Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  Men Consecrate to Heavn, were piece-meal hew’d

  For Sport and Pastime, to the brutal Crowd.

  The World ran Mad, and each distemper’d Brain,

  Did strange and different Frenzies entertain;

  Here Politick Mischiefs, there Ambition sway’d;

  The Credulous Rest, were Fool and Coward-Mad.

  The Wiser few, who did th’Infection shun,

  Were those most liable to be undone:

  Honour, as Breach of Priviledge, was detected;

  And Common Sense, was Popishly affected.53

  In case the parallel was not crystal clear, Behn provided a note that, for Jerusalem’s Golgotha, the reader should understand Tyburn, the site of English executions just outside London.54

  If it sounds as though Behn had become Catholic here, the date and circumstance of the composition of these lines should be noted. They occur in the poem to the propagandist Roger L’Estrange, printed long after the Popish Plot, during a Catholic monarchy and after Stafford’s treason had been quashed; in their language they pay tribute to L’Estrange’s always extreme vision. In contrast, in the poem Behn wrote earlier to Stafford’s son, printed in 1685 probably before the accession of the Catholic King James, Stafford was a saint and a ‘necessary Victim to the frantick Croud’, but not a redeemer. In further contrast, in the winter of 1680 Behn was among ‘the Wiser few... liable to be undone’, who published no thoughts on Stafford at all.

  As usual, then, Behn expressed what it was expedient to express, but the timing and theatricality of her final response to Stafford do not invalidate its genuineness, if only as part of a complex attitude to complex times. Payne and Cellier could warn her of the fate of the outspoken and more single-minded.

  Chapter 20

  The Second Part of The Rover and The Roundheads

  ‘Our Sister’s vain mistaken Eyes are open’

  As a woman of the theatre, an admirer of the court and a despiser of the mob, Aphra Behn was a publicly committed Tory, a supporter of kingly power and prerogative. The aftermath of the Popish and Meal-Tub plots was not, however, a moment to express violent anti-Whig feelings. Shadwell, the most skilled Whig dramatist, was on the attack, hitting out at arbitrary government and the decline of individualist Protestant values, and even Dryden offered a play to ‘the people’ in which he allowed some anti-Catholic satire. Charles II’s fortunes were at a low ebb, and his chief mistress, the French Duchess of Portsmouth, was wooing Whigs. The insecurity caused some to waver and write ambiguously, ready to interpret or reinterpret depending on the fortunes of Monmouth or the Duke of York. Behn chose to pull back: if it were wise to muffle Tory opinions, other themes might come to the fore, stifled when politics had to predominate. At the same time, the political upheavals were edging her towards a more serious conception of theatre, to a position closer to that of the earlier denigrated Ben Jonson. She never wrote comedies of humours in his manner, or approved dramatic rules, but his satirical use of farce was attracting her.

  The Duke of York had praised The Rover, subsequently seen twice at court. He suggested a sequel. Behn was receptive since she had been recalling her play while she grieved over Rochester, its partial inspiration. Perhaps there was another work to be mined from Thomaso, one that would imitate the elements of the first Rover but subtly change them. She decided to try. Hoping for a repeat success, Betterton encouraged her.

  The Second Part of The Rover has similar characters to the first, although the only absolute links are Willmore and Blunt. Hellena has died a month after marrying, because she insisted on following Willmore to sea. He has not mourned her, but regrets the dissipation of her dowry. Indeed, he almost hints that he wished to be rid of her since he mentions that she insisted on coming to sea with him; the Hellena who only fantasized gender equality would have been unsurprised. Willmore is now in Spain, like his predecessor Thomaso. Intrigues follow, and again he is forced to choose between virgin (Ariadne) and whore (La Nuche). This time he chooses the latter. Willmore and La Nuche reject riches and security for an apparently equal love.

  In the early 1670s Behn had followed the trend in denigrating arranged unions and supporting marriages of love. By the time she wrote The Rover, she was questioning aspects of the institution of marriage itself, as well as its relationship to prostitution. By 1681, she had moved beyond Thomaso into a more radical consideration of the different social expectations of men and women which necessarily undercut the whole concept of marriage. So the dissonances harmonised at the end of the first Rover were intensified in the second. Behn, who may once have wanted marriage to Hoyle, now accepted that no marriage was equal to courtship. In this she was in tune with the profound scepticism about human institutions that had come to permeate the theatre. At the same time, nothing in the play suggests that equality is possible between men and women, and there is thus a sour sweetness to the ending.

  Ariadne is given the same mixture of virginal care and libertine philosophy as her predecessor Hellena: ‘I love a man that scorns to impose dull truth and constancy on a Mistriss,’ she exclaims. She fails to capture the Rover, however, and instead ends in matrimony according to her family’s wishes. Is she a victim of a repressive society, or an example of a woman’s gaining what she subconsciously wants, much like Laura Lucretia in The Feign’d Curtizans?1 Despite her greater success, La Nuche does not differ substantially from Angellica Bianca of The Rover. She gets her man because she does not require the ‘formal foppery of marriage’; Angellica did not demand it either. But La Nuche comes closer to Hellena in accepting that the Rover will not be faithful. Where Angellica had wanted to kill him because of his roving, Hellena had accepted it in theory—though combatting it in practice. La Nuche does the same. As in the earlier play, Behn did not follow Killigrew in musing on the implications of the roving libertine life for men and women as they aged.

  La Nuche is not more controlled than Angellica but, where Angellica erred in placing romantic desire over self-interest, La Nuche displays a perversity deeper than Angellica’s or Ariadne’s, a psychological need to damage herself which may be related to her outsider status. When, through her arrogance and greed, she alienates both lovers, she realises that her power is simply dependent on men and that women alone are truly impotent. Such a complex female figure increasingly fascinated Behn in the 1680s and the predicament may have responded to something in her own life—or in that of Elizabeth Barry who, this time, played the whore not the virgin.2

  The Second Part of The Rover is both more farcical and sterner than the first Rover. The callousness of libertinism is more apparent, and the fools, Blunt and Featherfool, more clearly extend and shadow the activity of the central rake. Sex and other appetites are to be gratified, and the rest is simply an edifice constructed on them. Since women are interchangeable and the chase everything, then the fools should be free to pursue two monster women for their money: although Willmore baulks at this, it in no way violates his codes. Yet the effect is, as so often in the uneasy works of Behn’s middle period, less subversion than demonstration; here is the effect of libertinism, she seems to say, but it is still better than alternative hypocritical creeds.

  Willmore himself has changed between 1677 and 1681. He is less comic and drunken, harsher and more philosophically libertine. Right at the beginning of the play his callous attitude to the charming Hellena of The Rover makes him a darker character than his previous incarnation, a darkness that modifies the impression of the earlier Willmore for those who were watching both plays. In many ways, he embodies Behn’s fear in ‘Love Arm’d’ that the libertine could not be tamed, whatever the ‘happy ending’ of The Rover. Perhaps he was a compliment to Rochester, for this second Willmore has something of the aristocratic, wayward charm of the Earl, something of the cynicism and protean character as well as the cruelty. Indeed the connection is made explicit in the mountebank section, a tribute to three men who were now important in her literary life: Thomas Killigrew the begetter, the
Earl of Rochester and, through the echo of Volpone, the dramatist Ben Jonson.3

  The Cavaliers had prided themselves on their disguises. The stories of Charles and Wilmot, Rochester’s father, after the Battle of Worcester turned on their ability to represent other types of people, while always hinting at hidden nobility. Rochester was his father’s son, and grew notorious for his masks: he had been a porter, a beggar, a merchant, a landlord of an inn, and even a woman. But the summit of his impersonation had been his transformation into Dr Alexander Bendo.4

  In Burnet’s prissy words, Rochester had been ‘under an unlucky Accident, which obliged him to keep out of the way’—probably this referred to the ugly episode at Epsom when the drunken Earl, along with the playwright Etherege, attacked a constable; in the affray, one of their companions was killed.5 Rochester promptly disappeared. Simultaneously, handbills were distributed on the streets of London, proclaiming the arrival of the great Italian doctor, Alexander Bendo. Soon the town rang with his ‘extraordinary performances’ and people flocked to Tower Street, where they saw a splendid bearded figure in a gown of green, lined with exotic furs, a jewelled medal hanging from his neck. Bendo could be observed concocting potions out of various ingredients, from ashes and soot to lime, chalk and clay, using scales and accompanying his actions with a patter of strange tongues. He could fasten loose teeth and redden aged gums, it was averred. He could also tell the future from an examination of warts and moles. Since these were often in immodest places about a woman, he claimed that he would not look at hidden female markings himself but leave this to his wife, before whom women need not be diffident. Rochester of course acted both Bendo and his wife. When the King suddenly forgave his erring friend, Bendo had to disappear. A rumour went round that he and his assistants had been spirits all along and had returned to the underworld. The medicines they had sold were thrown away in fear.6

  Willmore of The Rover did not disguise himself but, in The Second Part of the Rover, Behn conflates her Willmore with Killigrew’s mountebank (himself calling on Volpone’s antics in Jonson’s play) in honour of Rochester’s exploit, which, Saint-Évremond declared, was ‘in every Body’s Mouth’. The disguise fits within a work that is much concerned with transformation: a man even becomes a clock. But if Burnet, who had popularised the Bendo exploit by mentioning it in his record of the deathbed conversion, saw Behn’s play, he must have been irritated at this glorification of the pre-conversion trickster. He would also have disapproved the nihilistic ending, in line with Behn’s elegy to Rochester. In mockery of Burnet, Willmore declares: ‘Love still, like Death, does to one Center tend.’

  Even more attracted to farce as a response to the human predicament than she had been in 1677, Behn now felt able to accommodate some of Killigrew’s grotesque elements, which she had earlier disdained. These included the subplot of the monstrous Jewish heiresses, one a dwarf, the other a giant, huge enough for two men.7 She treats them with unexpected sympathy, giving them personalities in a way Killigrew had not, and she even omits the anti-Semitic (but social) remark, that ‘the Jews their parents couzen’d the poor of a Nation to give it to these Monsters’ so they themselves could be fairly robbed. Indeed the suitors are more monstrous than the women they court: Featherfool is forced to hide a pearl by eating it and is threatened with dissection, a nice touch since it was usually monstrous women who were objects of dissection.8

  The main comment on the contemporary moment is the ambience of spying. People watch other people in all Behn’s plays, especially The Rover, for it is one of the stocks-in-trade of the theatre. In this play, however, it reaches new heights, as Ariadne watches Willmore watching La Nuche watching an old whore, Petronella, deceive Featherfool. The times were equally wary.

  If she was politically reticent in the play, Behn was partisan in her epilogue, in which she attacked the violently anti-Catholic Whig propagandist Elkanah Settle for his part in the Accession Day pageants and for his virulent Female Prelate...the Life and Death of Pope Joan. Hoping to ingratiate herself with the beleaguered court, she nailed her colours firmly to the royal mast and mocked any notion that she would ever dedicate a play to the ‘Almighty Rabble’.9 Instead, she presented it to the man who had asked for it, the man who, in most people’s eyes, was the ultimate cause of the political strife: James, Duke of York, himself. The parallels between James and Willmore were inescapable. Again in exile from political troubles, James was like an old Cavalier before the Restoration; he was associated with the sea like Willmore and his absent ‘prince’; and like Willmore he was something of a rake, although not on the scale of his kingly brother. He had aggravated his position during the Popish Plot by seducing his wife’s Maid of Honour, the plain, witty Katherine Sedley, who bore him a daughter.

  The Duke’s reaction is unknown if he ever saw the play, but it seems that the first Rover pleased him more, since he ordered this rather than the second to be acted twice at court when he was king. In this he was in line with posterity, which did not take to the second work despite its initial success, its music and spectacle of platforms, dancers, horse and horseplay.

  As the Popish Plot petered out, the theatre had still to compete with political spectacle. The wealthy Whig nobleman Ford, Lord Grey, was stage-managing a royal Monmouth show in the provinces to build up Monmouth as a credible successor to his father and alternative to his uncle, the Duke of York. In Parliament, there had been an accelerating drive for the exclusion of James. The King did not relish this, seeing it almost on a par with the execution of his father and as a distinct threat to himself. Behn agreed, writing of the ‘Ingratitud’ of a body that, instead of voting ‘against His Right and Fame’ should have been raising ‘Eternal Altars’ to James. But this was not the prevailing mood and, fearing violence from the City, the King chose Oxford as the site of his next Parliament, a place that had been the headquarters of Charles I in times of strife. There in March he staged the event which Dryden termed ‘the publick Theater’. Secure in his subsidy from the French king, which he had recently managed to increase, he had no pressing need of Parliament to grant him money, and no intention of compromising over the issue of the succession.

  Charles had arrived with his women, the Queen, Nell Gwyn and the Duchess of Portsmouth, on the 14th; Shaftesbury, some Whigs and a group of armed men came on the 19th, with Monmouth, Lord Grey and thirty followers arriving on the 22nd. With all the cast in place, the King was asked to legitimise his bastard son Monmouth. He gave the reply ‘that his Majesty was none of those that grew more timorous with age, but rather he grew the more resolute the nearer he was to his grave...’. His life ‘after Fifty’ was not of such value to be preserved ‘with the forfeiture of my Honor, Conscience, and the Laws of the Land’. When he had called Parliament, he had given signs that a long sitting was expected. But now he passed to the Lords, retired, swiftly dressed up in his formal regal robes stashed away in a sedan chair, returned and dissolved it. Such a performance Nell Gwyn as former actress must have applauded. So must Behn, for an attitude of cynical tolerance interrupted with a swerve into heroics was the sort of manoeuvre she gave to her rakish heroes in more domestic settings.10

  Back in London after the Oxford show, Charles and his court went on the vindictive offensive, intent on removing troublesome Whigs and Dissenters from office. Titus Oates was demoted, and his allowance stopped. Shaftesbury was arrested for treason and sent again to the Tower—though, to the fury of the Tories, a Whig jury acquitted him with an ‘ignoramus’ verdict at his subsequent trial in November 1681. Grey and Monmouth decided to visit Tunbridge Wells to ‘divert’ themselves.11 The King was cock of his kingdom again.

  Since the initiative lay with Charles II, abuse of the Whigs returned to fashion, and, since censorship had inadvertently lapsed, a pamphlet war erupted. The Royalist propagandist Roger L’Estrange, ‘Towser the buldog’, back from exile in Edinburgh, seized Whig pamphlets when possible and refuted them in a deluge of replies. It was now sensible to be on the establ
ishment side. If an author pursued ‘a Story... having in his eye the Affairs of his own Country’ and intended to write ‘against the establish’d Settlement of the State’, he should, thought a critic in A Comparison between the Two Stages, be dealt with as a libeller. In any case, the theatre had always been associated with the court for, as the prologue to the first play presented to Charles after the Restoration declared, ‘They that would have no king, would have no Play.’ Tory playwrights and poets were urged on by the King and L’Estrange. Not since the early Restoration had the theatre been so coopted for a political agenda.

  To be of assistance to the ‘establish’d Settlement’, Dryden produced his propagandist masterpiece, Absalom and Achitophel, a mock-heroic poem ridiculing Monmouth and Shaftesbury through the figures of biblical characters, and giving a humorous gloss to the peccadilloes of Charles as King David—the nation much enjoyed sharing the King’s sex life. Prudently he omitted some of the awkward parts of the story, such as Absalom’s sexual ousting of his father in copulating with the royal concubines, as well as the tragic biblical outcome in which Absalom was killed for his rebellion.

  Behn’s poetic contribution was many notches below Dryden’s, but she did her bit, for she, like Ephelia, feared the threat of Monmouth supported by Shaftesbury and Grey. She was as tolerant of the King’s illegitimate sons as anyone and honoured them as noblemen: in The Dutch Lover she had made of Quintana’s villainous bastard a hidden aristocrat, but, as a base-born admirer of aristocracy and monarchy, she valued legitimate royal birth even more highly: only kings coupling with queens produced kings. Any other view threw open the whole Hobbesian world of power and, in this state, anyone might struggle for supremacy and ruin the peace of the rest.

  Surnamed Scott through his marriage, Monmouth could be associated with Scotland and verses in an approximation of a Lallans or Scots dialect ‘To a Fine Scotch Tune’ would be immediately recognisable as political comment. For example, Behn’s ‘Silvio’s Complaint’ figured a ‘Noble Youth’, apt to dance, pipe and charm, now lamenting ‘’Twere better I’s was nere Born, / Ere wisht to be a King.’ He curses ‘Old Thirsis’ for leading him astray and warns: ‘Ye Noble Youths beware / Shun Ambitious powerful Tales.’ In another ballad, ‘To a New Scotch Tune’, Young Jemmy, a graceful charming ‘Lad, / Of Royal Birth and Breeding’, is ‘ruin’d’ by ambition. The reduction of Monmouth to the naïve shepherd, ‘Poor Jemmy’, was a technique many used to cut the threatening figure down to size. Behn’s song was published anonymously in at least two broadside versions.12