monstrously destructive economic parvenus such as Jonson’s Volpone or Massinger’s Sir Giles Overreach. Like Timerous, her bourgeois fools tend to resign themselves to comfortable impotence, though Timerous has a landed prosperity that he could not hope for in England. The ‘larger Worlds’ of Virginia provide an expanded, boundless space where such men can gain estates without impoverishing the gentry (as the bourgeois in The Luckey Chance had done), and where the same expanded horizons permit Ranter an autonomy and vigour



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granted to no previous Behn heroine. Of course, the estates still have to be taken from someone. The historical Bacon had wished to extirpate the Indians. Behn shows the tragedy of their fate, and the dubiousness of the territorial claim, but this is the sympathy of Virgil for Dido or Turnus: sympathy for those who are vanquished in what is felt to be a necessary cause. Wellman’s vision of co-operative prosperity is the closest that Behn’s plays come to envisaging Utopia. But Utopia is far away, in the continent of her youth, and the England of 1688–89 must have seemed remote from its ‘Safer Repose’.




In a well-known passage in the dedication of his tragicomedy The Spanish Fryar (1680), Dryden writes that he has often heard a bookseller wish that the hands which had clapped plays in the theatre would buy the published texts, and relieve him ‘of his melancholy bargain’. ‘In a Play-House’, he continues, ‘every thing contributes to impose upon the Judgment; the Lights, the Scenes, the Habits, and, above all, the Grace of Action.’ The ‘false Beauties of the Stage’ are like the mumbo-jumbo with which a ‘Juggler’ (i.e. conjurer) conceals the workings of his tricks, and the art of the actor could make the bombast of Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois seem like great poetry. Yet, as soon as we see the text, the shooting star is exposed as ‘a cold dull mass’.1 For Dryden, the visual elements of theatre are of secondary importance, even as deceptions: the primary deception is the oral delivery of the actor, disrupting our ability to visualize the written text, which for him is the chief object of the eyes. Behn was a careful and subtle writer of dramatic texts, but she did not revere the written page as the ultimate recourse. The slipperiness and ambiguity of texts is a prominent concern in Sir Patient Fancy and The Widdow Ranter, and her masterpiece of prose fiction, Oroonoko, is presented as a text mediated by a narrator who stands in variable moral relationship to the events which are described, at times horrified by the oppression she records, at times involuntarily complicit in it. It is tempting to link Behn’s and Dryden’s differing attitudes to textual authority to their differing expertise in the canon of classical and European literature. Perhaps Behn’s restricted linguistic education liberated her from bondage to the text, enabling her to formulate a language of space, scenic choreography, and visual tokens of gender demarcation. For her, the stage was not a conjuring trick to divert attention from the text; it was a text in itself. Behn’s plays are allusive, though primarily to other plays. She does not directly use philosophic texts as Dryden does in his (unperformed) adaptation of Paradise Lost, The State of Innocence, where the newly created Adam springs into life with Descartes’s most famous sentence on his lips. Yet, in a play such as Sir Patient Fancy, she is as responsive as any male contemporary to Montaigne’s view of moral systems as local, municipal laws and to Hobbes’s awareness of how easily the 192



Conclusion

shared code of language could lose its comprehensive character, splintering into idiolects and private ciphers. Many other dramatists stress the roots of society in the Hobbesian state of nature, suggesting that its ancient savagery is never far from the surface, and Behn’s rival Shadwell considers other questions of social evolution, writing repeatedly about the changing role of an aristocracy that can no longer function as a military élite. Behn, however, depicts a span of social evolution, and a range of synchronous cultural diversity, that is unparalleled in late seventeenth-century drama. She also thinks about economics, in a way that goes far beyond a concern with the prostitution of the arranged marriage. If her attitude to surplus value in The Luckey Chance is one of exasperated incomprehension, its nature remained controversial for a long time, and no other dramatist writes about money with the depth and ingenuity that she shows in that play. She is, indeed, the most various and exploratory of Restoration dramatists: the distinct imaginative and intellectual character of each work (exemplified by the contrasting significance of jewels in the two parts of The Rover) is a sign of unstoppable creativity, the more remarkable because of her extraordinary prolificness: during the years of her theatrical career, no one had anywhere near as many new plays staged as she. Behn died with the period that she recorded and – critically – celebrated: her death, on 16 April 1689, occurred five days after the coronation of William and Mary. It is a sign of her prominence that the play performed at court to celebrate William III’s first birthday as king should have been The Rover (4 November 1690); but it is a sign of the changed climate that Queen Mary should have been shocked by the play (while admiring the acting of William Mountfort, probably in the part of Willmore). The change of royal favour neatly matches the change of royal power: Behn had, after all, dedicated Rover II to Mary’s father, James, with the remarkable claim that Willmore was based on him. The Tory dramatists Crowne and Durfey immediately turned Whig and celebrated the new régime. Dryden lost the laureateship to Shadwell, and embarked upon a difficult but artistically productive final decade. Behn declined Gilbert Burnet’s invitation to write a celebratory poem on William III, but did write a congratulatory ode to Queen Mary (praising her as the daughter of James). At this stage, she was prepared to compromise and equivocate, but not to abandon her principles: in her Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet, she wrote that she deplored the political change (l. 86), and that ‘Indigence and Lost Repose’ (l. 90) could not shake her reason. She need not, of course, have



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continued as a political writer: much comedy of the 1690s is apolitical, or political only by implication. She would, however, have had to cultivate the lightest side of her talent, for dark comedy was now out of fashion: her two most successful works, The Rover and The Emperor of the Moon, were also her most exuberant. We know too little of the day-to-day repertoire in the 1690s to judge how frequently her plays were revived immediately after her death. Indeed, only two revivals are recorded (the information in each case preserved only because the occasion was noteworthy enough to be recalled in Colley Cibber’s memoirs). One is the court performance of The Rover, which excited the Queen’s disapproval. The other was the play with which Christopher Rich’s company re-opened after the secession of Betterton and his allies: Abdelazer, now with the well-known music by Henry Purcell. It did not succeed. A number of Behn’s plays were separately reprinted in 1697–98, and were followed by a complete edition in 1702. Along with regular revivals of The Rover and The Emperor of the Moon, the years from 1701 to 1729 witnessed sporadic revivals of The City-Heiress, The False Count, The Luckey Chance, The Revenge and The Debauchee. Three of the greatest theatrical successes of the 1690s – Thomas Southerne’s Sir Anthony Love, The Fatal Marriage and Oroonoko – were indebted to Behn’s short fiction, though none is remotely Behnlike in character. And, in the years from 1697–1700, following the success of Southerne’s Oroonoko, a number of hitherto unpublished, and perhaps ghosted, short stories were issued under Behn’s name.2 She also provided inspiration to the second generation of female dramatists, who were to emerge in the years after 1695; between then and 1700, six further women had plays staged. Behn has always been best known as the author of Oroonoko. It is her most enduring work, and it rightly appeals to the intense current interest in the important issues of race and colonialism. Yet it is a pity that a writer so brilliant and various should be known for such a small fraction of her talent. When the Royal Shakespeare Company performed a markedly adapted Rover in 1986, in the production by John Barton, the play was Oroonoko-ized. ‘The most obvious change’, Barton writes in his Director’s Note, ‘is the turning of Belvile into a black soldier of fortune, and the setting of the play in a Spanish colony rather than in Spain’.3 It escaped Barton’s notice that the original play was itself set in a Spanish colony, but his colony was patently transatlantic (the crooked whore Lucetta was a slave scarred by the whip), and issues of colonial oppression, sexual exploitation, and male violence – important but not all-engrossing ingredients in Behn – became the simple totality of the



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play, to the destruction of festive comedy.4 More recently, wishing to mount another Behn play, and having at least eight good ones to choose from, the RSC instead commissioned a new dramatization of Oroonoko ’Biyi Bandele. No one can (or did) complain of the result: a rethinking of Oroonoko’s experiences in Africa (never before dramatized), compellingly unified with appropriations of Thomas Southerne’s and John Hawkesworth’s early adaptations of the novel;5 yet one wishes that such welcome experiments existed alongside a Behn revival, instead of supplanting it. For her comedies can work in the theatre. In the year of Barton’s Rover, an amateur Gloucestershire company staged a far better Behn production: a gripping and faithful rendering of The Luckey Chance, of which my chief memory now is the overwhelming funniness of the episode in which Sir Feeble Fainwou’d turns up in armour at Sir Cautious Fulbank’s house, wrongly thinking that he is expected. It is a private memory, but one on which it is perhaps appropriate to conclude. The situation, and the cross-purpose dialogue which it provokes, appear at best mildly amusing on the page. They were made funny not by additional business but simply by being made flesh. It would be overenthusiastic to claim that all Behn’s plays merit revival, but those who read them would do well to make them flesh in the mind, instead of treating them as mere subjects of ideological enquiry, or fantasy.



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I have examined casting extensively during my discussions of Behn’s plays. The following is intended primarily as a synthesis of facts, for the reader to use as he or she will. I hope, however, that it will discourage the too prevalent assumption that Restoration players were generally typecast, and that deviations from type generally have a specific ironic weight.

Abbreviations 1R 2R Abd CH DL EM FCou FCur FM LC LFLS Rev SPF WR YB

The Rover The Second Part of the Rover Abdelazer The City-Heiress The Dutch Lover The Emperor of the Moon The False Count The Feign’d Curtizans The Forc’d Marriage The Luckey Chance Like Father, Like Son The Revenge Sir Patient Fancy The Widdow Ranter The Younger Brother

No cast lists survive for The Amorous Prince, The Dutch Lover, The Town-Fopp, The Debauchee, The Young King and The Roundheads, though Edward Angel is known to have acted the part of Haunce in The Dutch Lover. I ignore minor actors who only appear in one Behn play, and all actors who only appear in The Younger Brother. Nothing is known of Behn’s lost Like Father, Like Son, but its epilogue names many of the players taking part. I have indicated where players who created Behn roles are known to have taken over other roles in her plays. Edward Angel (d. 1673): Falatius (FM ), Haunce van Ezel (Dutch Lover). Along with Nokes and Underhill, one of the leading comedians of the early Restoration. Elizabeth Barry (c. 1658–1713): Leonora (Abd ), Hellena (1R), Cornelia (FCur), Corina (Rev), La Nuche (2R), Lady Galliard (CH ), Lady Fulbank (LC). Perhaps played Cleomena in The Young King. Quickly moved from lively roles such as Hellena to ones of passionate sensuality. In the 1690s she often played lustful villainesses in tragedy, or manipulative fallen women in comedy, though she still played heroines (sometimes sexually tempted ones), such as the inadver196



Appendix: Principal Players in Behn’s Works

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tently bigamous Isabella in Southerne’s The Fatal Marriage (based on Behn’s The History of the Nun) and the unhappily married Lady Brute in Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife. At some stage, perhaps very early, she took over the part of Angellica Bianca. Mary Betterton (c. 1637–1712): Erminia (FM), Florella (Abd ), Florinda (1R), Isabella (SPF ). Betterton’s wife. She often took vulnerable roles (such as Ophelia), and Behn always uses her in them (it is tempting to cast her as Cloris in The Amorous Prince). Her greatest role, however, was Lady Macbeth. Thomas Betterton (1635–1710): Alcippus (FM), Abdelazer (Abd), Belvile (1R), Wittmore (SPF ), Galliard (FCur), Wilding (CH ), Gayman (LC). The leading actor of the period, who after Davenant’s death took a leading role in theatre management. He had an enormous range. Behn chiefly exploits his talent for portraying dangerous glamour (also exemplified in his portrayal of Dorimant in Etherege’s The Man of Mode). John Boman or Bowman (c. 1651?–1739): Shatter (a lover of Diana) (Rev), Dresswell (CH ), Bredwel (LC), Cavarnio (WR). Acted in LFLS. Actor and singer. His special talent was for playing fops (e.g. Petulant in Congreve’s The Way of the World). Took over Frederick (1R). Anne Bracegirdle (c. 1663–1748): Semernia (WR). One of the greatest stars of the 1690s and early eighteenth century. In tragedy, she often portrayed vulnerable (and sometimes ravished) chastity, in contrast to the lustful villainesses whom Barry by then frequently portrayed. In comedy, she had a talent for witty elegance (e.g. in the role of Millamant in The Way of the World ). Is recorded as playing Hellena (1R) in 1707, perhaps having taken it over after the death of Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen in 1703. George Bright (fl. c. 1677–1707): Glisten, a goldsmith (Rev), Baltazer, father to Julia and Clara (FCou), Dullman (WR). ‘His specialities . . . were comic dullards, fops, and bouncy servants’ (Biographical Dictionary, II, 339). Charlotte Butler (fl. 1673–95): Marinda (Rev), Charlot (CH ). Acted in LFLS. Talented actress and singer for whom few parts are recorded during Behn’s life. Marinda was her first substantial role. Sarah Cooke (d. 1688): Elaria (EM ), Leticia (LC). Few roles are recorded for her in leading Restoration plays. Her parts include Gillian, an ingenuous rustic, in John Leanerd’s The Country Innocence, the heroic Portia in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and the domineering Lady Lovemore in Thomas Jevon’s The Devil of a Wife. Katherine Corey (née Mitchell) (b. c. 1635): Mopsophil (EM), Mrs Flirt (WR). Former King’s Company actress. Of large build, she often portrayed hectoring and unattractive women such as the Widow Blackacre in Wycherley’s The Plain-Dealer. John Crosby (d. 1724): Cleontius (FM ), Alonzo (Abd ), Frederick (1R), Leander (SPF ), Julio (FCur). Generally (as in Behn) took important but not first-rank roles. Retired in 1679. Elizabeth Currer (fl. 1673–90): Lady Fancy (SPF ), Marcella (FCur), Ariadne (2R), Isabella (FCou), Diana (CH ), Ranter (WR). Acted in LFLS. She perhaps played Lady Desbro in The Roundheads. She had a talent for playing sprightly and manipulative women (such as the prostitute Aquilina in Venice Preserv’d), though this was not her only line and Behn always gave her complex roles.



Appendix

Appendix

John Freeman (fl. 1666–1736): An old Jew, guardian to the monsters (2R), Sebastian (father to Antonio) (FCou), Wellman (WR). A long career in secondary and minor roles. Henry Harris (c. 1634–1704): Ferdinand (Abd ): Along with Betterton and Smith, one of the chief Duke’s Company actors in the 1660s and 1670s. Retired 1682. Joseph Harris (c. 1650–c. 1715): Noysey (LC), Downright (WR). An actor of secondary roles. Margaret Hughes (d. 1719): Valeria (1R). A popular actress of the late 1660s, who retired from the stage on becoming Prince Rupert’s mistress. She briefly returned to the theatre in 1676–77. Thomas Jevon (1652–88): Don Antonio (1R), Trickwell (Rev), Fopington (CH ), Harlequin (EM ), Bearjest (LC). Acted in LFLS. Best at low comedy, though he also took other forms of role. Frances Maria Knight (fl. 1682?–1724): Surelove (WR), Mirtilla (YB). Became prominent in the 1690s, taking an enormous diversity of roles. After the senior actors’ defection from Christopher Rich’s company, stepped into the gap vacated by Barry. After a major theatrical reorganization, as a result of which Drury Lane was the only theatre mounting straight plays (with opera being mounted at the Queen’s Theatre, Haymarket), Barry and Knight in 1708 were again in the same company. Knight took the part of Angellica later that year, during Barry’s temporary retirement, but the part then reverted to Barry. Edward Kynaston (1643–1712): Belmour (LC). A leading actor in the King’s Company, available to Behn only after the union of the companies. John Lee (fl. 1673–80): Sebastian (Abd ), Sancho (1R). A minor actor, husband of Mary Lee. He died some time between 1677 and 1680. Mary Lee (née Aldridge, later Lady Slingsby): Olinda (FM ), Isabella the Queen Mother (Abd ), Laura Lucretia (FCur). An actress who excelled in passionate or lustful roles, but was not typecast in them: in Abdelazer she played the lustful and villainous Queen Mother against Mary Betterton’s innocent Florella; in Elkanah Settle’s similar The Empress of Morocco, she played the innocent Mariamne against Mary Betterton’s lustful and villainous Queen Mother. Anthony Leigh (d. 1692): Sir Patient Fancy (SPF), Petro (FCur), Dashit (Rev), Guiliom (FCou), Sir Anthony Meriwill (CH), Sir Feeble Fainwou’d (LC), Scaramouch (EM ). Acted in LFLS. Mercurial comic actor. One of his talents was for portraying the sexual peculiarities of elderly men (such as the masochistic footfetishist Antonio in Venice Preserv’d). Elinor Leigh (fl. 1670–1709?): Moretta (1R), Mrs Dashit (Rev), Closet (CH ). Wife of Anthony Leigh. Specialized in superannuated beauties, old women or (occasionally) mature temptresses. A popular actress, but Behn evidently did not like to give prominence to the kind of woman she portrayed. She created Lady Woodvil in The Man of Mode and Lady Wishfort in The Way of the World. Matthew Medbourne (d. 1680): Cardinal Mendozo (Abd), Don Pedro (1R). Often, as here, cast in prominent though not starring roles. A Catholic, he died in prison during the Popish Plot scare. Susanna Mountfort (née Percival, later Verbruggen) (c. 1667–1703): Diana (LC), Bellemante (EM ), Olivia (YB). A vivacious and versatile comedienne. Took over the role of Hellena (1R), in which she may have been courted by the Willmores of both her husbands, William Mountfort and John Verbruggen.



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William Mountfort (c. 1664–92): Jack the Barber’s servant (Rev), Don Charmante (EM ). First husband of Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen. A leading tragic and comic actor, excelling in comedy both as fops and romantic leads. Probably took over the part of Willmore (1R). Murdered by an unwanted admirer of Anne Bracegirdle. James Nokes (d. 1696): Sir Credulous Easy (SPF ), Sir Signal Buffoon (FCur), Nicholas Fetherfool (2R), Francisco (FCou), Sir Timothy Treat-All (CH ), Sir Cautious Fulbank (LC). Excelled in ridiculously solemn, awkward and pusillanimous roles, but could also play unpleasant fops and old men, and elderly women. A likely choice for the role of Sir Timothy Tawdrey (The Town-Fopp). May have played Lambert in The Roundheads. Henry Norris (fl. c. 1661–87): Orgulius (FM ), Roderigo (Abd ), Morisini, Julio’s uncle (FCur), Don Carlo (2R). ‘[A] busy journeyman actor in tertiary roles’ (Biographical Dictionary, XI, 49). Mrs Norris (fl. 1660–84): Callis (1R), Philipa (FCur), Mrs Dunwell (Rev), Petronella Eleonora (2R), Mrs Clacket (CH ). ‘Mrs Norris was a utility performer, good at dowagers, old women, nurses, bawds, governesses, and the like’ (Biographical Dictionary, XI, 49). Margaret Osborn (d. 1694): Elvira, woman to the Queen (Abd ), Jacinta, woman to Julia (FCou). ‘Mrs Osborn did not play roles of great importance’ (Biographical Dictionary, XI, 120). Thomas Percivall (d. 1693?): Osmin (Abd ), Philippo, Lucetta’s lover (1R). Minor actor, father of Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen. Convicted of clipping coins in 1693, and apparently died on his way to Portsmouth for transportation. George Powell (1668?–1714): Don Cinthio (EM ), Friendly (WR), George Marteen (YB). Along with Mountfort and Verbruggen, one of the leading actors of his generation, though a difficult man with a drink problem. Cinthio was his first known role. In 1710 he played Willmore (1R) in Greenwich, though at Drury Lane the part had gone, after Verbruggen’s death, to the lighter and more urbane Robert Wilks. Mary Powell (fl. 1686–1723?): Gammer Grime (LC), Lady Blunder (YB). Wife of George Powell. Played mature and often unappealing women from the outset of her career (Gammer Grime is her first known role). Took over the roles of Clacket (CH), Closet (Debauchee), Mopsophil (EM ), and Moretta (1R). Emily? Price (fl. 1676–82): Lucretia (SPF ), Diana (Rev), ?Lucia (2R). A little known actress who took secondary roles. Janet Todd tentatively suggests the possibility of a lesbian relationship between Behn and Price (Secret Life, pp. 189–90). Anne Quin (née Marshall) (fl. 1660–83?): Angellica Bianca (1R), Lady Knowell (SPF ). A leading actress since the early 1660s, originally with the King’s Company (Thomas Killigrew had earmarked her for Angelica in a projected performance of Thomaso). Like Mary Lee, she had a talent for strong, passionate roles. Her casting as Lady Knowell gives considerable weight to the role. She left the Duke’s Company some time in 1678–79, and briefly returned to the King’s Company. In The Ornament of Action (pp. 67–8) Peter Holland places unnecessary interpretative weight on Quin’s absence from the cast of Rover II, evidently assuming that she would have been available. The allocation of the prostitute La Nuche’s part to Barry, he goes on to argue, is a sign that La Nuche and Willmore will pair off, since Barry as Hellena had paired off with Willmore



Appendix

Appendix

in Rover I. In view of Quin’s absence, the reasons for the casting were probably more mundane, and Barry had perhaps already taken over the role of Angellica. John Richards (1629?–88?): Zarrack (Abd ), Stephano, servant to Don Pedro (1R), Curry, Sir Credulous’s groom (SPF ), Hunt (2R). Acted in LFLS. A good but evidently ill-favoured actor who took on a variety of secondary roles, with some tendency towards foolish or thuggish characters. Samuel Sandford (fl. 1661–98): Dareing (WR). Sandford was doomed by face and body to be the leading actor of villains on the Restoration stage (he excelled as Richard III). He also played comic patriarchs, such as Foresight in Congreve’s Love for Love, and (occasionally) elder statesmen in tragedy. He was disastrously miscast as Dareing. William Smith (d. 1695): Phillander (FM), Philip (Abd ), Willmore (1R, 2R), Lodwick Knowell (SPF ), Sir Harry Fillamour (FCur), Wellman (Rev), Don Carlos (FCou). Perhaps played Loveless in The Roundheads. After Betterton, the leading Duke’s Company actor, and for some years co-manager of the company with Betterton. Played many heroic tragic characters, but also more ambiguous or intemperate roles (such as Philip in Abdelazer). In comedy, generally took one of the two male leads, but also created Sir Fopling Flutter in Etherege’s The Man of Mode. Cave Underhill (1634–1713): Blunt (1R, 2R), Tickletext (FCur), Guzman (Gentleman to Carlos) (FCou), Baliardo (EM ), Timerous Cornet (WR). A primarily comic actor who took a wide range of roles (his known Shakespearean roles were the gravedigger, Justice Shallow, Archbishop Gardiner, and Thersites, in Dryden’s revision of Troilus and Cressida). He tended to be chosen when a comic part required menace or villainy. John Verbruggen (d. 1708): Hazard (WR), Prince Frederick (YB). Second husband of Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen. It is probable that the actor ‘Alexander’, who played Hazard and a number of other roles, was identical with Verbruggen, who was one of the leading young actors of his generation, especially after the actors’ secession in 1695. He created the elegant Mirabel in The Way of the World and the boorish Sullen in George Farquhar’s The Beaux Stratagem. Took over the role of Willmore (1R), probably from Mountfort. Joseph Williams (b. c. 1663): Friendly (Rev), Beaumond (2R), Sir Charles Meriwill (CH ), Bacon (WR). Acted in LFLS. ‘By the early 1680s Williams was one of the top three actors in the company’ (Biographical Dictionary, XVI, 141). Another actor with a large range. Although he predominantly played heroes in tragedy and comedy, he could also play villains in the former and fools in the latter. Beaumond, Sir Charles and Bacon suggest a talent for combining glamour with ruthlessness. He also, however, created the ingenuously moral Mellefont in Congreve’s The Double-Dealer. John Wiltshire (d. c. 1685): Shift (2R), Antonio (FCou). Acted in LFLS. Played a variety of secondary but prominent roles, including the exemplary Kent in Tate’s revision of King Lear and the elderly, villainous Renault in Otway’s Venice Preserv’d.



200

Introduction 1. Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy, ed. Regina Barreca (New York: Gordon & Breach, 1988), pp. 23–42. This work first appeared as issues 1–3 of Women’s Studies, 15 (1988). Gallagher’s essay has been reprinted in Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism, ed. Heidi Hutner (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993), pp. 65–85; Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: the Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 1–48; Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 12–31. My citation is to Nobody’s Story, p. 27. 2. See Mary Ann O’Donnell’s review of Hutner, Rereading Aphra Behn, in Modern Philology, 93 (May 1996), pp. 519–24 (especially p. 521); The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols (London: Pickering, 1992–6), VII, p. 290. All citations of Behn are to the Todd edition. The re-use of the Dryden prologue was first noted by Gerard Langbaine in An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691), p. 22. 3. My present aim is to point out this gulf, not to conduct a sustained debate with Gallagher. I consider her argument in detail in ‘The Masked Woman Discovered; or, The Prostitute and the Playwright in Behn Criticism’, Women’s Writing, 7 (2000), 149–64. 4. ‘ “Deceit, Dissembling, all that’s Woman”: Comic Plot and Female Action in The Feigned Courtesans’, in Rereading Aphra Behn, ed. Hutner, pp. 86–101 (p. 89). 5. Robert D. Hume, ‘ “The Change in Comedy”: Cynical Versus Exemplary Comedy on the London Stage, 1678–1693’, Essays in Theatre, 1 (1982–83), 101–18 (pp. 108–9). 6. Aspects of Behn’s staging (chiefly her use of discovery scenes) are discussed in Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 41–2; Dawn Lewcock, ‘Behn and the Use of Theatre’, in Aphra Behn Studies, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 66–83; Susan Green, ‘Semiotic Modalities of the Female Body in Aphra Behn’s The Dutch Lover’, in Rereading Aphra Behn, ed. Hutner, pp. 138–42. The fullest study of Behn’s stage semiotics is John Franceschina, ‘Shadow and Substance in Aphra Behn’s The Rover: the Semiotics of Restoration Performance’, Restoration, 9 (1995), 29–42. Richard Southern discusses the scene plot of Sir Patient Fancy in Changeable Scenery: its Origin and Development in the British Theatre (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), pp. 146–53. 201



Notes

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Notes

1. The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Todd, VII, 362. 2. British Library AC 2691 d/11. 3. British Library Harley MSS 7587–7605. The information about Winchilsea and Colepepper is taken from Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (London: André Deutsch, 1996), 12–13. Behn appears in two places in Colepepper’s alphabetically arranged manuscript ‘Adversaria’, as ‘Mrs Aphra Bhen’ and ‘BEENE the famos female Poet’. 4. Jane Jones, ‘New Light on the Background and Early Life of Aphra Behn’, Notes and Queries, 235 (1990), 288–93, reprinted in Aphra Behn Studies, ed. Todd, pp. 310–20. 5. The fundamental work of reference about the theatrical repertory of the period is The London Stage 1660–1800, 5 parts in 11 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–68), I, ed. William Van Lennep, introd. Emmett L. Avery and Arthur H. Scouten (1965). Datings of premières are often conjectural inferences from publication dates. Many such datings have been revised in Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, ‘Dating Play Premières from Publication Data, 1660–1700’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 22 (1974), 374–405. Some further revisions of dates are provided in Pierre Danchin, The Prologues and Epilogues of the Restoration, 1660–1700, 4 parts, 7 vols (Nancy, 1981–88). The fullest studies of late seventeenth-century drama are Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), and Derek Hughes, English Drama, 1660–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 6. A letter from Elizabeth Cottington to Herbert Aston refers both to the public performance of Horace and the impending performance of Marcelia (Tixall Letters, ed. Arthur Clifford, 2 vols [Edinburgh, 1815], II, 60). A poem by Boothby lamenting the play’s failure is also preserved in the papers of the Aston family (Tixall Poetry, ed. Arthur Clifford [Edinburgh, 1813], 228–9). 7. 30 March and 11 April 1667. Playwrights’ names were not printed on playbills until the 1690s, and on one occasion Pepys attributed to Dryden a play by the wretched Richard Flecknoe (The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols [London: Bell, 1970–83], 15 September 1668). The attribution to the Duchess is accepted in Maureen Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn, 1640–89 (London: Methuen, 1989), pp. 104–5, and Elin Diamond, ‘Gestus and Signature in Aphra Behn’s The Rover’, ELH, 56 (1989), 519–41 (p. 520). 8. A ground-breaking study of early modern women’s writing is Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–88 (London: Virago, 1988). A good analysis of women’s writing in the long eighteenth century is Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1989). 9. Sir William Davenant’s widow, Mary, ran the Duke’s Company during the minority of her son Charles. She delegated artistic matters to the actors Thomas Betterton and Henry Harris, but was a capable businesswoman. See Philip H. Highfill, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians . . . & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern



1. Background

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

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Illinois University Press, 1973–93) (under Davenant, Henrietta Maria du Tremblay). The best study of the Restoration actress is Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). A Satyrical Epistle to the Female Author of a Poem, call’d ‘Silvia’s Revenge’ (London, 1691), p. 5. Gould is treated as a culturally representative figure in Diamond, ‘Gestus and Signature’, p. 520; Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, p. 23; Julie Nash, ‘ “The sight on ’t would beget a warm desire”: Visual Pleasure in Aphra Behn’s The Rover’, Restoration, 18 (1994), 77–87 (p. 78). Despite the importance they attach to him, Diamond and Nash only know Gould at second hand (respectively from George Woodcock, The Incomparable Aphra [London: Boardman, 1948], p. 103 and from Catherine Gallagher): Diamond mistakes the six-line passage quoted by Woodcock for the entire poem; Nash thinks that two passages from Gould’s poem quoted by Gallagher are from two different sources. For a more reliable assessment of Gould’s (in)significance, see Sara Heller Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), pp. 161–3; Deborah C. Payne, ‘Reified Object or Emergent Professional? Retheorizing the Restoration Actress’, in Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater, ed. J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah C. Payne (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995), pp. 13–38 (pp. 20–3). The companies mounted a full repertory from September to June, often with reduced activity in the other months. (London, 1671), sig. A3v. (London, 1631), p. 41. Cited in Hobby, Virtue of Necessity, p. 3. [Richard Graham, Viscount Preston], Angliæ Speculum Morale: the Moral State of England (London, 1670), p. 74. (London, 1672), pp. 9–13. Ramesay’s Coniugium Coniurgium (London, 1673), however, contains some anti-feminist satire. (London, 1665), p. 87. For example, [ John Maxwell], Sacro-sancta Regum Majestas; or, The Sacred and Royall Prerogative of Christian Kings (Oxford, 1644), p. 111. Davenant’s ‘Macbeth’ from the Yale Manuscript, ed. Christopher Spencer (New Haven, 1961), IV. iv. 63. George Hickes, A Discourse of the Soveraign Power, in a Sermon Preached at St. Mary Le Bow, Nov. 28. 1682 (London, 1682), p. 22. This sermon is also discussed in Susan Staves, Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 117. The Woman as Good as the Man; or, the Equallity of Both Sexes, trans. A. L. (London, 1677), pp. 12–13. The classic study of the changing physiological and cultural understandings of sex is Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1990). Laqueur traces the shift from the old Galenic model of the human body, in which the woman is an incompletely developed version of the man, to the discovery and interpretation of incommensurable sexual difference. Hobbes, rightly, figures only marginally in Laqueur’s work, but he greatly influences the portrayal of masculinity and femininity in Dryden, Wycherley and Behn.



Notes

Notes

23. De Corpore Politico; or, The Elements of Law, Moral and Politic, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 11 vols (London, 1839–45; repr. Aalen: Scientia, 1966), IV, 160. 24. Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), Part II, ch. xx, p. 253. 25. Philosophical Elements of a True Citizen, in English Works, II, 116. 26. The originator of the idea of the body-machine was René Descartes, though (unlike Hobbes) he believed in a separate immaterial soul. The separateness of mind and body was one of the bases of Poulain de la Barre’s case for the equality of the sexes. 27. Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions, 7 vols (Oxford, 1823), III, 82. 28. [ Judith Drake] An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (London, 1696), p. 48. 29. Recent accounts of Restoration scenery include Richard Southern, ‘Theatres and Scenery’, in The Revels History of Drama in English: Volume V, 1660– 1750, ed. John Loftis and others (London: Methuen, 1976), pp. 83–118; Colin Visser, ‘Scenery and Technical Design’, in The London Theatre World 1660–1800, ed. Robert D. Hume (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), pp. 66–118; Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, Producible Interpretation: Eight English Plays, 1675–1707 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), pp. 52–9. The fullest account is in Richard Southern, Changeable Scenery, pp. 109–62, though he is now considered to have overestimated the elaborateness of Restoration scene changes. 30. In their analysis of the production possibilities of eight Restoration plays, Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume assume at all theatres ‘the availability of six different sets of shutters (with coordinating wings and borders), divided into two distinct groups’ (Producible Interpretation, p. 56). 31. Robert D. Hume points out that there is no hard evidence for more than one door per side at Dorset Garden, but that it is likely that there were two (‘The Dorset Garden Theatre: a Review of Facts and Problems’, Theatre Notebook, 33 (1979), 4–17 (pp. 5–7)). Richard Leacroft argues for one (The Development of the English Playhouse [London and New York: Methuen, 1973]), p. 86. The stage directions of some Dorset Garden plays, including The Rover, perhaps imply only one. 32. See Colin Visser, ‘The Anatomy of the Early Restoration Stage: The Adventures of Five Hours and John Dryden’s “Spanish” Comedies’, Theatre Notebook, 29 (1975), 55–67, 114–18. 33. I. i. 9, in The Works of John Dryden, gen. ed. Edward Niles Hooker and others, 20 vols in progress (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1956–••). 34. It is re-used in Purcell’s The Fairy-Queen (1692) and Powell and Verbruggen’s Brutus of Alba (1696).

2. First Attempt 1. See Todd, Secret Life, pp. 138–9. For accounts of tragicomedy in the early Restoration, see Nancy Klein Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English



204

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

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Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Hughes, English Drama, 1660–1700, pp. 30–77 passim, 162–84. Ronald Hutton, Charles the Second: King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 189. The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948). Nell Gwyn retired from the stage at the end of 1670. The Earl of Orrery’s Guzman (April) and Mr Anthony (December) are feeble, though Guzman succeeded. The Duke of Newcastle’s unpublished The Heiress ( January) is unlikely to have been inspiring. Shadwell’s The Hypocrite ( June), apparently an adaptation of Tartuffe, also remained unpublished. Unlike her older contemporary, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), Behn did not create feminist utopias. Claude Lévi-Strauss argues that women are the primary objects of exchange in the gift cultures of primitive societies (The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 2nd ed., trans. James Harle Bull and others [London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1969]). Gayle Rubin sees in such exchange structures the roots of women’s oppression and argues that ‘Far from being confined to the “primitive” world, these practices seem only to become more pronounced and commercialized in more “civilized” societies’ (‘The Traffic in Women’, in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter [Monthly Review Press, 1975], pp. 157–210 [p. 175]). It has been suggested that The Young King might have been suppressed because The Forc’d Marriage and The Amorous Prince had been among the many plays mocked in The Rehearsal (1671), a satire of contemporary serious drama by the Duke of Buckingham and others. But in no other respect did The Rehearsal discernibly affect the repertory. It did not, as used to be thought, laugh heroic plays off the stage; on the contrary, it preceded their heyday (See Hume, Development, pp. 290–1). She seems not to have known Spanish, and no published English translation was available. A French prose translation by Abbé François le Métel de Boisrobert was published in 1657 (Works, VII, 80). But, as Janet Todd observes, Behn seems only to have become a fluent reader of French in the 1680s (Secret Life, p. 294). Perhaps a friend told her Calderón’s plot. For example, in Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee (1662), Sir Robert Stapylton’s The Step-Mother (1663), Sir William Davenant’s revision of Macbeth (1664), and the Dryden-Howard The Indian Queen (1664). Susan J. Owen makes a different point, seeing the rule of women even in this play as, simply, politically unnatural (‘ “Suspect my loyalty when I lose my virtue”: Sexual Politics and Party in Aphra Behn’s Plays of the Exclusion Crisis, 1678–83’, Restoration, 18 (1994), 37–47 [pp. 39–40]; Restoration Theatre and Crisis [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996], pp. 171–2). She sees the play’s subtitle, The Mistake, as referring to the attempt to divert the succession to a woman. But ‘mistake’ did not in this period mean moral or strategic error; the subtitle refers to the heroine’s misconceptions about the hero. The more famous literary Astrea, however, was the heroine of Honoré d’Urfé’s popular romance L’Astrée. ‘The History of Alcamenes and Menalippa’, in Gauthier de Costes, Sieur de La Calprenède, Hymen’s Prœludia, or Love’s Master-Piece. Being the Six Last Parts



Notes

14.

15.

16.

17.

Notes of that so much admired Romance, entituled Cleopatra, trans. J[ohn] C[oles] and I. D. (London, 1663), Book VIII, parts ii–iv, pp. 138–202. Janet Todd notes that, both in The Young King and The Amorous Prince, Behn is torn between divine right theory and hostility to the ‘abuse of power and hereditary privilege’ (Secret Life, p. 150). For reactions to the King’s sex-life in these and other plays, see Hughes, English Drama, 1660–1700, passim. In II. iv, she is tormented by the mistaken belief that Clemanthis is unfaithful, but finds that she cannot stab him. The other indoor scene (IV. v) is that in which she is threatened with marriage to Thersander and resolves to kill him. Both scenes are associated with the transfer of power from her to Orsames: in the first, the Queen resolves on his first enthronement; in the second, Cleomena decides on the final handover. The play calls for woodland scenes, a prison, palace rooms, the Dacian and Scythian tents, a place for the single combat, and a street (which may have been simply represented by the proscenium arch). When the play was premièred, the Duke’s company had long since left the Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre, where The Forc’d Marriage and The Amorous Prince were first performed, for the more elaborately equipped Dorset Garden theatre; but all the scenes are stock ones that can be paralleled in Lincoln’s Inn Fields productions. The feminine element in the description of the heroes is noted in Duffy, Passionate Shepherdess, p. 196.

3. First Impact 1. This recollection would have to have come from reading: Much Ado had not been staged since the Restoration, though the Beatrice and Benedick plot had been incorporated by Davenant in his reworking of Measure for Measure as The Law against Lovers (1662). 2. IV. 428, in The Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, ed. William Smith Clark II, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937), I. 3. Here again Behn significantly varies a precedent in The Generall, whose hero (Clorimun) is similarly a reformed traitor, based on George Monck, a Parliamentary general who changed sides and engineered the Restoration of the King. Orrery himself had held high office under Cromwell, and The Generall is in part his apologia. In Clorimun, he shows how good men may become tied to unjust causes. Behn’s traitor was merely motivated by disruptive male aggression; he does not redeem himself by an act of restoration, but was pardoned for his daughter’s sake. 4. Jacqueline Pearson notes the opening juxtaposition of the male and female communities (The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women & Women Dramatists 1642–1737 [New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988], p. 150). 5. Janet Todd suggests that Falatius might be a caricature of Charles II’s chief minister of state, the Earl of Arlington, who had left in her poverty during her spying activities in the Low Countries. He had been accused of cowardice, and wore a patch on his nose to cover a Civil War wound (Secret Life, p. 141).



206

207

6. Little is known of the players who took three of the leading roles: John Young (Alcander), Mrs Jennings (Galatea), and Mrs Wright (Aminta). Pepys was disappointed when Young stood in for Betterton in the role of Macbeth (6 November 1667). Mrs Jennings’s other best known role was Ariana, the more demure of the two heroines of Etherege’s She Would If She Could. 7. Roscius Anglicanus, ed. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume (London, 1987), p. 72. 8. V. i. 44–9, in The Works of Thomas Otway, ed. J. C. Ghosh, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), I. 9. Cf. Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 38. 10. The destructiveness of idealized male bonding was to be the subject of Nathaniel Lee’s Theodosius (1680) and Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (1682). 11. Behn uses a few of Lincoln’s Inn Fields’ stock scenes: a grove, a wood, rooms, a street, all carefully defined as sites of sexual power. 12. There is one unlocated scene, which Summers conjecturally places in the grove. Here, Alberto confesses to Antonio that (as he thinks) he really is in love with Clarina (III. iii). 13. See especially her poem ‘To the fair Clarinda, who made Love to me, imagin’d more than Woman’ (Works, I, 288). 14. Behn’s pastoral poem The Golden Age portrays an ideal sexual paradise which predates the military, commercial, moral, and political systems which enforce the authority of the male. See Jessica Munns, ‘ “But to the touch were soft”: pleasure, power, and impotence in “The Disappointment” and “The Golden Age” ’, in Aphra Behn Studies, ed. Todd, pp. 178–98. In the Iron Age world of the plays, pastoral can only be a beguiling illusion. Elizabeth V. Young argues that Behn ‘in all her pastoral poetry . . . proposes dismantling the concept of gender as a power base in order to create the ideal, but viable, world where people can thrive with all of nature’ (‘Aphra Behn, Gender, and Pastoral’, Studies in English Literature, 33 [1993], 522–43 [p. 541]). 15. Charles II (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), p. 219.

4. Experimentation 1. She was probably the ‘A. B.’ who in 1672 published Covent Garden Drollery, an anthology consisting mainly of unpublished songs, prologues and epilogues from plays staged by the King’s Company, including fourteen pieces by Dryden. See Todd, Secret Life, pp. 156–8; Covent Garden Drollery, ed. G. Thorn-Drury (London: Dobell, 1928), p. xvii–xviii. 2. Her targets, which have not previously been identified, are discussed in my ‘The Masked Woman Discovered’, pp. 155–6. 3. See the prefaces to The Sullen Lovers (1668) and The Royal Shepherdesse (1669), in The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers, 5 vols (London: Nonesuch, 1927) I, 11, 100. 4. ‘Wit transverst’ (l. 19) refers to the charge made in The Rehearsal, that Dryden composed by transversion: that is, by turning the verse of others into prose and vice-versa. ‘Bawdy A-la-Mode’ (l. 19) is Marriage A-la-Mode. ‘Whilst Rotas and Cabals aim at Granadoes’ (l. 23) line refers to two pamphlet attacks on



Notes

Notes

The Conquest of Granada, Richard Leigh’s The Censure of the Rota on Mr Driden’s Conquest of Granada (Oxford, 1673) and the sarcastically titled Friendly Vindication of Mr Dryden From the Censure of the Rota by his Cabal of Wits (Cambridge, 1673). All allusions but the last are identified in Danchin, Prologues and Epilogues, II, 158, but they are not noted in the Todd edition. In The Rehearsal Dryden had been mockingly impersonated in the figure of Mr Bayes; he was probably caricatured as Drybob in Shadwell’s The Humorists (1670); and he was again to be impersonated, as the tutor in Joseph Arrowsmith’s The Reformation (1673). 5. In private correspondence, Robert D. Hume and Judith Milhous have suggested the following disposition of shutters, in two sets of triple grooves: 2.3 deep grove 2.2 fine arbor 2.1 house 1.3 garden 1.2 (flat) grove 1.1 chamber

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

With this arrangement, the street could be represented by the proscenium; if the street were scenically represented, the house and the chamber could be represented by a single set of shutters. Hutton, Charles the Second, p. 154. This refers to a change of governors in 1659, and perhaps indicates that Behn was at that time already an agent in the Low Countries. See Todd, Secret Life, p. 31. The Duke of Lerma, the favourite of Philip III, had been used as an image of Clarendon in Sir Robert Howard’s The Great Favourite (1668). See Todd, Secret Life, p. 182. For example, Mendelson, Mental World, pp. 140–1. Lust’s Dominion was first published in 1657. The title-page of the second issue implausibly ascribed it to ‘Christofer Marloe, Gent.’ It has been conjecturally, though not conclusively, identified with The Spanish Moor’s Tragedy, which Dekker, Day and Haughton were writing for the Admiral’s Men in February 1600 (See The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, 4 vols [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953–61], IV, 117). The epilogue was spoken by ‘little Mis. Ariell’, who refers to her recent success as advocate for a male dramatist. The epilogue to Don Carlos was ‘Spoken by a Girle’ (perhaps the future star Anne Bracegirdle). ‘Slave Princes and Lady Monsters: Gender and Ethnic Difference in the Work of Aphra Behn’, in Aphra Behn Studies, ed. Todd, pp. 219–34. See also Todd, Secret Life, p. 187; Susie Thomas, ‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine: Aphra Behn’s Abdelazer, or, The Moor’s Revenge’, Restoration, 22 (1998), 18–39. Abdelazer is interpreted as a typical negro stereotype in Anthony Gerard Barthelemey, Black Face, Maligned Race (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), pp. 112–17. ‘Slave Princes’, pp. 227–8. The Earl of Shaftesbury and Lord Holles were now vigorous opponents of James. In 1674 Charles Howard, Earl of Carlisle, introduced a measure in the



208

16. 17 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

209

Lords to debar Catholics from the succession, though it failed to attract much support, and Charles prorogued Parliament lest James be accused of treason plot (John Miller, James II: a Study in Kingship, revised ed. [London: Methuen, 1989], p. 76). In the same year there were, already, fears of a Catholic plot (David Ogg, England in the Reign of Charles II, 2nd ed., 2 vols [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955], II, 561). See Hughes, English Drama, 1660–1700, pp. 85–100. V, p. 272 (italics added), in Complete Works, III. V. i. 531–2, in The Works of John Dryden, XI. See Judith Milhous, ‘The Duke’s Company Profits, 1675–1677’, Theatre Notebook, 32 (1978), pp. 76–88. Sir Timothy is not the first actively nasty Restoration fool: an important predecessor is Sir Arthur Addell in John Caryll’s Sir Salomon (1670), who was created by James Nokes, an actor who could play both harmless and nasty fools, and who could possibly have taken the role of Sir Timothy. More typical fools, however, are figures of empty superficiality. Sir Oliver was written for Nokes (see above, note 20), exploiting his talent for portraying characters reduced to pusillanimous helplessness. Behn’s reworking of the incident would have added point if Sir Timothy were acted by Nokes. For a description of Nokes’s talents, see An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber . . . Written by Himself, ed. B. R. S. Fone (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), pp. 82–5. See Gellert Spence Alleman, Matrimonial Law and the Materials of Restoration Comedy (Wallingford, Pa., 1942), pp. 126–7.

5. Maturity 1. The source is T. B.’s [Anthony or Thomas Brewer’s?] The Countrie Girle (1632). 2. An Account of the English Dramatick Poets, p. 529. See also Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, ‘Attribution Problems in English Drama, 1660–1700’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 31 (1983), 5–39 (p. 13). 3. Works, ed. Todd, V, xii. 4. Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, 10 vols (Bath, 1832), I, 213. 5. Behn’s alterations of Thomaso are discussed in Jones DeRitter, ‘The Gypsy, The Rover, and the Wanderer: Aphra Behn’s Revision of Thomas Killigrew’, Restoration, 10 (1986), 82–92; Laura J. Rosenthal, Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press), pp. 110–30. 6. Todd, Secret Life, p. 31. 7. The increased ambiguity of Behn’s whore Angellica is discussed in Nancy Copeland, ‘ “Once a whore and ever?” Whore and Virgin in The Rover and its Antecedents’, Restoration, 16 (1992), 20–7. 8. Cf. Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess, p. 153. Stephen Szigalyi argues that Behn is portraying a post-patriarchal world (‘The Sexual Politics of Behn’s Rover: After Patriarchy’, Studies in Philology, 95 [1998], 435– 55). 9. In an interesting essay, Robert Markley takes a different view of Behn’s



Notes

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Notes royalist heroes: ‘Behn seeks to demasculinize desire, to find contemporary equivalents – in her Tory heroes and the women who love them – for the nymphs and shepherds of a golden age’ (‘ “Be Impudent, Be Saucy, Forward, Bold, Touzing, and Leud”: the Politics of Masculine Sexuality and Feminine Desire in Behn’s Tory Comedies’, in Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater, ed. Canfield and Payne, pp. 114–40 [p. 117]). Severer or more complex views of Willmore are, for example, given in DeRitter, pp. 86–7, Anita Pacheco, ‘Rape and the Female Subject in Aphra Behn’s The Rover’, ELH, 65 (1998), 323–45, and Szigalyi, pp. 449–55. Underhill’s talents are described in Cibber, Apology, pp. 89–90. Cf. Pacheco, ‘Rape and the Female Subject’, pp. 326–7. The carnival element is discussed in Linda R. Payne, ‘The Carnivalesque Regeneration of Corrupt Economies in The Rover’, Restoration, 22 (1998), 40–9, and also – unhelpfully – in Dagny Boebel’s ‘In the Carnival World of Adam’s Garden: Roving and Rape in Behn’s The Rover’, in Broken Boundaries: Women & Feminism in Restoration Drama, ed. Katherine M. Quinsey (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), pp. 54–70. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helen Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 10. V. 434–5, in The Works of John Dryden, X. ‘He’ is Todd’s emendation of ‘She’ in the 1677 edition. In ‘ “The sight on’t would beget a warm desire” ’, Julie Nash discusses the role of the gaze in The Rover, and the ways in which Behn avoids female passivity to the male gaze. Problems of female self-representation in The Rover are discussed, in my view unsatisfactorily, in Diamond, ‘Gestus and Signature’. From Middle English yclept. Todd’s edition misprints as ‘Eclipsed’. Part I, I. i. 233, in The Works of John Dryden, XI. The combination of rape and legalism is perceptively discussed in Pacheco, ‘Rape and the Female Subject’, pp. 327–33. ‘Female characters are much more likely to open and close plays by women writers’ (Pearson, The Prostituted Muse, p. 64). Cross-reference of scenes is discussed in Holland, The Ornament of Action, pp. 40, 48, 50–2. Todd, Secret Life, p. 191. II, p. 326, in Thomas Killigrew, Comedies, and Tragedies (London, 1664). II. i. 98, 102, 105, 109, 140, 148, 177, 215, 226, 262–3. For a description of Nokes’s talents, see Cibber, Apology, pp. 82–5. Nokes could also play nasty, though not directly violent, elderly men, such as Sir Davy Dunce in Otway’s The Souldiers Fortune (1680) and Sir Timothy Treat-all in Behn’s own The City-Heiress (1682). For the repression of festivity during the Interregnum, see Godfrey Davies, The Early Stuarts, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 307–15. Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions, II, 108–38, IV, 203–64 (IV, 206). IV. iii. 13, in The Works of John Dryden, IX. Human Nature; or, The Fundamental Elements of Policy, in English Works, ed. Molesworth, IV, 23. Montaigne’s Essays, tr. John Florio, Everyman’s Library, 3 vols (London: Dent; New York: Dulton, 1965), II, 229 (chapter 12).



210

211

32. Troilus and Cressida I. iii. 86, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London: Norton, 1997). 33. Talasio (probably the name of a forgotten marriage god) was an exclamation uttered by immemorial custom at Roman weddings. See, for example, Catullus, Carmina, lxi. 127. 34. ‘τν δ αποµειβµενος προσfη πδας kς Aχιλλες’ (‘The swift-footed Achilles spoke in answer to him’ [for example Iliad i. 84]). 35. The Virtuoso, IV, p. 161, in Complete Works, III. 36. See Susan Staves, ‘Why Was Dryden’s Mr Limberham Banned?: a Problem in Restoration Theatre History’, Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research, 1st series, 13. 1 (1974), 1–11. 37. See Hume, Development, p. 333. 38. In addition, Dryden’s The Spanish Fryar has an important comic sub-plot. 39. Including her lost Like Father, Like Son; or, The Mistaken Brothers (prob. March 1682), of which nothing is known. 40. Alison Shell elaborately argues that The Feign’d Curtizans is pro-Catholic (‘Popish Plots: The Feign’d Curtizans in Context’, in Aphra Behn Studies, ed. Todd, pp. 30–49). Susan J. Owen suggests that Behn uses the Roman setting to satirize the attitudes of the English bourgeois (Restoration Theatre and Crisis, p. 154). Maureen Duffy and Jane Spencer regard the play as largely apolitical (The Passionate Shepherdess, p. 182, ‘ “Deceit, Dissembling, all that’s Woman” ’, p. 92). 41. We do not know when she first played the role, but Anne Quin (née Marshall), the original Angellica, left the Duke’s Company in the 1678–79 season. For an account of Barry’s career see Howe, The First English Actresses, pp. 108–46. 42. Mary Lee was a talented actress of great range, used somewhat more in tragedy than comedy. Her previous known Behn role was as the Queen of Spain in Abdelazer. Like Anne Quin, the first Angellica, she excelled in commanding, passionate roles. 43. In 1676 Ravenscroft had produced The Wrangling Lovers; or, The Invisible Mistress. Behn used the term ‘invisible Mistress’ when she used the device yet again in The Luckey Chance (IV. i. 158).

6. Political Crisis 1. See above, Chapter 2, Note 11. 2. For the external evidence, see Milhous and Hume, ‘Attribution Problems’, pp. 28–9, and Works, ed. Todd, VI, 163. 3. John Crowne’s The Misery of Civil-War (Duke’s, December 1679 or January 1680), an adaptation of Henry VI, Part III; William Whitaker’s The Conspiracy (Duke’s, March 1680); Otway’s The Souldiers Fortune ( June 1680). 4. IV. ii. 9–10, in Four Jacobean City Comedies, ed. Gamini Salgado (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975). 5. See Owen, ‘ “Suspect my Loyalty” ’, p. 38; Theatre and Crisis, p. 72. 6. ‘If I was going to Tyburne, I wou’d cry Drive on Carman; and choose to Sing my Penitential Psalme at the Gallows, rather than return to say, For Better for Worse’ (The Careless Lovers [London, 1673], I, p. 2).



Notes

Notes

7. The date of Nathaniel Lee’s The Princess of Cleve, which has elements of sex-comedy, is conjectural. Hume believes that it was written late in 1681 or early the following year (‘The Satiric Design of Nat. Lee’s The Princess of Cleve’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 75 [1976], 117–38 [pp. 118–23], repr. in Robert D. Hume, The Rakish Stage: Studies in English Drama, 1660–1800 [Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983], pp. 111–37 [pp. 114–18]). 8. If the conjectural dating of Rover II’s première is right. 9. Newdigate newsletters, 29 Jan. 1680/1, cited under that date in The London Stage. 10. ‘Resolve to hiss as late did Popish Crew’ (l. 52). 11. Heidi Hutner and Janet Todd have recognized that Behn treats the monsters more seriously and sympathetically than Killigrew (‘Revisioning the Female Body: Aphra Behn’s The Rover, Parts I and II’, in Rereading Aphra Behn, ed. Hutner, pp. 102–20 [pp. 112–14]; Secret Life, p. 271). 12. II. i. 141, 273, 338, III. i. 130. 13. ‘Revisioning the Female Body’, pp. 116–17. 14. John Wilkins’s An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668) tried to give written signs a portability between different languages which equalled that of numbers. 15. Anne Quin, who had created Angellica, was now with the King’s Company.

7. Political Triumph 1. The date of November, proposed by The London Stage and followed in Todd’s edition (VI, 300), is probably too late. See Milhous and Hume, ‘Dating Play Premières’, p. 394. 2. Rouse’s run of luck did not hold: he was hanged in 1683. 3. Like Father, Like Son; or, The Mistaken Brothers (prob. March 1682) is lost. 4. Julia was played by Katherine Davis, of whom little is known. Her sister Clara was also played by a little-known actress, Mrs Petty. 5. ‘Fiction Feigning Femininity: False Counts and Pageant Kings in Aphra Behn’s Popish Plot Writings’, in Aphra Behn Studies, ed. Todd, pp. 50–65. 6. The titular character of Durfey’s Tory triumphalist Sir Barnaby Whigg (October/November 1681), a caricature of Shadwell, is successively prepared to become a Catholic and a Moslem, and indeed to raise a revolt in favour of the Grand Signior. This illustrates his unprincipled opportunism. Behn’s point is rather different, and subtler. 7. On female husbands in this period, see Emma Donoghue, Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668–1801 (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 63–4. 8. She afterwards implies that no intercourse took place. It is, of course, meaningless to speculate about what ‘really’ happened, but Behn on a number of occasions puts characters in bed together and then declares that everything was innocent. 9. This scene is well discussed in Elizabeth Bennett Kubek, ‘ “Night Mares of the Commonwealth”: Royalist Passion and Female Ambition in Aphra Behn’s The Roundheads’, Restoration, 17 (1993), 88–103 (pp. 96–7).



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213

10. The Kings Cabinet Opened; or, Certain Packets of Secret Letters & Papers, Written with the Kings own Hand, and Taken in his Cabinet at Naseby-Field (London, 1645), p. 43. 11. ‘I have flatter’d Ireton, by telling him, Providence brought things about, when ’twas mere knavery all’ (I. i. 317–18). 12. The subtlest study of the relationship between state politics and sexual politics in this play is Kubek, ‘ “Night Mares of the Commonwealth” ’. 13. In an interesting discussion of the prevalence of economic language in The Feign’d Curtizans and The City-Heiress, Mark Lussier notes that, in the latter play, ‘Whig and Tory alike negotiate transactions by the same phallocentric code’ (‘ “The Vile Merchandize of Fortune”: Women, Economy, and Desire in Aphra Behn’, Women’s Studies, 18 [1990], 379–93 [p. 389]). 14. For example, Goodvile in Otway’s Friendship in Fashion (1678), and the protagonist of Shadwell’s version of the Don Juan story, The Libertine (1675). 15. See S. J. Wiseman, Aphra Behn (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996), p. 40. 16. The Man of Mode, ed. W. B. Carnochan, Regents Restoration Drama Series (London: Edward Amold, 1967), II. ii. 158–9. Dorimant is quoting from Matthew Roydon’s elegy on the death of Sir Philip Sidney. 17. Markley, ‘ “Be Impudent, Be Saucy” ’, p. 131; Owen, ‘Sexual Politics and Party Politics’, pp. 23–4. 18. There is some critical uncertainty on this point. Nancy Copeland, for example, believes that Sir Charles simply spends the night in her lodgings in order to incriminate her (‘ “Who Can . . . Her Own Wish Deny?”: Female Conduct and Politics in Aphra Behn’s The City-Heiress’, Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research, 2nd series, 8:1 [1993], 27–49 [p. 40]). 19. The Adelphi plot was also to be used by the Whig Shadwell in The Squire of Alsatia (1688). Here, the contrast between the tyrannical father and the kindly uncle indicates that authority is not inherited but earned, and conditional. 20. For example, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, 3 vols (Oxford, 1759), II, 40. 21. Hutton, Charles II, p. 419. A more compliant city administration was to be elected in June 1682. 22. These are the anonymous Mr Turbulent (October 1681), Durfey’s Sir Barnaby Whigg (October/November 1681) and his The Royalist ( January 1682).

8. Dearth and Famine 1. E.g. in Warren Chernaik’s otherwise excellent Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 162. 2. See Robert Adams Day, ‘Aphra Behn and the Works of the Intellect’, in Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), pp. 372–82. 3. Todd, Secret Life, p. 325. 4. The heroine subsidizes the hero through an apparently demonic intermediary in Dryden’s The Wild Gallant, to which there are close verbal debts. The first assignation of Gayman and Julia, with the demonic paraphernalia, is taken from Shirley’s The Lady of Pleasure. A hero returns from abroad to



Notes

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

Notes discover his beloved married to an elderly Whig in Otway’s The Souldiers Fortune; like Belmour, he eventually appears to the husband in the guise of a ghost. At one point, Bredwel re-enacts an incident from The CountryWife (1675), courting Diana under Bearjest’s nose and duping Bearjest into thinking that he is speaking for him. The gambling away of a wife’s favours is taken from Shirley’s The Gamester, though in Shirley the adultery is averted. Gallagher draws attention to the emphasis on Julia’s nothingness, explaining it by the wife’s worthlessness as a commodity and arguing that Julia is ‘made into a commodity because she is not one’ (Nobody’s Story, p. 45). This seems to me to get things the wrong way round. As I argue below, Behn treats all economic exchanges as mysterious and illusory transformations of nothing. In The Wild Gallant the pseudo-Devil is not a go-between but rather a satiric image of the rich gentry. See above, Chapter 5, note 43. She steals ‘five hundred Ginneys’ (III. i. 280). Until 1717, a guinea was worth a pound. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997), p. 26. The London Stage 1660–1800, Part 2: 1700–1729, ed. Emmett L. Avery (1960), 500. Aphra Behn, ‘The Rover’, ‘The Feigned Courtesans’, ‘The Lucky Chance’, ‘The Emperor of the Moon’, ed. Jane Spencer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xxii. Judith Milhous, ‘The Multimedia Spectacular on the Restoration Stage’, in British Theatre and the Other Arts, 1660–1800, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny (Washington: The Folger Shakespeare Library; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1984), pp. 41–66 (p. 56).

9. ‘Tho she is now no more’ 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

Prologue to The Younger Brother, l. 40. See Todd, Secret Life, 315–19. Not of bodily discharge, as Todd suggests (Works, VII, 461). IV. i. 41–2, in The Works of John Dryden, XII. IV. i. 296–8, in The Works of John Dryden, XIII. III. ii. 88–9, in The Norton Shakespeare. 20 January 1669. He was also unimpressed on 11 September 1661 and 6 January 1663. For the question of how well Shakespearean texts were known, see Robert D. Hume, ‘Before the Bard: “Shakespeare” in Early Eighteenth-Century London’, ELH, 64 (1997), 41–75. I. v. 214–18, in The Norton Shakespeare. Her first husband, the actor William Mountfort, was murdered in 1692. See Todd, Secret Life, pp. 384–5. Such replication has also been discussed, very perceptively, by Margarete Rubik in ‘Estranging the Familiar, Familiarising the Strange: Self and Other in Oroonoko and The Widdow Ranter’, in Aphra Behn: Identity, Alterity,



214

12. 13.

14.

15.

215

Ambiguity, ed. Mary Ann O’Donnell, Bernard Dhuicq, and Guyonne Leduc (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), pp. 33–41. L’Estrange, The Free-born Subject; or, the Englishmans Birthright (London, 1680), p. 2. The Interest of the Three Kingdom’s with respect to the Business of the Black Box (London, 1680), pp. 17, 8. (This is anonymous. It was also published, and attributed to L’Estrange by Wing, as The State and Interest of the Nation, With respect to His Royal Highness the Duke of York [London, 1680].) ‘Spectacular Deaths: History and Story in Aphra Behn’s Love Letters, Oroonoko and The Widdow Ranter’, in Janet Todd, Gender, Art and Death (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), pp. 32–62 (pp. 49–58). A stranger-lover is responsible for the death of the woman he seduces in The Dumb Virgin, a novella published (perhaps spuriously) under Behn’s name in 1700.

Conclusion 1. The Works of John Dryden, XIV, 100. 2. For Behn’s posthumous reputation, see Janet Todd, The Critical Fortunes of Aphra Behn (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998); Jane Spencer, ‘The Rover and the Eighteenth Century’, in Aphra Behn Studies, ed. Todd, pp. 84–106. Behn has found an excellent and meticulous bibliographer in Mary Ann O’Donnell (Aphra Behn: an Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources [New York and London: Garland, 1986]). 3. An Adaptation of ‘The Rover’, ed. Simon Trussler (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 5. 4. Barton’s production is analysed in Jessica Munns, ‘Barton and Behn’s The Rover; Or, The Text Transpos’d’, Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research, 2nd series, 3.2 (1988), 11–22. (Munns uses the published text rather than the promptbook.) 5. I am indebted to Jessica Munns for information about the genesis of this production.



Notes

Primary texts B., A., Covent Garden Drollery, ed. G. Thorn-Drury (London: Dobell, 1928) Behn, Aphra, The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Montague Summers, 6 vols (London and Stratford-upon-Avon; Heinemann and Bullen, 1915) —— The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols (London: Pickering, 1992–96) —— An Adaptation of ‘The Rover’, ed. Simon Trussler (London: Methuen, 1986) —— ‘The Rover’, ‘The Feigned Courtesans’, ‘The Lucky Chance’, ‘The Emperor of the Moon’, ed. Jane Spencer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) Boyle, Roger, Earl of Orrery, The Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, ed. William Smith Clark II, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937) Cibber, Colley, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber . . . Written by Himself, ed. B. R. S. Fone (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968) Clifford, Arthur (ed.), Tixall Letters, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1815) —— (ed.), Tixall Poetry (Edinburgh, 1813) Danchin, Pierre, The Prologues and Epilogues of the Restoration, 1660–1700, 4 parts, 7 vols (Nancy, 1981–88) Davenant, Sir William, Davenant’s ‘Macbeth’ from the Yale Manuscript, ed. Christopher Spencer (New Haven, 1961) Dekker, Thomas, The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953–61) Downes, John, Roscius Anglicanus, ed. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1987) [Drake, Judith], An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (London, 1696) Dryden, John, The Works of John Dryden, gen. ed. Edward Niles Hooker and others, 20 vols in progress (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1956– ). Etherege, Sir George, The Man of Mode, ed. W. B. Carnochan, Regents Restoration Drama Series (London: Edward Arnold, 1967) Gould, Robert, A Satyrical Epistle to the Female Author of a Poem, call’d ‘Silvia’s Revenge’ (London, 1691) Graham, Richard, Angliæ Speculum Morale: the Moral State of England (London, 1670) Hickes, George, A Discourse of the Soveraign Power, in a Sermon Preached at St. Mary Le Bow, Nov. 28. 1682 (London, 1682) Hobbes, Thomas, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 11 vols (London, 1839–45; repr. Aalen: Scientia, 1966) ——– Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, 3 vols (Oxford, 1759) The Kings Cabinet Opened; or, Certain Packets of Secret Letters & Papers, Written with the Kings own Hand, and Taken in his Cabinet at Naseby-Field (London, 1645) 216



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La Calprenède, Gauthier de Costes, Sieur de, Hymen’s Præludia, or Love’s MasterPiece. Being the Six Last Parts of that so much admired Romance, entituled Cleopatra, trans. J[ohn] C[oles] and I. D. (London, 1663) Langbaine, Gerard, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691) L’Estrange, Roger, The Free-born Subject; or, the Englishmans Birthright (London, 1680) —— The Interest of the Three Kingdom’s with respect to the Business of the Black Box (London, 1680) —— The State and Interest of the Nation, With respect to His Royal Highness the Duke of York (London, 1680) Maxwell, John, Sacro-sancta Regum Majestas; or, The Sacred and Royall Prerogative of Christian Kings (Oxford, 1644) Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, Montaigne’s Essays, trans John Florio (Everyman’s Library, 3 vols (London: Dent; New York: Dulton, 1965) Otway, Thomas, The Works of Thomas Otway, ed. J. C. Ghosh, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932) Pepys, Samuel, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London: Bell, 1970–83) Poulain de la Barre, François, The Woman as Good as the Man; or, the Equallity of Both Sexes, trans. A. L. (London, 1677) Ramesay, William [‘William Seymar’], Coniugium Coniurgium (London, 1673) Ramesay, William, The Gentlemans Companion (London, 1672) Salgado, Gamini (ed.), Four Jacobean City Comedies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975) Shadwell, Thomas, The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers, 5 vols (London: Nonesuch, 1927) Shakespeare, William, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London: Norton, 1997) South, Robert, Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions, 7 vols (Oxford, 1823) Waterhouse, Edward, The Gentlemans Monitor (London, 1665) Wilkins, John, An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668)

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Adorno, Theodor W., 168, 214 ch. 8, n. 9 Albemarle, Duke of. See Monck, George Alleman, Gellert Spence, 209 n. 22 Angel, Edward, 37, 44. See also Appendix Aristotle, 9, 10 Arlington, Earl of. See Bennet, Henry Arrowsmith, Joseph, The Reformation, caricatures Dryden, 208 n. 4 Arundel, Earl of. See Howard, Henry Astell, Mary, 5 Aston, Herbert, 202 n. 6 Avery, Emmet L. See The London Stage 1660–1800

Garden Drollery, 207 n. 1; Debauchee, The, 80–1, 194. See also Appendix early life, 4–5 influenced by Hobbes, 9, 47, 49, 62, 99, 115, 203 n. 22 in Low Countries, 4–5, 54, 81 materialism, 47, 62, 69, 115, 169 mocks Henry More, 47, 101 political allegiances, 11, 15, 25, 46, 66–7, 69, 83–4, 123, 133–4, 147, 148, 155–6, 174, 190, 193 poverty in mid-1680s, 159 sources and influences: Boyle, Roger, Earl of Orrery, The Generall, 31–2; Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, La Vida es sueño, 18–19, 20, 23, 29; Cervantes, Miguel Saavedra de, Don Quixote, 42; Dryden, John, The Wild Gallant, 213 n. 4, 214 ch. 8, n. 6; Dryden, John, and Sir Robert Howard, The Indian Queen, 30–2; Fatouville, Nolant de, Arlecchino, imperatore nella luna, 170; Howard, Sir Robert, The Committee, 139; Killigrew, Thomas, Thomaso, or The Wanderer, 81–5, 95–6, 122, 124, 125, 212 n. 11; La Calprenède, Gauthier de Costes, Sieur de, Cleopatra, 19; Lust’s Dominion, 56–7, 58, 59, 60–5, 68, 95; Marston, John, The Dutch Courtesan, 70, 116–22; Massinger, Philip, The Guardian, 147, 152; Middleton, Thomas, A Mad World My Masters, 147, 148; Molière, Les Femmes savantes, 96–7, 103, Le Malade imaginaire, 96–7, Les Précieuses ridicules, 134; Otway, Thomas, The Souldiers Fortune,

Bacon, Nathaniel, 181, 184, 188, 191 Baggs, Zachary, 159 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 85, 99 Ballaster, Ros, 136 Bandele, ’Biyi, Oroonoko, 195 Barreca, Regina, 201 n. 1 Barry, Elizabeth, 110, 117, 125, 132, 150, 180, 211 n. 41. See also Appendix Barthelemey, Anthony Gerard, 208 n. 13 Barton, John, production of The Rover, 194–5 Behn, Aphra alludes to: Dryden, 47–8, 90–1, 98, 107, 176–7; Etherege, 75, 149; Ravenscroft, 121; Shadwell, 107; Shakespeare, 179–80 attacks Shadwell, 48–9, 123, 136 criticizes Monmouth, and ordered to be arrested, 158 death, 193 deplores execution of Viscount Stafford, 147 dubious works: Counterfeit Bridegroom, The, 81; Covent 222



Index

Behn, Aphra – continued sources and influences – continued 213–14 n. 4; Shakespeare, William, Othello, 30, 35; Shirley, James, The Gamester, 214 ch. 8, n. 4, The Lady of Pleasure, 213 n. 4; Tatham, John, The Rump, 139– 47; Terence, Adelphi, 152–3; Wilkins, George, The Miseries of Inforst Marriage, 71–2; Wycherley, William, The PlainDealer, 177–80 translates La Rochefoucauld and Fontenelle, 159 works: Abdelazer, 56–70, 71, 84, 93, 95, 106, 115, 119, 137, 156–7, 187, 194, 211 n. 42. See also Appendix; Amorous Prince, The, 13, 16, 39–45, 47, 54, 75, 111, 205 n. 8, 206 nn. 14, 16. See also Appendix; City-Heiress, The, 70, 109, 133–4, 147–57, 187–8, 194, 210 n. 26, 213 n. 13. See also Appendix; Congratulatory Poem to her Sacred Majesty Queen Mary, 193; Counterfeit Bridegroom, The. See under dubious works; Covent Garden Drollery. See under dubious works; Debauchee, The. See under dubious works; Discovery of New Worlds, A, 159; Dumb Virgin, The, 215 n. 15; Dutch Lover, The, 46, 47–56, 57, 62, 64, 84, 101, 107, 111, 115, 149–50, 201 n. 6. See also Appendix; Emperor of the Moon, The, 13, 49, 158, 170–3, 194. See also Appendix; Fair Jilt, The, 132, 176, 181; False Count, The, 123, 133–9, 179, 190, 194. See also Appendix; Feign’d Curtizans, The, 108–15, 116, 120, 122, 125, 129, 147, 171, 176, 213 n. 13. See also Appendix; Forc’d Marriage, The, 5, 13, 15, 16, 30–9, 44, 47, 51, 53, 64, 70, 77, 78, 100, 107,

223

116, 161, 182, 189, 205 n. 8, 206 n. 16. See also Appendix; Golden Age, The, 207 n. 14; History of Oracles, The, 159; History of the Nun, The, 176, 197; Like Father, Like Son, 211 n. 39, 212 n. 3. See also Appendix; Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister, 132, 159, 176; Luckey Chance, The, 17, 158–70, 172–3, 176, 179, 188, 189, 190, 193, 194, 195, 211 n. 43. See also Appendix; Oroonoko, 4, 11, 30, 84, 159, 171, 174, 175, 181, 192, 194; Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet, A, 193; political odes, 11, 174; prologue and epilogue to Romulus and Hersilia, 158; Revenge, The, 70, 116–22, 194. See also Appendix; Roundheads, The, 109, 133–4, 139–47, 150, 155, 190. See also Appendix; Rover, The, 12, 17, 70, 79, 81–96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 117, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129, 139, 149, 152, 155, 158, 170, 171, 178, 179, 184, 187, 189, 193, 194–5, 201 n. 6, 204 n. 31. See also Appendix; Rover, The, Part II, 108, 116, 122–32, 133, 134, 136–7, 150, 167–8, 171, 176, 193; Seneca Unmasqued, 159; Sir Patient Fancy, 12, 13, 96–108, 109, 114, 117, 119, 122, 129, 131, 135, 152, 161, 188, 192, 201 n. 6. See also Appendix; ‘To the Author of the New Utopia’, 6; ‘To the fair Clarinda’, 207 n. 13; Town-Fopp, The, 70–9, 80, 81, 89, 96, 100, 109–10, 112, 118, 187. See also Appendix; Widdow Ranter, The, 1–2, 11, 35, 84, 171, 175, 181–91, 192. See also Appendix; Younger Brother, The,



Index

Index

Behn, Aphra – continued works – continued 4, 9, 174–80, 181, 214 n. 1. See also Appendix; Young King, The, 4, 14–29, 30, 39, 40, 44, 50, 56, 64, 70, 86, 116, 122, 145, 146, 179, 182, 189, 205 n. 8, 206 n. 14. See also Appendix Bennet, Henry, Earl of Arlington, 206 n. 5 Berkeley, Sir William, 181 Betterton, Mary, 37. See also Appendix Betterton, Thomas, 37, 40, 84, 106, 111, 117, 149, 175, 180, 194, 202 n. 9, 207 n. 6. See also Appendix Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses . . . 1660–1800, A, 197, 199, 200, 202–3 n. 9 Boebel, Dagny, 210 n. 12 Boisrobert, François le Métel de, 205 n. 9 Boothby, Frances, 5, 15, 44–5 Bowers, Fredson, 208 n. 11 Bowman, John. See Appendix Boyle, Roger, Earl of Orrery, 5, 42, 206 n. 3 Generall, The, 16–17; influences The Forc’d Marriage, 31–2 Guzman, 205 n. 5 Mr Anthony, 205 n. 5 Mustapha, 45 Bracegirdle, Anne, 182, 208 n. 12. See also Appendix Brathwait, Richard, 6 Brewer, Anthony or Thomas, The Countrie Girle, 209 n. 1 Bright, George. See Appendix Brome, Richard, A Mad Couple Well Match’d, adapted as The Debauchee, 80–1 Buckingham, Duke of. See Villiers, George Burnet, Gilbert, 193 Burnim, Kalman A. See A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses . . . 1660–1800 Butler, Charlotte, 117. See also Appendix

Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, La Vida es sueño, adapted by Behn, 18–19, 20, 23, 29 Canfield, J. Douglas, 203 n. 11 Carlisle, Earl of. See Howard, Charles Caryll, John, Sir Salomon, 209 n. 20 Case, Sue-Ellen, 207 n. 9 Castlemaine, Countess of. See Villiers, Barbara Catherine of Braganza, Queen of England, 14, 65 Catullus, 211 n. 33 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, 5, 205 n. 6 Cavendish, William, Duke of Newcastle Heiress, The, 205 n. 5 Humorous Lovers, The, erroneously attributed to Margaret Cavendish, 5 Centlivre, Susanna, 11 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, Don Quixote, used by Behn, 42 Chapman, George, Bussy D’Ambois, condemned by Dryden, 192 Charles I, 7, 144–5, 184 Charles II, 14, 15, 45–6, 65, 83, 108, 117, 122–3, 155, 158, 209 n. 15 death, 158 dissolves Oxford Parliament, 122–3, 133 restoration, 12, 139 prosecutes defeated Whigs, 133 theatrical allusions to, 7, 14, 16, 19, 25, 32, 44–5, 46, 139, 159 Chernaik, Warren, 213 n. 1 Cibber, Colley Apology, 194, 210 nn. 10, 21, 25 Love’s Last Shift, 180 Clarendon, Earl of. See Hyde, Edward Cleveland, Duchess of. See Villiers, Barbara Clifford, Arthur, 202 n. 6 Colepepper, Thomas, 4 Collier, Jeremy, 170 Congreve, William Double-Dealer, The, 200 Love for Love, 200



224

Congreve, William – continued Old Batchelour, The, 175 Way of the World, The, 197, 198, 200 Cooke, Sarah. See Appendix Cooper, Anthony Ashley, First Earl of Shaftesbury, 108, 133, 136, 148, 155, 208 n. 15 Copeland, Nancy, 209 n. 7, 213 n. 18 Corey, Katherine, 170. See also Appendix Corneille, Pierre, translated by Katherine Philips, 5 Cottington, Elizabeth, 202 n. 6 Cromwell, Oliver, 11, 139 treatment in Behn’s The Roundheads, 140, 141, 142 Cromwell, Richard, treatment in Behn’s The Roundheads, 140 Crosby, John. See Appendix Crowne, John, 193 City Politiques, 156 Misery of Civil-War, The, 211 n. 3 Currer, Elizabeth, 97, 110, 125, 131, 132, 134, 148, 182 Danchin, Pierre, 202 n. 5, 208 n. 4 Davenant, Henrietta Maria du Tremblay, Lady, 5, 202–3 n. 9 Davenant, Sir William, 12 Law against Lovers, The, 206 n. 1 Macbeth, 7, 197, 205 n. 10 Davies, Godfrey, 210 n. 27 Davis, Katherine, 212 n. 4 Day, John. See Lust’s Dominion Day, Robert Adams, 213 n. 2 Dekker, Thomas. See Lust’s Dominion Denham, Sir John, 5 DeRitter, Jones, 209 n. 5, 210 n. 9 Desborough, John, satirized by Tatham and Behn, 139, 143 Descartes, René, 192, 204 n. 26 Diamond, Elin, 202 n. 7, 203 n. 11, 210 n. 16 Donoghue, Emma, 212 ch. 7, n. 7 Downes, John, 38–9, 110, 147 Drake, Judith, 9–10

225

Dryden, John, 2, 6, 11, 48, 49, 56, 176, 193, 202 n. 7, 203 n. 22 satirized, 48, 207 n. 4 works: Albion and Albanius, 12–13, 159, 171; All for Love, echoed by Behn, 177; Amboyna, 46; Amphitryon, 185; Assignation, The, 48, 56; Aureng-Zebe, quoted by Behn, 176–7; Conquest of Granada, The, 207–8 n. 4, mentioned or quoted by Behn, 47–8, 90–1, 107; Evening’s Love, An, 15, 85–6, 92; Indian Emperour, The, 45, quoted by Behn, 98, 107; Indian Queen, The (with Sir Robert Howard), 205 n. 10, influences The Forc’d Marriage, 30–2; Kind Keeper, The, 107–8; Limberham. See The Kind Keeper; Marriage A-la-Mode, 54–5, 56, 70, 207 n. 4; Prologue to Shadwell, A True Widow, 1–2, 201 n. 2; Spanish Fryar, The, 192, 211 n. 38; State of Innocence, The, 192; Troilus and Cressida, 109, 200; Wild Gallant, The, influences The Luckey Chance, 213 n. 4, 214 ch. 8, n. 6 Duffy, Maureen, 202 n. 7, 206 n. 17, 209 n. 8, 211 n. 40 Durfey, Thomas, 2, 56, 116, 155, 193 Fool’s Preferment, A, condemned for obscenity, 169–70 Madam Fickle, 10, 56 Royalist, The, 133, 213 n. 22; debt to Sir Robert Howard, The Committee, 139 Sir Barnaby Whigg, 156, 212 n. 6, 213 n. 22 Trick for Trick, 149 Virtuous Wife, The, 109, 116 Elstob, Elizabeth, 7 Etherege, Sir George, 10 Comical Revenge, The, 148; recalled in The Revenge, 121



Index

Index

Etherege, Sir George – continued Man of Mode, The, 2, 71, 81, 90, 106, 197, 198, 200; influence on Behn, 84, 149 She Would If She Could, 15, 207 n. 6; recalled in The Town-Fopp, 75 Exclusion Crisis, 7, 11, 65, 109, 116, 117, 120, 122–3, 133, 158, 185 Fane, Sir Francis, Love in the Dark, 184 Farquhar, George, 11 Beaux Stratagem, The, 200 Fatouville, Nolant de, Arlecchino, imperatore nella luna, adapted by Behn, 170 Finch, Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, 4 Flecknoe, Richard, 202 n. 7 Fleetwood, Charles, satirized by Tatham and Behn, 139 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de, translated by Behn, 159 Franceschina, John, 201 n. 6 Freeman, John. See Appendix Friendly Vindication of Mr Dryden, The, 208 n. 4 Gallagher, Catherine, 1–2, 165, 167, 203 n. 11, 213 ch. 8, n. 5 Genest, John, 81 Gildon, Charles, 4, 174–5 Goldoni, Carlo, 170 Gould, Robert, 5–6, 9 Grabu, Luis, Albion and Albanius, 12–13, 159, 171 Graham, Richard, later Viscount Preston, 6–7, 8 Green, Susan, 201 n. 6 Gwyn, Nell, 15, 71, 110, 205 n. 4 Harris, Henry, 202 n. 9. See also Appendix Harris, Joseph. See Appendix Hart, Charles, 15, 71 Haughton, William. See Lust’s Dominion Hawkesworth, John, 195 Haydn, Joseph, 170

Henrietta Maria, Queen of England, 145 Hickes, George, 7–8 Highfill, Philip H., Jr., See A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses . . . 1660–1800 Hobbes, Thomas, 8–9, 11, 47, 49, 99, 115, 192–3, 203 n. 22 Hobby, Elaine, 202 n. 8, 203 n. 14 Holland, Earl of. See Rich, Henry Holland, Peter, 199–200, 201 n. 6, 210 n. 21 Holles, Denzil, Lord, 208 n. 15 Homer, 103–4, 107 Horkheimer, Max, 214 ch. 8, n. 9 Howard, Charles, Earl of Carlisle, 208–9 n. 15 Howard, Edward Six Days Adventure, The, 6, 17 Womens Conquest, The, 17 Howard, Henry, Earl of Arundel, dedicatee of The City-Heiress, 147 Howard, Sir Robert Committee, The, 142, 155, 205 n. 10; influences Behn, The Roundheads, and Durfey, The Royalist, 139 Great Favourite, The, 14–15, 208 n. 8 Indian Queen, The (with Dryden), 30–2, 205 n. 10 Howard, William, Viscount Stafford, 122, 147 Howe, Elizabeth, 203 n. 9, 211 n. 41 Hoyle, John, 56 Hughes, Derek, 201 n. 3, 202 n. 5, 205 n. 1, 206 n. 14, 207 n. 2, 209 n. 16 Hughes, Margaret. See Appendix Hume, Robert D., 201 n. 5, 202 n. 5, 204 nn. 29, 30, 31, 205 n. 8, 208 n. 5, 209 n. 2, 211 nn. 2, 37, 212 ch. 6, n. 7, ch. 7, n. 1, 214 ch. 9, n. 7 Hutner, Heidi, 130, 201 n. 2, 212 n. 11 Hutton, Ronald, 14, 208 n. 6, 213 n. 21 Hyde, Anne, Duchess of York, 14, 15



226

Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 14–15, 54, 208 n. 8, 213 n. 20 James, Duke of York, later James II, 7, 11, 14, 15, 45–6, 65, 83, 108–9, 116, 117, 122, 158, 175, 184, 193, 209 n. 15. See also Exclusion Crisis dedicatee of The Rover, Part II, 123, 193 deposed, 7, 45, 174, 188 exile during Exclusion Crisis, 108, 116, 117, 122 Jennings, Mrs, 207 n. 6 Jevon, Thomas, 118, 170. See also Appendix Devil of a Wife, The, 197 Johnson, Bartholomew, 4 Jones, Jane, 202 n. 4 Jonson, Ben, 48 Volpone, 190 Kemble, John Philip, 80 Killigrew, Thomas, 12 Thomaso, or The Wanderer, 199; adapted by Behn, 81–5, 95–6, 122, 124, 125, 212 n. 11 Kings Cabinet Opened, The, 145 Knight, Frances Maria, 180, 182. See also Appendix Kubek, Elizabeth Bennett, 212 ch. 7, n. 9, 213 n. 12 Kynaston, Edward. See Appendix La Calprenède, Gauthier de Costes, Sieur de Cleopatra, 19 Lambert, John, satirized by Tatham and Behn, 139, 141–2 Langbaine, Gerard, 80, 95, 201 n. 2 Langhans, Edward A., See A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses . . . 1660–1800 Laqueur, Thomas, 203 n. 22 La Rochefoucauld, François, Duc de, translated by Behn, 159 Leacroft, Richard, 204 n. 31 Leanerd, John, The Country Innocence, 80, 197

227

Lee, John. See Appendix Lee, Mary, 37, 111, 158, 211 n. 42. See also Appendix Lee, Nathaniel, 6 Lucius Junius Brutus, 123 Princess of Cleve, The, 212 ch. 6, n. 7 Theodosius, 207 n. 10 Tragedy of Nero, The, 46 Leigh, Anthony, 100, 110, 118, 134, 152, 170. See also Appendix Leigh, Elinor, 97. See also Appendix Leigh, Richard, 208 n. 4 Lennep, William Van. See The London Stage 1660–1800 L’Estrange, Sir Roger, 185, 188 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 205 n. 7 Lewcock, Dawn, 201 n. 6 London Stage 1660–1800, The, 202 n. 5, 212 ch. 6, n. 9, ch. 7, n. 1, 214 ch. 8, n. 10 Louis XIV, King of France, 123 Lussier, Mark, 213 n. 13 Lust’s Dominion, adapted by Behn, 56–7, 58, 59, 60–5, 68, 95 Maguire, Nancy Klein, 204–5 n. 1 Makin, Bathsua, 5 Markley, Robert, 209–10 n. 9, 213 n. 17 Marshall, Anne. See Quin, Anne Marston, John, The Dutch Courtesan, adapted by Behn, 70, 116–22 Martin, George, 175 Mary II. See Mary, Princess Mary of Modena, Duchess of York, afterwards Queen of England, 45 Mary, Princess, later Queen Mary II, 83, 174, 193 Massaniello, 84 Massinger, Philip Guardian, The, adapted by Behn, 147, 152 New Way to Pay Old Debts, A, 190 Maxwell, John, 203 n. 18 Medbourne, Matthew, 117. See also Appendix Mendelson, Sara Heller, 203 n. 11, 208 n. 10



Index

Index

Middleton, Thomas Mad World My Masters, A, adapted by Behn, 147, 148 No Wit No Help Like a Woman’s, adapted as The Counterfeit Bridegroom, 81 Milhous, Judith, 202 n. 5, 204 nn. 29, 30, 208 n. 5, 209 nn. 2, 19, 211 n. 2, 212 n. 1, 214 n. 12 Miller, John, 45, 209 n. 15 Milton, John Paradise Lost, adapted by Dryden, 192 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 15 adapted by Wycherley, 97 Femmes savantes, Les; adapted by Behn, 96–7, 103; adapted by Thomas Wright, 97 Fourberies de Scapin, Les, adapted by Ravenscroft, 110 Malade imaginaire, Le, adapted by Behn, 96–7 Précieuses ridicules, Les, adapted by Behn, 134 Tartuffe, adapted by Shadwell, 205 n. 5 Monck, George, Duke of Albemarle, 139, 206 n. 3 Monmouth, Duke of. See Scott, James Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 100, 192 More, Henry mocked by Behn, 47, 101 Motteux, Peter, Love’s a Jest, 180 Mountfort, Susanna, 180. See also Appendix Mountfort, William, 193, 214 ch. 9, n. 9. See also Appendix Mr Turbulent, 213 n. 22 Munns, Jessica, 207 n. 14, 215 nn. 4, 5 Nash, Julie, 203 n. 11, 210 n. 16 Newcastle, Duchess of. See Cavendish, Margaret Newcastle, Duke of. See Cavendish, William

Nokes, James, 96, 107, 123, 134, 147, 148, 209 nn. 20, 21. See also Appendix Norris, Henry. See Appendix Norris, Mrs. See Appendix Oates, Titus, 108 O’Donnell, Mary Ann, 201 n. 2, 215 n. 2 Ogg, David, 209 n. 15 Olivares, Gaspar de Guzmán, Conde-Duque de, 54–5 Orrery, Earl of. See Boyle, Roger Osborn, Margaret. See Appendix Otway, Thomas, 2, 6, 39, 52 death, 159 works: Don Carlos, 56, 70, 208 n. 12; Friendship in Fashion, 124, 149, 213 n. 14; Souldiers Fortune, The, 122, 131, 152, 210 n. 26, 211 n. 3, influences The Luckey Chance, 213–14 n. 4; Venice Preserv’d, 39, 152, 157, 197, 198, 200, 207 n. 10 Owen, Susan J., 116, 205 n. 11, 211 nn. 5, 40, 213 n. 17 Pacheco, Anita, 2, 210 nn. 9, 11, 19 Payne, Deborah C., 203 n. 11 Payne, Henry Neville, 2 Payne, Linda R., 210 n. 12 Pearson, Jacqueline, 2, 60, 62, 206 n. 4, 210 n. 20 Pepys, Samuel, 5, 179, 202 n. 7, 207 n. 6 Percivall, Susanna. See Mountfort, Susanna Percivall, Thomas. See Appendix Petty, Mrs, 212 n. 4 Philip IV, King of Spain, 54 Philips, Katherine, 5, 6 Plunket, Oliver, 117 Polwhele, Elizabeth, 5, 44–5 Poulain de la Barre, François, 8 Powell, George, 180, 204 n. 34. See also Appendix Powell, Mary. See Appendix Price, Mrs, 117. See also Appendix Purcell, Henry, 194, 204 n. 34



228

Quin, Anne, née Marshall, 91, 97, 211 nn. 41, 42, 212 n. 15. See also Appendix Ramesay, William, 7 Ravenscroft, Edward, 2, 6 Careless Lovers, The, 131–2, quoted in The Revenge, 121 English Lawyer, The, 112, 116 London Cuckolds, The, 116, 156 Scaramouch a Philosopher, 110, 112 Titus Andronicus, 116 Wrangling Lovers, The, 211 n. 43 Rich, Christopher, 175, 180, 194 Rich, Henry, Earl of Holland, 145 Richards, John. See Appendix Rochester, Earl of. See Wilmot, John Romulus and Hersilia, 158 Rosenthal, Laura J., 209 n. 5 Rouse, Francis, 133 Roydon, Matthew, 213 n. 16 Rubik, Margarete, 214 ch. 9, n. 11 Rubin, Gayle, 205 n. 7 Sandford, Samuel, 182. See also Appendix Scarron, Paul, Le Roman comique, 112 Scott (or Crofts), James, Duke of Monmouth and Buccleuch, 108, 122, 136, 158, 181, 188 executed, 158 invades England, 158, 159 Scouten, Arthur H. See The London Stage 1660–1800 Sedley, Sir Charles, 10 Bellamira, condemned for obscenity, 169–70 Mulberry Garden, The, 153 Seneca, 159 Settle, Elkanah, 65 Cambyses, 46 Empress of Morocco, The, 57, 198 Shadwell, Thomas, 2, 6, 15, 49, 56, 190, 193 mocked by Behn, 48–9, 123, 136 satirized by Durfey, 212 n. 6 works: Epsom-Wells, 48–9, 57, 107; History of Timon of Athens, The, 66–7; Humorists, The, 48,

229

caricatures Dryden, 208 n. 4; Hypocrite, The, 205 n. 5; Lancashire Witches, The, 122, 123, 136; Libertine, The, 213 n. 14; Royal Shepherdesse, The, 207 n. 3; Squire of Alsatia, The, 185, 213 n. 19; Sullen Lovers, The, 207 n. 3; Timon of Athens. See History of Timon of Athens, The; True Widow, A, 1–2, 107; Virtuoso, The, quoted by Behn, 107; Woman-Captain, The, 131–2 Shakespeare, William adapted by Davenant, 11 works: Hamlet, 66; Henry VI, Part III, adapted by Crowne, 211 n. 3; Julius Caesar, 197; King Lear, 66, adapted by Tate, 200; Macbeth, adapted by Davenant, 7, 197, 205 n. 10; Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 200; Much Ado About Nothing, 30, 35, 36, 177, adapted by Davenant, 206 n. 1; Othello, influences The Forc’d Marriage, 30, 35; Richard II, adapted by Tate, 123; Richard III, 200; Tempest, The, 29; Timon of Athens, adapted by Shadwell, 66–7; Titus Andronicus, 56–7, adapted by Ravenscroft, 116; Troilus and Cressida, 102, adapted by Dryden, 109, 200; Twelfth Night, 84, influence on Wycherley and Behn, 177–80, reception in Restoration, 179; Winter’s Tale, The, 35, 36 Shell, Alison, 211 n. 40 Shirley, James Gamester, The, influences The Luckey Chance, 214 ch. 8, n. 4 Lady of Pleasure, The, influences The Luckey Chance, 213 n. 4 Slingsby, Lady. See Lee, Mary Smith, John Harrington, 15 Smith, William, 37, 84, 106, 111, 117, 134, 149. See also Appendix South, Robert, 9, 13, 97–8



Index

Index

Southern, Richard, 201 n. 6, 204 n. 29 Southerne, Thomas Fatal Marriage, The, 194, 196–7 Oroonoko, 175, 194 Sir Anthony Love, 175, 194 Spencer, Jane, 2, 169, 211 n. 40, 214 ch. 8, n. 11, 215 n. 2 Stafford, Viscount. See Howard, William Stapylton, Sir Robert, The Step-Mother, 205 n. 10 Staves, Susan, 203 n. 20, 211 n. 36 Steele, Sir Richard, 11 Strafford, Earl of. See Wentworth, Thomas Summers, Montague, 207 n. 12 Szigalyi, Stephen, 209 n. 8, 210 n. 9

Verbruggen, John, 180, 182, 204 n. 34. See also Appendix Verbruggen, Susanna. See Mountfort, Susanna Villiers, Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine and Duchess of Cleveland, 14 Villiers, George, Second Duke of Buckingham, 108 Rehearsal, The, 205 n. 8, 207–8 n. 4 Virgil, 191 Visser, Colin, 204 nn. 29, 32

Underhill, Cave, 84, 123, 170. See also Appendix Urfé, Honoré d’, 205 n. 12

Waterhouse, Edward, 7 Wentworth, Thomas, Earl of Strafford, 54 Wharton, Anne, 6 Whitaker, William, The Conspiracy, 211 n. 3 Wilkins, George, The Miseries of Inforst Marriage, adapted by Behn, 71–2 Wilkins, John, 212 n. 14 William of Orange, later William III, 83, 174, 193 Williams, Joseph, 117, 124, 132, 181. See also Appendix Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester, 166 Wiltshire, John. See Appendix Winchilsea, Countess of. See Finch, Anne Wiseman, S. J., 213 n. 15 Woman Turn’d Bully, The, 56 Woodcock, George, 203 n. 11 Wright, Mrs, 207 n. 6 Wright, Thomas, The Female Vertuoso’s, 97 Wycherley, William, 203 n. 22 Country-Wife, The, 2, 49, 57, 71, 74, 97 Love in a Wood, 15 Plain-Dealer, The, 71, 97, 197; used by Behn, 177–80

Vanbrugh, Sir John, The Provok’d Wife, 197

Young, Elizabeth V., 207 n. 14 Young, John, 207 n. 6

Tate, Nahum History of King Lear, The, 200 History of King Richard the Second, The, 123 Tatham, John, The Rump, 153, 189 adapted by Behn, 139–47 Terence, Adelphi (The Brothers), influence on Restoration Drama, 152–3 Thomas, Susie, 208 n. 13 Todd, Janet, 2, 4, 175, 186, 188, 199, 201 n. 2, 202 nn. 3, 8, 204 n. 1, 205 n. 9, 206 nn. 5, 14, 207 n. 1, 208 nn. 4, 7, 9, 13, 209 n. 6, 210 nn. 15, 17, 22, 211 n. 2, 212 nn. 1, 11, 213 n. 3, 214 ch. 9, nn. 2, 3, 10, 215 n. 2 Tonson, Jacob, 159 Trotter, Catherine, Agnes de Castro, 175



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