by Janet Todd
Whatever Behn’s duplicity with the play, The Rover gained an important admirer: James, Duke of York, the King’s brother. He enjoyed it and told the playwright so. For Behn he presented the possibility of patronage and income, although the Duke was always freer with his praise than with his purse, and his encouragement of Otway, for example, led to nothing substantial. He also stood for the glamour of power and privilege, and perhaps, after years in thrall to John Hoyle, a simple and transparent manly heroism. It can have done the Duke no harm in her eyes that he disliked Lord Arlington.35 The praise transfixed Behn in a posture of public admiration which she retained far longer than most of James’s supporters. It also made her realise that she had a winning theatrical formula and she used it to the hilt over the next years.
Chapter 17
Sir Patient Fancy and City Whigs
‘I have almost run out of all my stock of Hypocrisy’
Aphra Behn was fascinated with jargon, signs, cant and idiosyncratic chatter. She was writing for public entertainment and her method was to study what a particular audience wanted and then give it to them. This included a good deal of mimicry both of what they despised and feared and, more insidiously, of what they valued. By the beginning of 1678, her taste and that of the courtly element of her audience seem to have coincided. Restoration comedy was at its most sophisticatedly cynical and even Otway, so mawkishly moral at times, was putting on a play ridiculing conventional morality.
Yet, even as it flowered, the mood of cynicism and indulged hedonism began to wane. In 1676, Savile had written to Rochester in the country that London was ‘full as foolish, and full as wise, full as formall, and full as impertinent as you left it, there is noe one contradiction you left in it but you will find again at your returne, noething changing in it but some few mortall lives’.1 But by now Rochester, the chief rake, was ill and beginning to feel the cold winds of mortality. There were even rumours that he was showing interest in theology. Savile himself was a regular in the sweatshops taking a ‘masse of Mercury’ for his venereal disease. The statesman, libertine and part author of The Rehearsal, the Duke of Buckingham, whom Behn never much liked, was physically failing: his teeth were false and he smelled bad to the cleanly Nell Gwyn.
The court frightened pious Protestants and ordinary citizens as the site not only of licentiousness but also of Catholicism and arbitrary rule. Indeed, Algernon Sidney went so far as to link royal debauchery with absolutism when he suggested that Charles II was depraving his people with his fetid example and so preventing their resistance to his policies. The French connection exaggerated the fear, for Louis XIV of France was regarded as the garish exponent of both Catholicism and absolutism. His English cousins, the militantly Catholic James and his equivocal brother King Charles, might well be his allies, the enemy within. Charles tried to placate Protestant opinion by marrying James’s unwilling daughter Mary, a girl of fifteen, to his Protestant nephew William of Orange, son of his eldest sister Mary. William was nearly twice Mary’s age and five inches shorter, and the gloom of the wedding was lightened by the King’s indulgence in the kind of buffoonery that made Willmore endearing and absurd.2 Behn wrote no poem on the event—she was not yet a political panegyrist, nor did she care for Dutchmen.
By now, someone even closer to the King was exercising the thoughts of the nation. Fear of a court conspiracy to impose absolutism and Catholicism, or even of a military coup by James, provoked whispers, then loud talk, of changing the principle of succession and excluding Catholics from the throne. The name of the Protestant James, Duke of Monmouth, the King’s eldest illegitimate son, was canvassed as a ruler, and the astute Earl of Shaftesbury, an old Cromwellian turned Royalist, turned opposition, saw in both uncle and nephew a destabilising promise. He set about harnessing fear of despotism to the cause of Exclusion and Monmouth’s candidacy.
Like Dryden and other loyal supporters of the Duke of York, Behn had long been intrigued by Monmouth, both as a handsome, skittish Cavalier and as the dark shadow of legitimate Stuart power, the embodiment of Charles II’s sexual prowess which was both admirable in a monarch and disastrous for a realm. Unlike his father, whose youth had been spent in exile, acting below his true rank, Monmouth, his mother dying early, had grown up the spoilt darling of the court, caressed by his father and grandmother and accepted openly as the eldest son of the King. He was also publicly brought up in the Protestant religion, which made him distinct from the regular male royal family, with its dye or at least patina of Catholicism. As a Protestant and a King’s son, he had been married off in his early teens to the heiress Countess of Buccleuch, whose surname, Scott, he took as his own.
Monmouth had his father’s popular touch and he was charming to everyone. He was dangerous to the state as the only one of the King’s illegitimate children who could have claimed the throne and, with his charm and Protestantism, be supported by a good number of citizens: he was the eldest as far as anyone knew and he had been born before Charles married his Queen, Catherine of Braganza. So, had the King declared himself married to Monmouth’s mother Lucy Walters, there would have been nothing to disprove the match. Unfortunately, as well as being charming, Monmouth was rather stupid, as Behn and the thinking part of the nation could see, though he compensated a little for this by sharing his father’s lack of principle. Monmouth himself probably came to believe in the rumours that the King had indeed married his mother, and that there was a box of documents which would prove it. Charles, however, strenuously denied it and opposed any claim by his beloved son. Kingship, including his own possession of it, relied precisely on legitimacy and absolute succession.
In the polarising of King and Parliament, Charles and his brother James against the Earls of Shaftesbury and Monmouth, the abusive labels Whig and Tory were first heard to denote a wide spectrum of ideologies or beliefs—in time they would be used for political parties. ‘Tory’, deriving from the Irish word ‘toraidhe’ applied to the dispossessed Irish who attacked English settlers, suggested support for the royal brothers in their desire to strengthen the prerogative against Parliament and, more extremely, belief in the King as God’s representative on earth. A Tory would, on the whole, maintain the Duke of York’s right of succession. The ‘Whigs’, whose name derived from the expression ‘Whiggamore raid’ applied to a band of Scottish Covenanters in the 1640s, were staunchly Protestant; they favoured some form of constitutional monarchy and inevitably became associated with ‘Exclusionists’ who opposed the accession of James or at least wished to hedge him in with Parliamentary constraints. Tories feared the Whigs were using the London ‘mobile’ or Wapping rabble to gain their ends; the Whigs feared the Tories were using French subsidies and Jesuit plotting.
The polarising included Aphra Behn. Her contempt for the mob, obvious from the moment she put pen to paper, was influenced by her attitude to the theatre audience, an uncontrollable mass swayed by the loudest critic and unable to distinguish between good and bad, true and false. In its roused state, it had immense power and had always to be cajoled. As she wished to control her audience, so Behn wished the King to control his people. Her tentative doubts over arbitrary authority, expressed in her earliest plays, disappeared under the increasing fear of democracy, mob-rule, or anarchy. Her enthusiasm for Shakespeare bolstered her views, for he too had dreaded ‘the blunt monster with uncounted heads, / The still-discordant wav’ring multitude’.3
Whigs were often Dissenters—old Puritans, as she always saw them—often City merchants and traders. Behn’s political principles were those of a ‘pseudo-aristocrat’, not one born into the upper classes, but one who had internalised their views and images and who aimed to support their privilege and pretensions and to enjoy and serve their culture. She had had few conventional morals early in life—perhaps her own sexual habits had influenced her, perhaps her experience of Puritan hypocrisy in Canterbury. Certainly by now, having mixed with the demi-monde and the theatrical community and enjoyed the fringes of louche aristocrati
c society, Behn had an investment in the institutions that underpinned them: the King and his court. These were the ratifiers of the connection between free living or expression and witty art.
Aphra Behn did not relish a return to the old times and was horrified by any growth in City or democratic power—she never wished to see constraining sexual morality linked with politics again. Dreading the connection of introspection and coercion in the opponents of the court, she noted that those who thought much about forms of drama wished to impose rules on others and those who thought most about themselves expected others most to appreciate them and be like them, wishing to legislate their morality. Behn did not equate intelligence with this introspection, as later ages would do; she considered that a resolute triviality was as intellectually reasonable a response to an analysis of the human predicament as concentration on the ‘depths’ of something presumed to be the ‘self’.
Other, less psychological circumstances were also driving Behn into greater public commitment to one side. State politics were infecting drama and Nat Lee advised poets to give up disinterestedness or starve: ‘Turn then, who e’er thou art that canst write well, / Thy Ink to Gaul, and in Lampoons excell.’4 Playwrights had to take sides: Elkanah Settle became a Whig pamphleteer and rabble-rouser with his spectacular pope-burning processions; Shadwell grew thick with Shaftesbury. The defenders of James were slower to group. In the end they were theatrically wiser, however, since on the whole the theatre audience was Tory.
After wavering, Dryden settled down in the Tory camp, as did Otway and a new intense young Irish and strongly Protestant dramatist, Nahum Tate, with whom Behn rather unaccountably became friendly. She herself was one of the few not to waver publicly (although public commitment, useful for business, did not preclude advantageous private involvement with influential men of other views). She was a Tory. She supported the rule of hereditary males and accepted that men of lower rank and all women except queens should have nothing directly to do with government. As she wrote in a late story: ‘I cannot alter Custom, nor shall ever be allow’d to make new Laws, or rectify the old ones....’5 Royal government should provide stability and, except in the basic tie of subject and monarch, leave freedom to its subjects in all other relationships.
Some playwrights responded to the times with serious discussion in tragedy, but Behn knew its two-edged nature when it enacted the breakdown of social order. Intending to appear a Tory, Nat Lee, for example, managed to put on one play exposing Romish cruelties at precisely the wrong moment and another in which the hero argued the need for curbs on ‘raging Kings’.6 In any case Behn was not ready to write propagandist drama, or perhaps she had not yet been paid to do so. To continue the libertine message—but with more sophisticated ambivalence—to follow the trend in Wycherley and Otway for harsh, sexually amoral plays, and to swipe at Puritan ‘cits’ were political acts enough. Despite the attacks on The Rover, it had undeniably been a success and Betterton was eager for Behn to repeat it—although, since she had no intention of coming clean, she should disguise her borrowing a little more. What better than to use the same formula: an elastic source, sexual intrigue, some political implication, and comedy unsullied by tragedy?
At this pregnant moment, a ‘Gentleman’ translated Molière’s last play, Le Malade imaginaire, which had been staged in Paris in 1673 and printed two years later. The gentleman might have been one of several of her educated acquaintances: Ravenscroft, who had plundered Molière for two farces, the Catholic Matthew Medburne, who had acted in Behn’s plays and already translated Molière’s, Tartuffe; most likely he was James Wright, another Middle Temple lawyer like Ravenscroft. A translator and theatre historian, Wright translated the Molière play and probably shared his manuscript with Behn—he did not publish it.
Behn had been slow in coming to the French dramatist, whom there’s no evidence she read in the original, but the farcical skit, Le Malade imaginaire, mixing music, speech and dance, tweaked her fancy. She would make something more plotted and less choreographed.7 She would also make something more indecent than anything she had staged before. The play, Sir Patient Fancy, would have the energy of The Rover, but provide no perfect romantic couple as foil to the compromises and contingencies of the central pair.
Sir Patient Fancy is less earthy, more bawdy and more substantial than Le Malade imaginaire, with touches from Ben Jonson who, from the moment Behn found her most successful form in sex comedy, was increasingly present in her plays.8 Molière allowed little sexual intrigue, whereas a general erotic feeling pervades Sir Patient Fancy: mothers and daughters vie for lovers and not everyone is fussy over his or her copulating partner. The old rich Puritan, Sir Patient Fancy, who replaced Molière’s hypochondriac, dotes on his pretty young wife and displays the amorousness for which cits were constantly mocked, calling her monkey face and indulging in baby talk. He even does ‘the office of my Women’, that is, he ‘dresses and undresses me,’ the implication being that he cannot fulfil his more manly duties.
The spectre of impotence appears again in the vulgar lover, Lodwick, who, coming to meet his intended bride, Isabella, Sir Patient’s daughter—chastely, for who, he asks nastily, ‘would first sully the Linen they meant to put on?’—is appalled into seeming impotence by her desire. His anxiety evaporates when he learns that the desire emanates not from Isabella, but from her delicious step-mother, who takes him for her beloved Wittmore. He is ushered in to Lady Fancy’s bed where he performs to satisfaction in the darkness. Behn had opened The Amorous Prince with suggestion of sexual activity, but it had been love in Arcadia between two young people: she had not before tried anything like the beginning of a scene of Act III, where, after his session with Lady Fancy, Lodwick is presented ‘as just risen in Disorder from the Bed, buttoning himself, and setting himself in order’.
The amorality is compounded when, although discovered, nothing very terrible follows, since both are discreet and hypocritical. In parallel fashion, Wittmore, observing Isabella whom he is pretending to court as cover for his affair with her step-mother Lady Fancy, notes that she is very pretty and inviting: at that point he is restrained from pursuing her only by ‘my Vows to the fair Mother’. It is a kind of moral libertinism more disturbing than Willmore’s spontaneous version. The one piece of principle to which Behn subscribed, the iniquity of compelled marriage, seems repeated in Sir Patient Fancy in echo of The Forc’d Marriage and The Town-Fopp; yet, even this is vitiated when it is clear that want of money rather than a father’s pressure drove the young Lady Fancy to marry the old rich man. Behn’s marital separations at the ends of her plays are all optimistic in the context of actual seventeenth-century practice, but this one, where the woman is separated and left independently rich, is conspicuously so.
Lady Fancy is a complex creation, part heroine, part anti-heroine. Her justification for her adultery and hypocrisy in an earlier pledge to Wittmore is balanced by testimony from her maid: ‘Now am I return’d to my old trade again, fetch and carry my Ladyies Lovers, I was afraid when she had been married these night-works wou’d have ended.’ Lady Fancy realises how much femininity is a game and sex just a pleasure, so she spends little time repining for having slept with the wrong man: ‘I was so possesst with the thoughts of that dear false one, I had no sense free to perceive the cheat.’9 At the end, the place she reaches is beyond marriage. Even the young blades cannot match her callous self-assertion and she avoids the apologetic tone that creeps into Wittmore’s speech. Sir Patient Fancy becomes the first work in which Behn attempted to include women in the libertine space. From now on they would often inhabit it but the wisest would know it was a fantasy space.
On first sight, it seems strange that Behn should have qualified Lady Fancy with Lady Knowell, the conventionally amorous older woman who wants both a husband and fame as a learned lady. She is the widow of another puritanical City alderman like Sir Patient, in whose view she has degenerated into a ‘fop’. Based partly on characters in Molière’s mocki
ng Les Femmes savantes, Lady Knowell is allowed, if not a lover, at least a dignified retreat: she had always urged her fortune rather than her charms, but at the end she is discovered to have been testing the young man rather than lusting for him, a motif found in earlier drama too.10 Yet, at thirty-seven, Behn must have been a little sensitive to male mockery of ageing amorousness and have had some sympathy for Lady Knowell’s desires.
The absurd erudition the widow reveals is not specific to women as in Molière, but more commonly found in university-bred men: Behn’s usual butt. Lady Knowell is made to follow snobbish men in repudiating translation of the classics, which Behn herself thoroughly endorsed.11 Yet, when Lucretia, her frustrated daughter, remarks of her mother, ‘Methinks to be read in the Arts, as they call ’em, is the peculiar Province of the other Sex,’ Isabella more cautiously replies, ‘Indeed the Men would have us think so, and boast their Learning and Languages; but if they can find any of our Sex fuller of Words, and to so little purpose as some of their Gownmen, I’ll be content to change my Petticoats for Pantaloons, and go to a Grammar-school.’
The main fool of the play is the usual rustic bumpkin, this time a ‘Devonshire Knight’ called Sir Credulous. His three years at the University, never a happy circumstance for a limited man in a Behn play, have taught him one particular code which he can no more forget than he can his dead mare Gillian. He fancies himself as a ‘Country Wit’, not knowing this to be a contradiction in Restoration drama.12 His concern for animals, whether seen as friends or assets, is as absurd as the family values country people and cits both display. In courtly circles, a relative represents potential cash, and Sir Credulous’s sentimental feeling for a purse of broad gold given by a grandmother marks him out a fool. Yet, even he knows the marriage laws: ingeniously forced to part with his coins to the woman he intends to marry, he comforts himself: ‘when I have married her, they are my own again.’
