Wastrel’s Reviews > The Secret Life of Aphra Behn > Status Update

The point here being that in the Restoration masks had become fashionable, first for prostitutes and then by extension for high society ladies. They were apparently seen as somewhat ambiguous symbols as a result, and paired well with the age's love of mysteries, deceptions and false appearances. Not only are the plays of the era filled with people in disguises (often resulting in illicit sex), but the playwrights and poets themselves disguised themselves with pseudonyms, particularly the women.

Anyway, the character in The Country Wife insists that his wife cross-dresses, as this is less likely to attract attention than wearing a mask would.

That, of course, is another obsession of the age: one in which, we're told (by contemporary conservatives) young men delighted in perfumes, ribbons, and breeches that look as much as possible like petticoats, while women increasingly rode on horseback and wore male-coded attire, like wigs, hats (with feathers), and riding coats. [Sometimes, of course, it went further than just coding - the Duchess of Mazarine, the king's glamorous new courtesan, famously entered the country, and seduced the king, while dressed as a man. She also liked swordfighting, gambling, and having sex with the king's daughter.]

In any case, it's in this environment that Behn launched her first performed play (though Todd thinks it's the third she wrote), the Forc'd Marriage. It's about a woman who is forced into marriage against her will, and refuses to have sex with her husband - which causes her husband to strangle her to death. Except he doesn't - she survives, and decides to disguise herself as her own vengeful ghost in order to persuade him to marry her best friend instead, so that she can safely come back to life and mary the king's son.

More interesting, though, is the prologue - it may not be by Behn, but it's not improbable. It's two parts - first a man speaks, then a woman. The man warns all the men in the audience that women are invading - some of them have decided that:
Beauty alone goes now at too cheap rates;
And therefore they like Wise and Politick states,
Court a new power that may the old supply,
And keep as well as gain the victory.
They'le joyn the Force of Wit to Beauty now
And so maintain the right they have in you;
If the vain Sex this priviledge should beast,
Past cure of a declining face, we're lost.

And foremost in this invasion?
To day one of their, party ventures out,
Not with design to Conquer, but to Scout:
Discourage but this first attempt, and then,
They'le hardly dare to sally out again.

So the male audience should reject the play, then? Not so fast! "The Poetess" has spies everywhere, the actor warns, and he points to all the women in the audience:
I'th' upper Box, Pit, Gallerus, every face
You find disguis'd, in a black Velvet Case.
My life on 'tis her Spy on purpose sent,
To hold you not a wanting on Complement
That so you may not censure what she's writ. As a result, anxious to win 'some common prize', the actor fears the men in the audience will let the 'Tyrant' in to conquer.

In other words: watch out, if you claim not to like this play, you won't get laid.

But not to worry, says the actress as she arrives on stage. Women aren't really a threat at all, she claims, because all they want to do is please men. All they ask is faithfulness (she speaks scathingly of the 'picaroons' (pirates) of whom "all they do is pillage ye, then gladly let ye go") and if their men are faithful then "We'll sacrifice it all to pleasure you."

At the end of the play, the actress returns to apologise, and admit it was a mistake for a woman to try to write something. From now on, women will know their place and recognise that they must reign through beauty alone, and let men do the thinking - while acknowledging that it is "as tributary Kings we own /
It is by you that we possess that Throne".

The conventional battle of the sexes motif aside - and also leaving aside to what extent the apology is to be read as a genuine, preemptively fearful piece of caution for a woman entering a man's world, and to what extent it is conventional, coquettish self-mockery - it's interesting that the concept of spying appears prominently in the prologue (there are also allusions in the play). Is this a coincidence, or is it an in-joke for the author and her friends, or had her previous career as a spy already become part of her public image?

Rather touchingly - perhaps one of Behn's most sincere and revealing moments - she didn't add a dedication to her first play, but simply gave the valediction:
Va mon enfant, prend ta fortune

[interesting as well that an author self-conscious of her lack of Latin is confident enough to write an epigram in French. Todd links Behn's early literary awareness to widely-available French romances.]

Anyway, it did find some fortune - it ran for six nights, earned her perhaps as much as £25, and was quickly published.

The fact it was published is impressive - playwrights often struggled to get even succesful plays published, but Behn's almost all were. The play had also apparently entertained a full house during its run. We might suspect that some of this eagerness in her audience was gawkery - come see the female playwright! - but we should remember that at this point she was only an oddity, not a true novelty, as other women had already had plays performed and published (Behn would be the first to make a living out of it, but the audience for her first play couldn't have known that).

In any case, the publisher is as telling as the fact of publication: apparently her publisher was mostly known for literary works, and was the same publisher who worked with Dryden (the Poet Laureate, and the dominant playwright of the age both with the critics and with the Court). So either she really was immediately very well received, or else she had some connexions - both seem possible.

Her second play, The Amorous Prince, followed only five months later - an adaptation from Cervantes.

Todd is troubled by this work, as she doesn't understand how a young woman could have written it - it's "an oddly sexy play for a woman"... "it is hard to imagine that Behn could have opened her very first work with a scene of two lovers whose undress indicates sexual activity". [this means it must be at least her third play, and cannot have been written before The Forc'd Marriage, despite in some ways seeming more primitive]

With respect, the fact that Todd finds this hard to imagine is a big part of what I find frustrating about this book. She accepts - she can hardly not - that Behn acted confident and liberated in her sexuality, later in her career, just as she showed herself to be politically opinionated; but for Todd, this can only be explained as the result of long and bitter experience of misogyny and patriarchy, impinging upon an original innocence and naivity that she seems to believe universal to women. Personally, my impression is that if Behn was ever an ingenue, it was long before her public bow. I can completely imagine a woman - knowing that she is an oddity in a male-dominated, hyper-sexualised theatrical world - intentionally opening her play with titillation, a declaration of intent (sincere or opportunistic) for her style of entertainment.


Anyway, in the play, the heroine is persuaded (by other women) to cross-dress, but is surprised to notice that being dressed as a boy makes men sexually interested in her.

There's a fun example in the prologue of the incestuousness of theatre culture: Behn (if she wrote it) makes an in-joke about a hat that Nell Gwyn had worn, which was itself a parody of a hat worn by Nokes, who had in turn worn his to caricature the French entourage that had visited England with the king's sister some time before.

Speaking of it being a small world: we happen to know an anecdote about the performance of The Forc'd Marriage! Which is that Behn's fellow new playwright, Thomas Ottway, decided to act in it, for his first ever appearance... but was so disasterously overwhelmed by stage fright that he never acted again.