Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  Perhaps, remembering the past, Killigrew suggested turning his cumbersome, old-fashioned but engaging Thomaso into an actable play. Or perhaps Behn approached him. He was a far more important figure in society than she, but neither he nor she could have avoided noticing her superior play-writing skill.20 By now Behn had a string of satisfactory performances behind her, revealing her ability to make taut and theatrical what was once lax. Yet, given her anxiety over plagiarism, it was strange she believed she might borrow so recent a play with impunity. Perhaps, since she knew she improved what she changed, she thought that what she improved she owned. She may, too, have remembered an earlier involvement in the play as amanuensis, in the Low Countries, before the Restoration.

  As she carved it out of the ten-act, two-part play of Thomaso, The Rover was moved from Madrid to the rebellious Spanish colony of Naples during carnival, in part perhaps because her recent failure, The Dutch Lover, was set in Madrid. Behn made no effort to capture the strangeness of location that Killigrew found in southern cities—heat, evaporated rivers, and biting lice.21 The play opens in the manner Behn would make her own, with two young girls talking, Florinda in love with the English Cavalier, Belvile, but promised elsewhere and the assertive Hellena, designed a nun. Their spiritedness suggests that their brother, Don Pedro, will have a hard time controlling them. He is not helped by the carnival, into which the young women escape, one eager to test her lover and the other to find one. Soon they are enmeshed with the soldier Belvile and his friend, Willmore, who has newly arrived from sea in a randy state—echoes of the riotous sailors young Prince James had commanded in pre-Restoration Rotterdam. Hellena is quickly hooked; Willmore is attracted but fascinated also by Angellica Bianca, the famous courtesan, who has advertised herself for sale through a portrait. By pulling this down and treating her as a commodity in which shares might be bought—like a ship—Willmore kindles Angellica’s interest and, as they reveal the sexual charge between them, her maid fears her lucrative mistress will become a lover and jealous dupe—as she does. A third Englishman, the bumpkin Essex man, Blunt—one of those to whom, in Rochester’s words, nature ‘does dispense, / A large Estate, to cover Want of Sense!’—is less lucky in his choice of woman: the whore Lucetta arranges for him to be duped, robbed and dumped back on the street almost naked.22 In the end, most of the characters are coupled, although Angellica remains bitter and alone—the man who would follow her is pulled back on to the stage as she leaves. After some sparring about matrimony, Willmore agrees, despite his dislike of the state, to take Hellena and her large dowry.

  So what did Behn lift from Thomaso? The answer is, most of the play, although the breaking up and reassigning of speeches makes The Rover something new.23 For example, she gives to Hellena some of the speeches of Killigrew’s more modest heroine, Serulina—parts of these have gone also to Florinda—but she adds words originally spoken by men. Behn had been impressed with Killigrew’s scene in which Thomaso’s friend, describing what it would be like for Serulina to marry her old rich suitor, portrays the physical horrors of the ageing male. When the words about carcases, impotence and belches are spoken by young Hellena and delivered at the beginning of the play, the effect is startling, and the character of Hellena distinguished sharply from Serulina’s. But something is lost too. Although Behn takes this dismembering of a man’s body from Thomaso, she omits that of the old woman: ‘One whose Teeth, Eyes and hair rests all night in a Box, and her Chamber lies strew’d with her loose members, High shooes, false Back, and Breasts.’ Hellena would have been less comic repeating this.

  Angellica Bianca, a character in both Thomaso and The Rover, is a more substantial figure in Killigrew, the discussion of whom opens the play. She is flanked by several other whores, who also consider the state and profession of prostitution; in The Rover the whores are reduced and the virgins increased, so that a happy denouement in multiple marriages can be accommodated. Killigrew’s Angellica has a more thoughtful grasp on the female situation than Behn’s, but she is also more of a conscious exhibitionist, believing that her action will live on the stage and be a theme of discourse. In fact, her bravoes (servant-bullies) declare that she would have got more ‘in a Booth with the Elephant’ than with her picture. In the end, neither in Thomaso nor in The Rover does Angellica entirely fit into a comic mode: Behn could not make an amusing version of Hippolyta, the woman who internalised her shame in The Dutch Lover, but at least she did not demand the submission Killigrew required of his courtesan.24

  Thomaso has more success as a rake than Behn’s Willmore. He is a divided man, whose reformation at the end is appropriate, as it could not be for the jauntier Rover. He controls the events which, in Behn’s play, are largely controlled by the plotting Hellena. So, when Thomaso disguises himself, he does it consciously. Willmore, however, is constantly ‘disguised’ by being drunk and fuddled; he disrupts rather than forms plots.

  The two come together, however, in refusing to revere women, assuming they are after sex like men. So Willmore’s comic effort at raping Florinda, paralleled in the fool but not the hero of Thomaso, becomes a comic expression of both their views: that forceful men are really fulfilling female desires. It may sound—and is—misogynous, and to a modern audience is menacing, but it needs to be seen in cultural context.

  First, Puritans and Dissenters tended to condemn rape and wifebeating, so that male violence had a whiff of the Cavalier about it. Second, in heroic plays of the 1660s and early 1670s, rape had become the ultimate property crime; Behn’s tendency to trivialise it was an escape from this degrading circumstance. And third, when the tragic presentation of rape by male playwrights in the theatre was almost always voyeuristic, pandering to the sadism of the male audience, Behn’s resolute refusal to allow rape dramatic seriousness can appear decently reactionary.25 (Notably, however, when a woman like Florinda does face rape, the scenes are discontinued because the woman is of ‘Quality’; Behn would, it appears, have had little sympathy with any complaining rape victim of the lower ranks. It is also significant that, although her romantic heroines suffer violence, her spirited witty ones face no such challenge, as if, with sense, a woman ought to be able to avoid the threat. Perhaps in this distinction Behn, who must have known the controlling fear of male violence even when held in abeyance, was commenting on a perceived male fantasy: of a spirited, witty and sexy woman who is not intimidated when confronted with inescapably superior male force.)

  Inevitably Behn omitted much: farcical scenes and some bawdiness, for example. Later audiences, worrying over the impropriety of The Rover, should have taken comfort that Behn did not include descriptions of two sisters as ‘ovens’ which burn cakes or make them come out as dough, or of the hot one as a dog leaping on and dirtying men. She also largely avoided the profound questions which had clogged the comedy: why chastity is wanted in a wife when experience is valued in a horse, hawk or hound; how women can be simply divided into whores and virgins, when both categories include the respectable and the lewd (Behn to some extent lets Hellena question the double standard, but she is, after all, chaste, so the questioning has less power than it does in the whores); what happens to a rover in inevitable old age. Thomaso sees ‘a gray Wanderer’ out of doors in the ‘Winter’ of his life, an old beggar not a rake, a tragedy to himself. Behn was right: this was not the stuff of her sort of comedy.

  Behn’s Rover is the heir of Alonzo in The Dutch Lover, macho and sexually attractive to desperate southern women. His insouciance is alluring and he has the best lines in the play. He avoids the deep misogyny of Wycherley’s Horner and, in the list of actors, he is described as ‘A Loyal and Witty Gentleman, only addicted to rail against Women’. He is not emasculated by his easy acceptance of limited female power, as many Restoration heroes are: Mark Antony in Dryden’s All for Love is, for example, ‘unbent, unsinew’d, made a Womans Toy’. Men are more robust and more ridiculous in Behn. But Willmore is also a drunk, and his repetition of the fool’s episode in his attemp
ted drunken rape brings him suspiciously close to the villainous Sir Timothy Tawdry of The Town-Fopp, who prided himself on his self-indulgence in wine and women. For those who later saw Rochester in the portrayal of Willmore, his constant drunkenness and roistering interventions must have been the clearest sign. Yet the Rover was given none of Rochester’s social power. Where the icily controlled and stylish Dorimant of The Man of Mode lived after the Restoration and could have position as well as charm, Willmore, a man with stinking linen, has to make do with a society of exile. His power is only in personality and sex.

  Some of the ambiguity in The Rover may have been gained by time. Behn and her contemporaries never ceased to point out that language was part of the seducing game, but our more romantic age finds it hard to separate apparently sensitive language from truth; so we find Willmore’s words true because well expressed, although his moral remarks are part of his amorous stratagems. He upbraids Angellica for being a whore, while he himself will wear the clothes she has given him. Is his upbraiding ‘true’? Or is it part of the seduction through seriousness? Because of his charm, the rake gets more than he ought in a just world: is it that the charming and entertaining not only usually do, but also should, win? Or is Willmore simply a male ‘whore’?

  So too with Angellica, with whom it is hard not to empathise because of her ‘sincerity’ (and blank verse). Willmore declares lovers’ vows made to be broken by a sensible man. They are a fictional pact. But Angellica, trying to reconcile libertine and romantic love, now believes in fictional social words. Willmore puts her straight, accusing her of being spoilt for ordinary life by flattery, that is heightened words. The scene in which she learns the limits of the romantic language she thought she had taken from Willmore echoes that other moment of realisation between unequals: Caliban with Prospero in The Tempest. Caliban has learnt his master’s language and has derived no benefit from it except an ability to curse. Both Angellica and Caliban are, in the last resort, gullible fools.

  The audience is intended to enjoy the high spiritedness of the witty heroine, Hellena, who is necessarily a little saucy and sexy, a little anarchic and transgressive, answering Willmore’s condescending address of ‘Child’ with ‘Captain’, so mocking his masculine pretension to authority. She is the heir of a whole line of spirited Restoration girls who combat men’s desire to confine them ‘just in [their] rambling Age’ and she too sets out to employ her assets ‘to best advantage’.26 In her, the treacherous mercantile imagery which Behn mocked in poems seems liberal and sensible, supporting disobedience to what is unjust and allowing free trade for women. It is the tyrants and those who would interrupt commonsensical commerce who bear the blame.

  Hellena assumes a multiplicity of roles: gypsy fortune-teller, nun, lady, and boy, so escaping the enclosure of a daughter and concern for portions and jointures. At the same time she avoids Angellica’s mistake in raising desire through an image and deflating it with her simpler person, since she keeps it raised through a series of shifting selves. Had it not been carnival time, she could not have taken such licence, as her exasperated brother is aware. In masquerade, Hellena can flirt and make sexual overtures to a man she does not know, since the disguise allows the rare pleasure of seeing rather than simply being seen. Hellena has some distinction in ending the play in cross-dress and avoiding a scene of absorption back into society, but, like other witty heroines, she remains a virgin who seeks marriage, one whose virginity and financial worth secure the husband.27 To turn from idealised love and marriage was to enter the libertine world with its misogyny and lonely pregnancies: at this threshold Hellena draws back. Without romantic love or wifehood, woman is not elevated to a free agent but, in a world controlled by men, degraded into a ‘cunt’, as numerous lampoons informed her.

  So Hellena answers Willmore’s demand for love without marriage by declaring she would then get ‘A cradle full of noise and mischief’. An ideal society of sexually equal men and women existed only in the Golden Age. The new sexuality had to be negotiated, not enjoyed by unmarried women, it seemed. There may have been moments when the unmarried—perhaps now unmarriageable—Aphra Behn did not find her attraction to the sexually withdrawing Hoyle so very fatal.

  The Rover explores vision, both male and female. Most of the watchers within the play, especially the secret, disguised or masked ones, are women, although Willmore knows the power of eyes when he says, ‘I will gaze—to let you see my Strength.’ In moments of danger for women, however, such as the near rapes, both men and women spectators are forced to see through male eyes. Willmore insists that he has a right to possess what he has looked at so long—indeed he manages to go from the portrait of Angellica to the real person without even paying. In a way, he suggests the enormous power of the watching (though paying) audience in the theatre who really do control. As it says in the prologue, ‘Poets are Kings of Wit, and you appear, / A Parliament, by Play-Bill, summon’d here.’

  In the case of The Rover the watching was benign, and on 24 March 1677 the play was excitedly received. It was slightly behind the playwright’s moment and right in the popular mode. There was little problem of political analogy: lovers’ vows did not affect political vows, and Willmore, without faith to women, keeps faith with his prince. Elizabeth Barry triumphantly played Hellena, a character probably tailored to her skills. Some thought her more apt for Angellica, since she was already appearing in lampoons as a mercenary whore charging ‘fifty shillings a week’, but, for others, it might have seemed a high theatrical moment: the first starring of the most celebrated Restoration actress in a play by the foremost female playwright.28 William Smith acted Willmore to Betterton’s Belvile and was much acclaimed. For once he had outshone Betterton, and he came to see the part as his own special one. Don Pedro was played by the Catholic actor Matthew Medburne, and the comic Cave Underhill, skilled at lumpen parts, was right for the fool, Blunt. The cadaverous new comedian Thomas Jevon, Shadwell’s brother-in-law, made his Behn debut in a minor role; she would lovingly exploit his mimicking talents later on. The song in the play was set by Simon Pack, a well-known composer of light music. The dividends of the month of March, in which The Rover may have been the only new play at the Duke’s, rose to £37 16s 8d.29

  Possibly Behn supplied her own prologue; if so it was an example of her mystifying ventriloquism. It had a defensive tone, blaming claques and, with extraordinary cheek, attacking other playwrights for stealing good lines. It does not assert the writer is a young, rather ill-natured and unseasoned man, but it implies it, although, at thirty-six, the female Aphra Behn was the composer of at least six staged plays, possibly more, and was eager to please. For those who knew the author, it was a duplicitous piece of writing, but fair enough in the theatre. It paled beside the duplicity of the postscript accompanying the printed work.30

  The inevitable had happened: there came ‘a Report about the Town (made by some either very Malitious or very Ignorant) that ’twas Thomaso alter’d; which made the Book-sellers fear some trouble from the Proprietor of that Admirable Play’. At which stage Behn could have apologised or stated her source in Killigrew, who had, after all, himself borrowed the self-marketing of the whore from Brome’s The Novella.31 That she did not indicates her infection of secrecy—neither openness nor repentance was her way, in literature or in life.

  Instead, she brazened it out with a postscript attacking others for what she herself had tried to do. She might ‘have stoln some hints’ from Thomaso but this would be ‘a proof, that I valu’d it more than to pretend to alter it, had I had the Dexterity of some Poets, who are not more Expert in stealing than in the Art of Concealing’. Moving from the subjunctive, she then declared, ‘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.’

  Who knows what she meant? Was she comparing herself to Angellica Bianca, whose initials she shared, or was she drawing attention to Killigrew’s play, since this is the only name o
f a main character that remains the same across the two works?32 Was the wit hers or Killigrew’s? If the former, why would she choose the one incident Killigrew had clearly taken from another source? Was there a sly allusion to her earlier involvement in the play, of which some of the wit might just have been hers? She gave the reader no time to ponder, for she dashed onwards, ‘I will only say the Plot and Bus’ness (not to boast on’t) is my own: as for the Words and Characters, I leave the Reader to judge and compare ’em with Thomaso, to whom I recommend the great Entertainment of reading it.’ She must have assumed not many would plough through Killigrew’s ten acts. She finished by making her truest point, that, if the play had flopped, no one would have bothered to attack her: ‘Therefore I will only say in English what the famous Virgil does in Latin; I make Verses, and others have the Fame.’ It was an impudent quotation.

  Realising the success of the play, the publisher Amery issued a new title page advertising it as a ‘Comedy’, but keeping it anonymous—although the authorship was becoming widely known. Soon Behn felt she might as well get what credit she could. So, when he reissued it again, Amery added ‘Written by Mrs. A. Behn’ to the title page and inserted into the postscript the words ‘especially of our Sex’: the passage now read, ‘I shou’d have had no need of imploring Justice from the Criticks, who are naturally so kind to any that pretend to usurp their Dominion, especially of our Sex, they wou’d doubtless have given me the whole Honour on’t.’ Her sex could not bring down any more opprobrium on her head than was there already and it might let her counter criticism by complaining of discrimination.33

  Langbaine, ‘the great detector of plagiarism’, usually excused Behn because she wrote for bread and improved her originals.34 The outright lie about Thomaso rankled, however, and he wrote of this and the sequel, ‘These are the only Comedies, for the Theft of which, I condemn this ingenious Authoress.... I cannot acquit her of prevarication; since Angelica is not the only stol’n Object, as she calls it: she having borrow’d largely throughout,’ to such an extent that she ‘could not justly call these Plays her own’.