Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  With much ‘dunning’, Behn was probably paid for her loyal propaganda work in ballads and perhaps lampoons, which, since she refers to ‘His Sacred Majesty’ being frequently in debt to her, had clearly been commissioned. Yet the theatre remained her most lucrative source. She was ready now to use her pen for specifically political purposes, although not prepared to abandon her chosen genre of farcical comedy and follow Lee and Otway into ‘serious’ drama. ‘In this Age ’tis not a Poets Merit, but his Party that must do his business; so that if his Play consists of a Witch, a Devil, or a Broomstick, so he have but a Priest at one end of the Play, and a Faction at ’tother end of the Pit, it shall be fam’d for an excellent piece.’13

  To take financial advantage of the difficult times and to say something to the nation, Behn speedily wrote four plays, two adapting and two using old plays. All were performed within months of each other from 1681 to 1682: The False Count, The Roundheads, Like Father, Like Son and The City-Heiress. The first and third of these were not primarily political and they flopped, the second and fourth were and they succeeded. It was not the moment to avoid being partisan: the Tories would be offended and neutrality did not attract Whigs.

  In the epilogue to The False Count, written by ‘a Person of Quality’, Behn is made to insist she had taken ‘five Days’ to produce the work. Possibly this was tongue-in-cheek, mocking boastful male colleagues like Ravenscroft and Shadwell who prided themselves on speed; possibly it was true. The production was, the epilogue claimed, a ‘slight Farce’ suitable for a Whiggish citizen audience which cared nothing for wit or clever bawdry.

  The pretence that the piece was written for the Whigs was in keeping with the claim in the prologue, which comically played on Behn’s known Tory partisanship, so strenuously asserted in the dedication to The Second Part of The Rover: she, Aphra Behn, hitherto ‘a most wicked Tory’, had, it averred, been converted to Whiggism, for ‘Our Sister’s vain mistaken Eyes are open.’ She had learnt to value her ‘Interest’ and had written a ‘Recantation Play’. The pretence allowed the prologue backhandedly to deliver a ferocious attack on Whig acts and attitudes, as well as to provide the court with a testimonial to Behn as Royalist propagandist:

  ’Twas long she did maintain the Royal Cause,

  Argu’d, disputed, rail’d, with great applause;

  Writ Madrigals and Dogerel on the times,

  And charg’d you all with your Fore-fathers crimes;

  Nay confidently swore no plot was true,

  But that so slyly carri’d on by you.14

  Despite the ironic nature of the description of Behn’s Whig conversion, curiously the play does allow expression of the Whiggish opinions she usually avoids: the sense that lordly breeding can be faked, that an honest merchant, not perfumed like a lord but wearing ‘cleanly Linen’, is not contemptible, that a man’s ‘Appetite increases with his Greatness’, that the City habit of making gentry of their children—hoisting the ‘Daughter’s Topsail... above her breeding’—is stupider than the Dutch one of raising them for their parents’ calling, that ‘good Clothes, Money, and an Equipage,—and a little Instruction’ do make a ‘Gallant’, and that, with enough money, a repellent chimney-sweep can be passed off in foreign parts ‘for what you please to make him’. The more basic reality, however, remains as snobbish as ever: a shoemaker will never really be a gentleman, nor his daughter a lady. And property is not, as Whigs supposed, the basis of civic identity and worth.

  Although essentially a City play (albeit set in Cadiz), The False Count was based in part on Molière’s skit, Les Précieuses ridicules, which mocked a couple of romance-addicted cousins who expected to be courted at the length of multiple volumes. Instead, they were humiliated by their rejected suitors’ device of disguising lackeys as nobles to woo them with the flowery speech and flattery romance demanded.15 Well aware of her own romance-reading past—indeed one of Molière’s girls chooses her own poetic pseudonym of Aminta—Aphra Behn found such young women less ridiculous and was not keen to present their defeat by a sensible father.16 So she changed the butt to parvenues, the former English cobbler, Francisco, and his stuck-up daughter, Isabella, and made the father more odious by putting him in her old plot of elderly merchant husband and young witty wife. The fault of the unsympathetic characters is not, as in Molière, a yearning for a more romantic and empowered life, however comically presented, but a mistaken belief that money can buy others, in the father’s case a young wife, in the daughter’s a man of ‘quality’. The only connection between Molière’s young women and Behn’s upstart one is an exaggerated sense of self-worth.

  Ill-bred father and daughter are thoroughly disagreeable. Francisco is not bound by civilities that temper the violence of hierarchy, whether of sex or class, and he veers between infantilising his wife in the manner of Sir Patient Fancy and calling her his slave and merchandise: ‘[Y]our true bred Courtier’, perhaps just as misogynous underneath, is ‘more ceremonious in his Civilities to Ladies than Men’. Francisco fears plots where they are not and fails to see them where they are, in neat comment on London, where the absurd Popish Plot covered the growth of the real, potentially anarchic plot of excluding the legitimate James from the throne. Francisco is fooled through ignorance—he supposes Turkey close to Cadiz—while Isabella is brought down through the kind of ludicrous ambition for which Titus Oates was famous: at the height of his power Oates thought himself worthy of a title. In the marriage of Isabella and the chimney-sweep as nobleman, Behn may also have called on the stories of Mary Carleton and her foiled desires.

  Like The Second Part of The Rover, there is complexity in The False Count beyond politics: the cynicism of money and the instability of rank and gender. Guilliom, the chimney-sweeper, is assumed to be available for any lordly sport, but, once transformed, he is threateningly disruptive and he cannot easily be returned. As he observes, ‘’tis a harder task to leap from a Lord to a Rogue, than ’tis from a Rogue to a Lord.’ His rudeness becomes lordly freedom, and his exuberant speech has only to drop the references to brooms and chimneys to form the exaggerated code of nobility. He abuses his ‘servants’ coarsely—but Rochester was famous for wittily abusing his.

  So many of Behn’s plays had ended with Utopian dissolutions of unwanted marriages: this seems to be on course when, towards the end, Francisco unexpectedly interrupts the progress by insisting that consummation of his marriage has occurred despite many hints of his impotence. So the marriage must simply be ignored for the happy ending, in which Francisco gives his wife to her lover like any other commodity. Earlier on, the sense of woman simply as a sexual body had bred exaggerated fear in Francisco, who sees lesbian monstrosity where there is only female intrigue: ‘I have known as much danger hid under a Petticoat, as a pair of Breeches. I have heard of two Women that married each other—oh abominable, as if there were so prodigious a scarcity of Christian Mans Flesh.’ The monstrosity of the woman given in whoredom (according to one scheme of values) does not strike him.17

  The False Count is a knowing, although not a witty or bawdy work, which manages well its stage business of darkness and doors. It plays with issues, and its own form: a servant hopes for a ‘comical end’ when her mistress veers towards tragedy, a lover fits himself for his part in ‘this Farce’ and then worries that the ‘plot’ may miscarry, so that they make ‘a Tragedy of our Comedy’. Despite its advantages and her proven actors, however, Nokes as Francisco, Antony Leigh as Guilliom and Betty Currer as Isabella, with Elizabeth Barry coming on to do the epilogue, The False Count did not please when staged before the King in the autumn of 1681. Behn published it with no dedicatee.

  Clearly, to succeed ‘in an Age when Faction rages, and differing Parties disagree in all things’, Behn would have to be cruder and more explicit. Audiences were so rowdy that plays were nearly drowned out; in the pit Whigs sat ‘with a pious design to Hisse and Rail’, while ‘the Loyal hands ever out-do their venom’d Hisse’.18

  Behn’s next play h
ad much in common with The False Count in the way it relished middle-class female pretension to aristocratic ceremony.19 It had some political complexity, raising though not settling the serious problem of loyalty to the wrong side. What is owed to a Parliamentary husband? What is the nature of a contract or an oath to a defeated man or regime? What is honesty when the heart and tongue have different codes? Yet in general The Roundheads, set in London just before the Restoration, greatly simplifies matters made problematic in the earlier play, reducing rank complexity and abandoning allusion for direct political attack.20 The use of an Interregnum subject enforced the Tory point, that Whig agitation in the 1680s repeated republican unrest in the 1640s and 1650s and that Dissenting Whigs were just old Civil War Presbyterians: ‘every poor Ape, Who for Changes does gape’ is really trying to bring back the ‘Good-Old-Cause’.21 Behn’s play was as up-to-the-minute as it could be in its old-fashioned combination of sixties Royalist comedy and eighties abuse.

  Although, as usual, she did not admit her source, the work was an adaptation of Tatham’s propagandist play The Rump, concerning the last days of the republic when the army and the ‘Rump’ Parliament—whose name had already generated a vast quantity of farting backsides and buggery jokes—struggled over the legacy of Oliver Cromwell. Tatham’s crude play had been put on privately between the fall of the Rump and the arrival of Charles II, and it thinly disguised the names of the principals, General Lambert as Bertlam for example. As so often in English plays, the Scots were ridiculed, and this aspect allowed Behn to bring in the contemporary ‘Scott’, Monmouth, as well as the Whigs.

  The time of the play, 1659 and early 1660, was probably a significant period in Behn’s own young life, and she may have remembered talk of the figures she now presented. Cromwell had just died, and his son Richard had become Protector. The army chiefs failed to rally behind him, and the canting Fleetwood, Oliver Cromwell’s son-in-law, along with the oafish Desborough, his brother-in-law, and various uncouth upstarts (in Royalist terms) recalled the remnants of the Long Parliament. This body, nicknamed the Rump, assumed power. (Perhaps residual feeling for William Scot made Behn omit his father from her play, despite his involvement in the Rump’s revival; his place was taken by Thurloe, Cromwell’s chief of intelligence, described as ‘Trapanning the Kings liege people’, of whom Behn may have had some secret and sour memory.22) Quarrelling inevitably broke out, especially with the powerful General Lambert, as Behn always assumed it would when there was no legitimate leader.23 At this point General Monck, with his army in Scotland, came forward to take control, and invite in the King. The Roundheads were reduced to their original roles of pedlars, cobblers and scroungers of kitchen slops. In Behn’s play, much is made of Roundhead low birth and uncouthness, complemented by absurd passion for the people—the list of characters actually includes ‘A Rable Of the sanctified Mobil[e]’. Although the London crowd had participated in the Restoration, Behn was so appalled at the Whig mob of the Popish Plot years, whipped up through wild processions and pope-burnings, that she could not imagine its being other than recalcitrant and dangerous.

  Tatham had written lengthy ‘shrew’ scenes in which the ladies Lambert and Cromwell quarrel over who is grander—although, in reality, Cromwell’s wife had been mocked for her homely demeanour. Behn used part of these scenes, but omitted the frequent humiliation of the Protector’s widow, making her instead a dispossessed, dooming Queen Margaret figure out of Shakespeare’s history plays. As usual, Behn was disinclined to mock anything connected with the dead Cromwell except his ostentatious state funeral. His follower in the play, the Oliverian commander, is really a Cavalier in his heart, suggesting that even a pseudo king like Cromwell is better than the anarchy of Parliaments. As a sign of this general respect, Behn presented neither Protector nor seventeenth-century King on the stage: proper government appeared only in the symbol of the crown itself.24

  What Behn added to Tatham was love interest, this time between Roundhead women and Cavalier men who, despite opposing the materialism of the Roundheads, end with their ladies and the money. She also provided an Oatesish Puritan hypocrite—here called Ananias Gogle, heir of Tickletext in The Feign’d Curtizans, who had himself been called ‘my amorous Ananias’ in echo of Jonson’s famous Puritan in The Alchemist. Both probably used the image of the ‘enthusiastical buffoon preacher’, Hugh Peters, famous for his ranting sermons and lasciviousness; Behn went out of her way to introduce his name into The Roundheads despite his playing no part in the events of 1659–60.25 As usual Puritans, pretending to control sexuality, control only appearance, and Gogle remarks, ‘the Sin lyeth in the Scandal.’ But he is not solely comic, for his canting, levelling language influences the people: ‘You are a Knave of Credit, a very Saint with the rascally Rabble, with whom your Seditious Cant more prevails, your pretious hum and ha, and gifted Nonsence, than all the Rhetorick of the learn’d or honest.’

  Behn uses the misogynous fear of petticoat rule to make her point that no one but the legitimate king should govern. The sense that, if rank goes, proper sex inequality must follow, lies behind Tatham’s female council scene, which Behn borrows for her cause, although she adroitly moves it into the final act of her play, and allows it to be penetrated by two Cavaliers in drag. Since her main butt is not women, she does not include Tatham’s exchanges about cosmetics and perfumes which allow women to be ‘sented a street off’; instead, she emphasises the ridiculous Puritan notion of democracy, with its appeal to law and rights, and gives the exchange—‘in a Free State, why shou’d not we be free?’ answered, ‘Why not? we stand for the Liberty and Property of our Sex’—to a man pretending to be a woman and a Cavalier lady pretending to be a Puritan. As in Tatham and countless other writers of the time, women in The Roundheads are solely sexual beings: political posturing precedes bed. In this misogynous presentation, Behn does not necessarily temper her more basic feminist feelings, for nowhere else does she refer to women’s substantial role in the Civil War.26 Sceptical of political ‘progress’, she always saw women’s only hope of influence not in any doctrine of universal freedom and rights but in their subtlety, their performative abilities, and their sexual manoeuvring.

  The historical Frances Lambert had been famed for her arrogance and beauty. In Behn she becomes a pushy wife who openly henpecks her husband, like so many middle-class women in Tory plays. She even demands that he make her queen, rather as Isabella in The False Count demanded to be noble. Both upstart women act preposterously, in keeping with their ambition: as Lady Lambert remarks, ‘I thought I’d been so Elevated above the common Crowd, it had been visible to all Eyes who I was.’ Lady Lambert, always only the ‘little Actress’, is brought down not by presumption but by something Behn respected more (while always aware of its dangers for women): sexual feeling. Lady Lambert has this for a man who, on first meeting, sees not a potential queen but ‘a thing just like a Woman’.

  As in The Rover, the woman’s gifts to the man do not render him a despised gigolo or give her the status of a keeper, but simply diminish her. Under Loveless’s tutelage, Lady Lambert drops social for sexual desire and becomes eager simply for the ‘Common Civilities due to my Sex alone’ at which Cavaliers had always excelled. When, at the end of the play, a soldier pursues Lady Lambert, believing with some justice that she did more damage than her lord, he is mocked by Loveless for hunting a woman. The Restoration is close, the time when women—outside of the court and theatre—will be put back on to their pedestal of subordination and respect and the intellectual gender freedom of the Puritans will become lewd. In the satires, the Rump Parliament was often portrayed as a monstrous wife, where the Free Parliament, which opposed it and, under Monck’s guidance, brought in the King, was the virtuous wife. Uncharacteristically, Behn had to rely on this imaging when she made her Puritan women, insubordinate and rebellious to improper Roundhead husbands, look forward to a future of obedient wifeliness to (slightly insalubrious) Cavaliers.27

  In Behn’s formul
ation, Cavalier against Roundhead becomes the common plot of youth outwitting age, and taking its women. Politics falls into chaos and sexual struggle; government is reduced to bedroom farce, as in the brilliantly orchestrated scene where the Committee of Safety begins to rule, gets drunk, dances wildly, ending in Lady Lambert’s bedroom. There they sing of the ‘lean Carrion’, Shaftesbury, and of themselves as those who, being

  ...Rogues that are Resolute, bare-facd and Great,

  Boldly head the rude Rabble in open Sedition,

  Bearing all down before us in Church and in State.

  Your Impudence is the best State trick.

  And he that by Law means to rule,

  Let his History with ours be related,

  Tho’ we prove the Knaves, ’tis he is the Fool.28

  In the bedroom Loveless is concealed in a couch on which Lord Lambert inevitably sits. When Lambert feels movement, he shouts ‘a Popish Plot’.

  The Roundheads was crude, farcical, and intermittently misogynous—the City was like a woman raped and left with legs open to the wide world, an unpleasant image from Tatham which Behn in propagandising mood did not suppress. The play was also effective, and it had its purpose in giving its author a new sense of self: as a playwright with a clearly political agenda. This was expressed in her dedication.