Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  While not referring to her, Miss Cottington’s apprehension was appropriate for Aphra Behn as she determined to present her work on the stage. One needed to be thick-skinned for public display: the female playwright could combine the opprobrium felt for the professional writer with the scorn directed at the oldest female profession, and she could quickly be seen as a new-fangled whore. Or she could simply be regarded as absurd, ‘A woman write a Play! Out upon it, out upon it, for it cannot be good, besides you say she is a lady, which is the likelyer to make the Play worse, a woman and a Lady to write a Play; fye, fye.’2

  In her period of intense theatre-going, Behn made new, play-writing friends, but few could have been women. Katherine Philips was dead. Frances Boothby, to whom Elizabeth Cottington had been referring, had put on Marcelia to little acclaim and then, along with the shadowy Elizabeth Polwhele who wrote The Faithful Virgins, died or simply disappeared. If, as seems unlikely—the idea comes from a probable error of Samuel Pepys—Margaret Cavendish had written the play performed under her husband’s name in 1667, she did not repeat the experiment; she held back from trying to get her acknowledged plays revised, made theatrical and performable with the help of a jobbing playwright, as she might have done. Perhaps she was reluctant to compete with a husband, who, after her first excursion alone into print in the early 1650s, had been publicly supportive of her unprecedented publishing. Or perhaps she was deterred by comments of a theatre manager, however obsequiously ventured: the accusation she quoted, that her plays were too serious and had no plots, sounds like a theatrical judgement.3 For one reason or another, Behn had no female fellows.

  Inevitably, the playwrights Behn came to know were men, highly educated ones, some with titles and many related to each other and connected closely to the court. As a woman without formal training Behn was therefore unusual in sex and status. With her propensity to admire the well-born and her special respect for the Howards, she was pleased to meet the arrogant, touchy Edward Howard, son of the first Earl of Berkshire and brother-in-law of Dryden. Mocked for having literary ambitions beyond his talents, he had been labelled ‘Poet Ninny’ by the new playwright at the Duke’s, Thomas Shadwell.4 Behn was probably more intimate with Edward Ravenscroft, a young gentleman of the Middle Temple who was hanging round the theatre wanting to make his mark. The two got on well and helped each other—although, inevitably, it was said that he helped her.5

  In such company, Behn pondered the purpose of plays. In his 1671 preface to Evening’s Love, Dryden claimed that audience reaction was no test of dramatic worth; pandering to public humour left him embarrassed. ‘I confess I have given too much to the people in [the play], and am ashamed for them as well as for myself, that I have pleased them at so cheap a rate.’ Such posturing annoyed Behn, who wondered what a play was for if not to please. She was even more irritated by the pronouncements of Shadwell, who, in his preface to The Sullen Lovers (1668), claimed that all dramatists should imitate the learned (and misogynous) Ben Jonson, ‘he being the onely person that appears to me to have made perfect Representations of Humane Life’; Jonson was to Shadwell ‘the man, of all the World, I most passionately admire for his Excellency in Drammatick Poetry’. Despite her friend Howard’s admiration and despite the useful play some of her eulogists could make on her two names of Behn and Johnson, Behn was far from thinking Jonson perfection, either in his humour plays or in his insistence on rules in drama.6 At this stage in her life she greatly preferred Shakespeare, of whose lack of learning much was made—to her great comfort.7

  Behn was also heartened by the boast of another playwright, Thomas Randolph, who declared, ‘I speak the language of the people.’8 For play-writing she needed knowledge not of the classics but of society. It was no doubt irritating that women could not frequent coffee houses like men, but perhaps this was no great loss. In Thomas Sydserff’s Tarugo’s Wiles: or, the Coffee-House. A Comedy, coffee vapour mounts to men’s heads, turning them into politicians and critics. In the midst of the discourse, a woman enters to drag out her husband, complaining he has left her to run their bakery and look after the children; coffee houses should be called the ‘Prating-houses’, she declares. In ‘The Women’s Petition against Coffee’ (1674), the drink makes men unfruitful—it is a ‘Ninny-broth’ and ‘Turkey-gruel’. True, news sheets were distributed or sold at coffee houses, but nothing prevented Behn from sending a servant to pick them up. In any case, she could sit in taverns and drink her bottle with whomever she wished, hear the gossip, and learn the intonation of the rake and fop.

  Killigrew may have wanted to do something for his old colleague, but perhaps both he and Behn were wary of further collaboration. Also his company at the King’s had the bulk of the old plays to perform and had less need of new ones than its rival, the Duke’s. Possibly, then, Killigrew introduced Behn to Thomas Betterton, the manager of the Duke’s, thus missing the opportunity of employing one of the most skilled and prolific playwrights of the era. Presumably Behn was unafraid of Betterton’s reputation: as a lampoon put it, ‘being cheif, each playing Drab to swive / He takes it as his Just Prerogative’.

  Sir William Davenant had been the original theatre manager of the Duke’s Company. His connections with the old pre-Interregnum theatre being stronger than Killigrew’s, he had made sure these were known by encouraging the rumour that he was Shakespeare’s natural son. Davenant remembered the dramatic ways of acting at the Blackfriars Company and, since he was a masterly teacher, his influence on his troupe was great. He died in 1668, leaving it to the management of his widow as guardian for their young son. Mary Lady Davenant was now the ruler of the Company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and this fact may initially have attracted Behn to it. Under her, the actors Thomas Betterton and Henry Harris actually managed the day-to-day operations of the theatre, with some help in stage-managing from John Downes, the prompter. Downes wrote out the individual parts in each new play, along with the cues for the actors to learn; then he controlled and ordered rehearsals with his bell and whistle.

  The actors of the Duke’s Company had to be versatile. Harris himself was a singer, possibly a scene painter, a stage manager and an actor—he also had several places at court such as Engraver of Seals and Yeoman in the Revels Office. As well as managing the theatre, the ‘brawny’ and uneducated Betterton acted constantly, establishing the major tragic roles of Shakespeare on the new stage. He presided over a troupe that included his wife Mary, an accomplished actress of Shakespearean tragic roles and a good teacher, although never as famous as her husband; the rumbunctious William Smith, who, like Betterton, had been playing since the reopening of the theatre; Mary Lee, who had just joined the company, full of potential though none as yet knew for what; and, above all, the comic actors, James Nokes, Edward Angel, and Cave Underhill.

  The later critic and actor, Colley Cibber, rhapsodised about Nokes (known to lampooners as ‘Buggering Nokes’ and famed for pursuit of ‘smock fac’d lads’ with ‘gentle Bums’9): ‘his general Excellence may be comprehended in one Article, viz a plain and palpable Simplicity of Nature.’ Nokes could provoke laughter simply by appearing gravely on the stage, and many playwrights such as Dryden wrote parts directly for him.10 Indeed Dryden’s success was once rudely explained as due to ‘old Nokes that humours it so well’, for the audience ‘bravely Clap the Actor not the Act’.11 Nokes often played with Angel, who specialised in low comedy and farce, and Dryden called the pair together ‘the best Comedians of the Age’. Meanwhile, Davenant named Underhill, who played lugubrious rustics, ‘the truest Comedian in his Company’. According to Cibber he gave to the stiff and stupid ‘the exactest and most expressive colours, and in some of them look’d as if it were not in the power of human passions to alter a feature of him.... [He was] the most lumpish, moping mortal that ever made beholders merry.’12

  What the Duke’s Company lacked was a gifted comic woman. Nell Gwyn, whom the King’s Company was about to lose, had formed the ‘gay couple’ with her first lover, Char
les Hart, a spirited and witty pair who avoided sentiment and caught the exciting hostility of sex as they bargained over terms. Their roots were in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, with Beatrice and Benedick, but the pair predominated only in the Restoration. In young George Etherege, the Duke’s Company had a playwright to do justice to the roles, but their possible actress, Moll Davis, had been removed from the stage to the King’s bed some time before Nell followed a similar route.

  It was customary to bring a play to the theatre with some sort of reference.13 Behn probably had three plays in draft, the early Young King and two new ones, The Forc’d Marriage and The Amorous Prince. She may have tried them all out on theatrical friends, perhaps Ravenscroft, who had not yet staged a play himself, or, more likely, Howard or Killigrew, who could have presented the chosen one, The Forc’d Marriage. The first reading was crucial; Behn hoped desperately that Betterton was in a receptive mood.

  All three plays were in the mode of tragicomedy, as popular in the 1660s with Dryden as in the Jacobean era with Beaumont and Fletcher. Tragicomedy was an odd segmented form, in which melodrama was followed by romance. Suitably, it was a Royalist genre, since it fed off the political drama of the death of Charles I, followed by the restoration of his son:

  Our King return’d, and banish’d Peace restor’d,

  The Muse ran mad to see her exil’d Lord;

  On the crack’d Stage the Bedlam Heroes roar’d,

  And scarce could speak one reasonable Word...14

  Increasingly aware that it was the going, not the coming style, Behn wrote in this mode. She was wary of the comedians, irritated by their tendency to intrude their developed stage characters into whatever they acted and to extend their fooling tiresomely. So she had not had them much in mind when she wrote her first plays.

  The story of The Forc’d Marriage was not complicated but, like other dramas of the time, it had multiple pairings. There were mistakes and night encounters but little intrigue in the play, which was rather lacking in tension. Yet the sex struggle was there in embryo, and a shrewd reader might have discerned Behn’s future preoccupation.

  In The Forc’d Marriage, an old king rewards a young warrior, Alcippus, with the hand of the beautiful Erminia, who is privately betrothed to his son, Prince Phillander. Erminia refuses consummation and, maddened by jealousy, Alcippus tries to strangle her, leaving her for dead. (The influence of Othello was here so strong that Behn even gave the option of suffocating in the first printed edition of the play.) Still alive, however—for this is tragicomedy not tragedy—Erminia disguises herself as a ghost in a plot to persuade Alcippus that he is penitent, that he will be less violent, and that he really loves the tolerant princess Galatea, who loves him and whom he rather ungraciously comes to accept. The old king is happy to agree to whatever the headstrong young people want and soon all correct couples are joined. The theme of forced marriage outwitted, both a conventional concern and an idiosyncratic obsession, will run throughout Behn’s dramatic career. It provided alternatives to the single legal marriage supported by parental power, which so many of her audience had complacently experienced. In the later plays, consummation might occur in the unwanted marriage to complicate the issue but, in the earlier one, it is not countenanced.

  The instability of heroic romance within tragicomedy is caught in the character of Phillander, who postures like the heroes of the French dramatist, Corneille, laboriously deciding whether to kill themselves or their rivals, betray a woman or the state. Part of the absurdity is that the heroics are all in words. The martial drama has happened before the play begins, and the scene of the hectoring is the bedroom rather than the battlefield; despite a movement towards spectacle, this was still very much an oral theatre. The most compelling male lead is the strange Alcippus, who, like Erminia herself, at times seems to desire the abasement of the royal pair, Phillander and Galatea, on whom he feeds. He represents bullying male force, which his friend Pisaro constantly begs him to control, as if he were a mad bear who would destroy himself if let loose.

  As for the women characters, they function both as simple pawns of war and as the main subjectivity of the play. Erminia, whose beauty, we learn, has caused the whole family to be raised in status, has a high sense of her ‘Quality’, and there is some tart dialogue between her and the elevated princess whose beloved has just chosen Erminia. Princess Galatea has her admirers, but all of them, including Erminia herself, agree that the greatest beauty is Erminia. Thus, when Galatea reminds her proud friend of what she was before Phillander’s love raised her, Erminia points Galatea towards her beloved’s passion for another. In other scenes, Erminia seems to relish her influence over the two powerful young men, while routinely lamenting the confusion she has caused. Yet she does share with all the women the sense of sexual warfare and, after her enforced wedding to Alcippus, she imagines the pastoral world which Behn’s female characters would so frequently fantasise. This is a realm of softness, gentleness and love, without the noise of masculine jealousy and pride or the male ideologies of honour and courage.

  Perhaps the strangest aspect of The Forc’d Marriage is the political. Considering that the disasters result from an arbitrary decree and the exaggerated advancement of favourites, the play might have been used to assault autocratic rule of the sort the Stuarts approved. There is no suggestion of this, however, and the patriarchal power simply becomes paternal and puts all right. The old king, who needs to be a tyrant to prevent anyone speaking out at the start of the play, appears in the last act as a kindly father figure, eager to leave his children happy, however far down the social scale they wish to marry.15 Although the play turns on patriarchal monarchical power, however, it fails to embody it satisfactorily. The kingdom in which the proud Erminia and Alcippus exist can have no very great hope of peace. There is even mention of the envy of the soldiers for the much rewarded Alcippus, suggesting that Behn was already aware of the dangers of men promoted too far or favoured too hugely at the expense of legitimate privilege and power. Alcippus is blustery and rude to his prince, a man whom he has thoroughly wronged. It is rather startling then when, towards the end, the old king pronounces good Stuart doctrine, saying of his son to Alcippus: ‘Who dares gaze on him with irreverend eye? / ...all his evills ’tis the Gods must punish, / Who made no Laws for Princes.’16

  There may be one or two precise if coded political allusions in The Forc’d Marriage. To the embarrassment of her father, the fury of the old queen Henrietta Maria, and the dismay of most of the court, Clarendon’s daughter Anne had persuaded the King that her impregnation by the Duke of York, heir to the throne, should result in marriage. Behn may have intended a frisson in the audience with a play that closed with two royals marrying two commoners. In her play such unions are desirable if their common elements are worthy or beautiful; so Behn might have been trying for a compliment to the Duke of York and his wife. As for Lord Arlington, still chief minister of state, she cannot have harboured pleasant feelings towards him. In her play, the cowardly Falatius tries to persuade his doubting friends that he has been in the wars by wearing patches on his face. Could she have hazarded a dig at the man who had left her so coldly in the lurch, by jesting at the display of his Civil War wound?

  Behn was not eager to put her own life and personality on the stage, but the minor character, the wild Aminta of ‘fickle humour’, is the nearest she came to the witty, comic heroine and perhaps to a selfportrait. Aware of the constructed nature of femininity and romance, Aminta advises the lovelorn Princess not to die but to scheme for what she wants—or, in the absence of male constancy, to appreciate a brisk young husband.17 Her own taste is singular: as Falatius declares, ‘Aminta / Is a wit, and your Wits care not how ill-favour’d / Their men be’. Love comes, is pleasant while it lasts, and then declines; characteristically Aminta expresses her philosophy in verse:

  I will not purchase slavery At such a dangerous rate.

  But glory at my liberty,

  And laugh at
love and fate.18

  Since Aminta was a name Behn often took for self-images in her pastoral poetry, she may, through the character, have expressed something of her post-Antwerp feelings about love and its perversities, as well as her dissatisfaction with her Amyntases, including Jeffrey Boys.

  The waiting must have been as tense as anything Aphra Behn had experienced. But, when he saw her again, Betterton told her he approved The Forc’d Marriage and would proceed. The drinks for her sponsors and friends that evening, for Ravenscroft, Howard and perhaps some of the Colepeper relatives, would only be the first of the expenses Behn would incur in her career. But money on entertaining and good cheer was never wasted. She enjoyed an evening of drink and talk, but she also knew it was the only way theatrical business was transacted.

  Betterton always retained the right to ask for major alterations even at the stage of rehearsal, although as both actor and theatre manager, he was eager to keep the playwright as a partner. He declared it his practice ‘to consult e’en the most indifferent Poet in any Part [he had] thought fit to accept of’.19 Behn made no mention of changes to The Forc’d Marriage, but Shadwell, whose dramatic career got under way just before hers, ‘was forc’d...to blot out the main design’ of The Humorists before it could be acted, and Dryden claimed of one play that Betterton had ‘judiciously lopt’ it.20 In such a milieu it was not possible to become snobbish about authorship: plays came from a social communion as much as from an individual head.

  After the excitement of acceptance the real work began. The weeks spent in the audience were a necessary prelude, for the playwright had input in the choice of actors and needed to know the members of the company intimately, their talents and faults. Mostly Behn used seasoned players for her debut: Betterton himself as the hectoring Alcippus, with his wife as Erminia—indeed she may have tailored the parts to the couple: Mrs Jennings, coming to the end of her acting career as Galatea, and the comic Angel as Falatius ‘a Phantastick Courtier’, but without Nokes to encourage his foolery. The small part of Olinda provided the debut for Mary Lee, who would go on to far greater things, though, as a primarily tragic actress, she was never a major inspiration for Behn. By 1670 the majority of the actors in the Duke’s Company had worked together for some years and they often irritated authors by insisting on knowing how things should be done. No doubt they had considerable influence on the prompt copy which was now made, laying out scenes and effects, and instructions for actors.