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

Bits like that really add more interest to the question of whether Mrs Behn herself was married, and, if so, to whom, wherefore, and what became of it...

Anyway, Sir Patient Fancy is apparently rather scandalous. Sir Patient's wife accidentally has sex with the wrong secret lover - her excuse is that she's so overwhelmed by loving thoughts of her boyfriend that she has 'no sense left' to notice that she's having sex with an entirely different person. I wonder whether that excuse actually worked back then.

Anyway, Wittmore is meant to be having an affair with Lady Fancy, but is disguising this by pretending to be courting her step-daughter; Lodwick, meanwhile, is actually seducing the step-daughter, but takes the opportunity along the way to sleep with Lady Fancy, who thinks that he's Wittmore at the time. In earlier plays, this would be grounds for some drama - jealousy, regret, guilt - but in this play everyone is found out and nothing really happens, because nobody cares who is sleeping with whom anyway. Meanwhile, Sir Patient is a puritan, and the play has a happy ending, in that Sir Patient, overwhelmed by cynicism, resolves to attend court, aquire a mistress, and 'hate all Conventicles' - for Behn, abandoning your principles is a good thing, because it's Puritans/Republicans/Whigs who have principles.

[however, there is a meaner edge along the way: when Lady Fancy thinks her husband is dead, she celebrates, "I now having no more to do but to bury the stinking corpse of my quondam cuckold, dismiss his daughters, and give [her boyfriend] quiet possession of all!" - again, in plays of an earlier generation this attitude would mark her out as a villain, but for Behn it's hardly disqualifying...]

The play is more explicit than her previous works, as although there's no on-stage sex scene, we do open a scene with a man buttoning his clothes up immediately after the act.

Lady Fancy on the hypocrisies of puritanical men: they "do sneer upon me, pat my Breasts, and cry, 'fie, fie upon this fashion of tempting Nakedness!'"

What has poor Woman done, that she must be
debar'd from sense and sacred poetrie?
why in this age has heaven allow'd you more,
and Women less, of wit than heretofore?
We once were fam'd in story, and could write
equal to men; could govern, nay, could fight.
We still have passive valour - and can show,
would custom give us leave, the active too...
since we no provocation want from you!

(Behn there taking advantage of the custom of having women deliver prologues and epilogues for plays: as a female playwright, she has an accepted space to speak directly to the audience through a female actor, without having to filter the words through the mask of a specific character)

Meanwhile, in royal sexual politics, this is the point where Mazarine finally arrives. de Keroualle, wracked with jealousy (and fear for her position) 'dragged herself' to Sir Patient Fancy in order to watch Charles and Mazarine together in the audience.

(speaking of which: later centuries apparently believed that Gwyn herself delivered that epilogue; but there's no evidence for this, and Todd agrees that it was actress coincidentally named Ann Quin).