Aphra Behn: A Secret Life by Janet Todd
Author:Janet Todd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00
Chapter 21
Free-thinking in Politics and Religion
‘Beyond poor Feeble Faith’s dull Oracles’
Behn had reluctantly followed the times in using plays as overt propaganda and was glad of some success in the mode. With satisfaction she reflected on the popular Roundheads and The City-Heiress: of the latter she wrote, ‘It has the luck to be well received in the Town; which (not for my Vanity) pleases me, but that thereby I find Honesty in fashion again, when Loyalty is approved and Whigism becomes a Jest where’er ’tis met with.’1 Perhaps she even celebrated the moment by commissioning a portrait of herself by Lely’s successor as court painter, John Riley. A shy, diffident man, no lover of conviviality and taverns like her dead artist friend Greenhill, Riley is unlikely to have encountered Behn socially. But, unpopular with court ladies, he did paint women of her rank, including, on one occasion, a governess in the royal household. He had writers such as Edmund Waller among his sitters and to these he gave an inward, brooding quality quite distinct from Lely’s more extrovert images. The portrait of Behn, surviving now only in engravings, is serious, even sombre, but compatible with the one ascribed to Lely five or so years earlier.2
With Behn’s success the Whig Shadwell was thoroughly vexed. Gleeful over the failure of her unpublished play, Like Father, Like Son, he was incensed at the good reception of The Roundheads and The City-Heiress, and, in The Tory Poets, A Satire, he fulminated against both works as shams. He made Otway into Behn’s pimp because he had supplied her with a prologue:
Poetess Aphra, though she’s damn’d today,
Tomorrow will put up another play;
And Otway must be pimp to set her off
Lest the enraged bully scowl, and scoff,
And hiss, and laugh, and give not such applause
To Th’City Heiress as The Good Old Caused.3
Other less Whiggish poets were displeased with Behn’s efforts as well. Believing that wicked writers would ‘pluck down a Judgment on the Times’, Robert Gould was furious at the spectacle of the impudent Mrs Behn portraying rewarded rakes and cursing virgins.4 He had been uneasy as each of her plays was performed, but he positively seethed when, in The City-Heiress, he saw intercourse implied in the rumpled clothes of Wilding and the laments of the widow, Lady Galliard. With visceral horror he watched Behn moving into the political and literary centre as a ‘Female Laureat’ and lashed out at her:
What tho’ thou brings’t (to please a vicious Age)
A far more vicious widdow on the Stage,
Just Reeking from a Stallions Rank Embrace,
With Ruffled Garments, and disordered Face,
T’acquaint the Audience with her Slimy Case?5
It says something for Behn’s personal discretion that Gould, who probably did not know her personally, seems to have had little specific to charge concerning her sexual life, when he dismissed Dryden’s wife as a whore, Dryden as a lecher, and Otway as a drunk. The worst he could say of Behn was that she had become ‘Sapho, famous for Her Gout and Guilt’.6
Wycherley also
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