Archive: Aphra Behn

Widely regarded as the first professional woman writer in English literature, Aphra Behn (1640-1689) is best known for her plays and her novel Oroonoko, she's been an inspiration to countless writers across the ages. This archive episode, first released in October 2017, was selected as part of a ten-episode series by Misha Glenny. In the episode, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and times of Behn, who made her name and her living as a playwright, poet and writer of fiction during the Restoration. Virginia Woolf wrote of her: 'All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds'. Behn may well have spent some of her early life in Surinam, the setting for her novel Oroonoko, and there are records of her working in the Netherlands as a spy for Charles II. She was loyal to the Stuart kings and refused to write a poem on the coronation of William of Orange. She was regarded as an important writer in her lifetime and inspired others to write but fell out of favour for two centuries after her death when her work was seen as too bawdy, the product of a disreputable age. With Janet Todd Former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University Ros Ballaster Professor of 18th Century Literature at Mansfield College, University of Oxford and Claire Bowditch Post-doctoral Research Associate in English and Drama at Loughborough University Producer: Simon Tillotson. Reading list: Kate Aughterson, Aphra Behn: The Comedies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction 1684-1740 (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1991) Aphra Behn (ed. Joanna Lipking), Oroonoko (Norton and Co, 1997) Aphra Behn (ed. Paul Salzman), Oroonoko and Other Writings (Oxford University Press, 2009) Aphra Behn (ed. Jane Spencer), The Rover and Other Plays (Oxford University Press, 2008) Aphra Behn (ed. Janet Todd), Oroonoko (Penguin Classics, 2003) Aphra Behn (ed. Janet Todd), Oroonoko, the Rover and Other Works (Penguin Classics, 1999) Aphra Behn (ed. Janet Todd), The Complete Works of Aphra Behn:7 vols. (Pickering and Chatto, 1992-6) Claire Bowditch, The Works of Aphra Behn (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) W. J. Cameron, New Light on Aphra Behn (University of Auckland Press, 1961) Maureen Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn, 1640-89 (Jonathan Cape, 1977) Derek Hughes, The Theatre of Aphra Behn (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) Derek Hughes (ed.), Versions of Blackness: Oroonoko, Race and Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn’s Afterlife (Oxford University Press, 2000) Janet Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1996) Janet Todd, Aphra Behn: A Secret Life (Fentum Press, 2017) Janet Todd and Derek Hughes (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn (Cambridge University Press, 2004) S. J. Wiseman, Aphra Behn (Northcote House, 1996) In Our Time is a BBC Studios production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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  This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than 1,000 episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, and welcome to the first in a series of archive editions of In Our Time, which I found especially fascinating. I first came across the 17th century dramatist and novelist Aphra Behn when studying drama at Bristol University. Long forgotten, in the 1970s, her reputation and works were experiencing a most deserved revival, thanks to the powerful

• 2:19Speaker 04

  injection of feminism in the theatrical and academic worlds. She was quite simply one of the most influential and popular playwrights of the Restoration period in England. This was a joyous response in the arts to the end of the rather dead hand of life under Oliver Cromwell's protectorate, and the return of the monarchy in 1660 under Charles II. Since the 1970s, Behn's place in the world of academia has been secure. Yet in the wider world, she remains relatively unknown, still living in the shadow of playwrights like Congreve and Dryden. This is disappointing, because as Melvyn Bragg's guests demonstrate in this

• 3:04Speaker 04

  episode, Behn was not only a hugely successful dramatist, novelist and poet, she forged a career and gained recognition as the first woman to make her living from writing, a world which, until the Restoration, women had been prevented from inhabiting and exploring. That among her other career paths she indulged in espionage only adds to the biography of this truly remarkable woman. And even though back in the day, I actually read and studied Behn, this episode opened my eyes to many of the things I had missed. I hope it'll do the same for you. Enjoy listening.

• 3:45Speaker 05

  Hello. Aphra Behn was a prolific playwright for the Restoration stage, a poet, a writer of fiction, and a sometimes spy. And her life spanned one of the most turbulent times in English history. She was born as the Civil War started in 1640, flourished under the restored Stuart monarchy, and stayed loyal to James II after the Glorious Revolution, right up to her death in 1689. And she was the first English woman to make her living from writing. As tastes changed, she was dismissed as too bawdy, but Virginia Woolf wrote, "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds." With me to discuss Aphra Behn are Janet Todd, former president of Lucy Cavendish College,

• 4:30Speaker 05

  Cambridge University, Ross Ballaster, professor of 18th century literature at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, and Claire Burdich, postdoctoral research associate in English and drama at Loughborough University. Jan Todd, how much do we know about Aphra Behn's early life?

• 4:47Speaker 06

  Well, not a lot, but she was clearly humbly born. We think that her father was a barber in Kent. She was born into this tumultuous time, as you've already mentioned, and for the rest of her life, she had a horror of civil strife and Puritan rule, the notion of a government that has to control behaviour and morality. Her mother appears to have been a wet nurse in a more elevated family, and I think it's probably through that connection that she gets to know a man called Kiligrew, who, when the Restoration comes, is both involved in the secret service and in the theatre. And of course, Behn comes into history first as a secret agent.

• 5:32Speaker 05

  But in terms of her childhood, Jermaine Greer said, "We must be prepared to live with what we do not know about her." Yes.

• 5:39Speaker 06

  That is what we are doing, I think, rather substantially. I hope one day there will be more known.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  Because is it sure that her father was a barber in Kent? It seems to be more sure that her mother was a wet nurse, doesn't it?

• 5:51Speaker 06

  I think the barber bit is pretty secure. It's all circumstantial, because she's not born into the kind of family that keeps letters in the attic, and that has a big house where they can control and hold their own archives. So it's not surprising that very little is known. And the fact that she is constantly referred to as somebody, someone humbly born, I think is fair enough. But what I think is almost more important than exactly what her provenance was, is where did she get her amazing education? She is obviously an autodidact. She obviously makes a great use of everything and everybody she knows. And she's just a very, very clever girl. But nonetheless, she learns how to

• 6:34Speaker 06

  write in all genres. She learns how to comport herself among the learned, among men who are at the ins of court. She learns all that somewhere.

• 6:45Speaker 05

  That was the question I was going to ask you. Where did she learn it?

• 6:48Speaker 06

  Well, please don't, because I don't know. All I can do is speculate. And I think it's to do with these connections that she makes.

• 6:56Speaker 05

  Somehow through the wet nurse, she got into the library, one of the great big houses with libraries and took to reading books. That's the best we can do, is it?

• 7:05Speaker 06

  I think it's the best we can do, and I think it's a lot. I mean, a lot of people who are very clever can get there through their wit. And I think the other thing is, it's a period in which women could do this, a period in which women could, who are clever, witty and pretty as well, could actually rise and get to a position where they could hobnob with people of learning and education.

• 7:29Speaker 05

  And this is in the terrible Civil War period, masses of deaths, and then in the Cromwellian period, the period of what was called the Commonwealth and so on. And she's doing that then. But we do know she was a spy in Antwerp.

• 7:40Speaker 06

  We do know that, for sure.

• 7:42Speaker 05

  Well, you're on your own, Jan. Where did she go? How did she get to be a spy in Antwerp?

• 7:44Speaker 06

  Right. I was hoping I was going to be asked about her theatrical world, but I think she was already a spy when she went to Suriname, which is an amazing place for a woman to go at that time. And I think that because she was already being called Astraea, which was her codename later and her theatrical name. And in Suriname, she also met a William Scott, who was a dissident, a republican and an enemy of the king. And when she was definitely a spy in Antwerp, codenamed 160 and called Astraea again, she was sent there to bring in this William Scott and make him turn into a double agent, so that he would

• 8:28Speaker 06

  work for the government of Charles II.

• 8:32Speaker 05

  And we've actually letters and reports and how she's saying, "I need more money to do this job."

• 8:37Speaker 06

  She wrote endlessly about needing more money. And I think all through her life, most of her letters that we have are asking for money.

• 8:45Speaker 05

  Ross Ballaster, what was the state of the theatre when Behn began to write? Did she write? Did she say? Why did she begin to write for the state?

• 8:54Speaker 07

  Well, as Jan said, it seems likely that it's this connection with Thomas Kiligrew. We know that in her novel that she publishes in 1688 called Orinoco, Aphra Behn mentions that she sent some Indian feathers from Suriname to Kiligrew, to the king's company for a performance.

• 9:16Speaker 07

  This, so I think she has connections with the stage and I suppose what Jan's outlined here is a situation where she clearly wasn't making money through the other careers that she tried. Spying wasn't working, um, and, um, and she didn't seem, she doesn't seem to have been a very effective spy. Um, so I think she turns to the stage to try and earn money. Um, she probably looks at models like John Dryden and Thomas Chadwell, who were, um, the rising professionals in the stage at the time. I think it's worth understanding what the theatre's like in this period.

• 9:45Speaker 05

  Because it had been closed down in sixteen forty-two.

• 9:47Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 9:48Speaker 05

  It opened up again, but only two theatres compared with the massive theatres there were in, as it were, Shakespeare and post-Shakespearean world.

• 9:54Speaker 07

  And it's an entirely, yeah, it's an entirely different kind of theatre. I mean, not so people sort of say, this isn't just a revival or a restoration, it's a reinvention of theatre. Um, Charles the Second does two things that are very significant. He gives two patents to two companies that are called the Duke's Company and the King's Company. Kiligrew runs the King's Company, Davenant runs the Duke's Company. Most of, all of Ben's plays until sixteen eighty-two are performed by the Duke's Company, interestingly, so that's James, named after James, Duke of York, later James the Second. And he seems to have been, um, the member of the royal family, the monarch that Ben was most loyal to.

• 10:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, but how did the theatre, theatre came back as a different thing? What different thing was it?

• 10:32Speaker 07

  Okay, so it's, it's a patent theatre, it's owned by those managers, whereas previously they were stock companies.

• 10:39Speaker 05

  Women can play women.

• 10:40Speaker 07

  Well, the second part, it, it, in his second, um, in sixteen, well, few years later, um, Charles passes an edict that says all parts for women must be played by women. And interestingly, he says that because he says otherwise, um, there are scurrilous and obscene passages that are given to female parts. So he's saying actually that he's going to make the theatre more respectable by having women play these parts. Our impression is, of course, that this, this is a kind of enormous novelty and excitement, seeing women playing female parts on the stage.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  Is it true that women are now legitimately allowed to go to the theatre for the first time? Or had they gone before?

• 11:15Speaker 07

  I think they'd always gone to the theatre before. Um, I think there are new kinds of parts for women that sort of, Ben starts her career writing tragic comedies, actually, and, and those tragic comedies have amazing parts for women. They're sort of the commandeering, powerful woman, the woman who kind of commands love with her eyes, that these extraordinary actresses like, um, Elizabeth Barry, John Wilmore, Earl of Rochester's mistress, and Nell Gwynne, who have real stage presence and are really attractive to the audience. So they're a draw, they're a lure to this new kind of theatre.

• 11:48Speaker 05

  When you say she decided to go to the theatre to make a living, it was very risky. Why did she, what sort of living did she make in the beginning?

• 11:56Speaker 07

  It's really, it's, it's really difficult for us to work out what people earned from some theatrical work. Again, what's different about these theatres, in the Renaissance period, an act, a playwright receives sort of eight pounds for their script and it was then owned by the company. In this period, the playwright earns the profits from the third night of a performance. Um, so once all of the cost is taken out, you get the profits. You might, if you run to a sixth or a ninth night, you might get those profits. Another bit of earning might come from publishing your play, you might get about ten pounds for that three months later. If you're a man, you might get some dedication. Dryden, some money from dedications. Dryden's an interesting case, he's, he's successful on the stage before Ben.

• 12:40Speaker 07

  In the late sixteen sixties, Dryden is commissioned by the King's Company to write three plays a year, so he's probably doing quite well out of that. Ben doesn't have that kind of contract, women never get that kind of contract, so she has to make money, uh, she's as good as her last play, basically. Um, and when the theatres go into doldrums, Ben's fortune tends to drop, we see her moving into other genres. The plays, in sixteen eighty-two, the two companies come together, there are far fewer new plays, Ben turns to fiction and then comes back to drama, uh, when the, when the theatrical scene revives again.

• 13:13Speaker 05

  Claire, but it's, were, were there other women writing plays at the time, writing plays at the time? She was the most successful, we know, but, but were there others around?

• 13:21Speaker 07

  She was the most successful, but yes, by the time that she started writing for the stage in sixteen seventy, sixteen seventy-one, there were at least two other women around at that time. Uh, the first was Frances Boothby, who wrote a tragic comedy, as Roz said, that's where Ben started her dramatic career. Uh, the one who came either slightly after or about the same time as Ben was Elizabeth Polwell, but as far as we know, they both only had one play performed, uh, whereas Ben ran for, for two decades nearly.

• 13:52Speaker 05

  Can you give us an overview of the sort of plays that, that Aphra Behn was writing?

• 13:56Speaker 07

  Uh, indeed, she started with tragic comedy and in sixteen seventy-three, for her third play, she moved to comedy. Uh, the third play was definitely a trial in comedy, she hadn't quite got the sense of space and how the, the stage worked, uh, down at, at that point. And she really continued with comedy right the way through her career, until just before her death, when she returned to one, one tragic comedy.

• 14:26Speaker 05

  And she's in a very, she, you've mentioned, Dryden has been mentioned, but there's also Witschley around and Etheridge around and.

• 14:33Speaker 07

  And Ravenscroft as well, yes.

• 14:35Speaker 05

  And so, so she's in with a lot of, uh, very successful men. Do they resent her? Do they bring her on? What, what's, what's their view? Is there a view, is there known to be a collective view that they have of this woman being very successful or getting a lot of plays on, anyway?

• 14:50Speaker 07

  I think amongst her immediate colleagues, uh, she does command their respect. They write prologues and epilogues for her plays, uh, which might be indeed interpreted as some kind of professional compliment. Uh, even when we get into her prose and some of her translations, she's receiving dedicatory verses from her, her peers that are extremely complimentary. That's not to say that everybody about her, uh, was complimentary about her, but.

• 15:17Speaker 05

  As I understand it, by this time, she's been married, but the marriage didn't last very long. How is she living? I have any idea? Is she living in a little lodging in Cheapside? Where is she?

• 15:25Speaker 07

  We don't know exactly where she was living. Uh, we do know that she could keep a servant, so she was, she had about enough money to keep a servant. Um, but in terms of her location, we assume she's immediately London-based and probably somewhere near the theatre on, on the Thames, but we don't have a, a location for her.

• 15:49Speaker 05

  So I understand that her first notable success was a play called, uh, The Rover, sixteen seventy-seven.

• 15:54Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 15:55Speaker 05

  What was, why was that a success, you think?

• 15:56Speaker 07

  Um, I think The Rover was especially successful because what it did was to give the Restoration audience what they wanted. And what generally they wanted was, um, a kind of pairing, two sets of lovers, one a constant couple who had some, uh, opposition to, to their romantic union. The other was, um, a witty couple, one rake and one clever woman who's trying to capture this rake. So it had that about it, it ticked that box, it had that formula. But what Ben also did with it was to complicate that binary with a character called Angelica

• 16:40Speaker 07

  Bianca, who was a courtesan. So, and Angelica Bianca added a darkness to that play that I think appealed to two different constituencies, really.

• 16:50Speaker 05

  It was quite bold because, because actresses were thought to be, were thought to be prostitutes, thought actresses were thought to be prostitutes by some people at that time. So by putting someone like that on the stage, she was smacking them in the face with it, wasn't she?

• 17:03Speaker 07

  She was, she was, I think, and Angelica Bianca is an extremely complicated character. She's not simply there as a prostitute, she's there as a devoted woman as well. And so I think that, yes, that's a very clever way of shutting down some of those arguments about what women in the public sphere were like. And her initials, of course, are the same as Aphra Behn's initials, so she's A B. So there's some suggestion that Behn may have been playing with expectations about her image in this role.

• 17:30Speaker 05

  Jan, Tony, in what, in what ways was The Rover typical of Ben's ideas? I've read a lot from the three of you about Ben's ideas of masculine, feminine, libertine, women can be libertines and so on. Could you develop that a bit?

• 17:43Speaker 06

  Well, I think she develops it more in the later plays, but it certainly starts here.

• 17:51Speaker 06

  That dichotomy between the virgin who gets the rake, the man, the most desirable man, and the whore who doesn't but has the best speeches, I think is going on all the way through. And these love-lorn women who are a little more experienced are, it's a feature of Afrobeans plays. But I think what's there already is the notion that the world is stacked against women. It's a patriarchal world and that women need to use their sexuality and to use their wit and cunning to succeed in the world. Violence, men have, so women are going to have to use guile. And if they don't, they will lose in the sexual game

• 18:34Speaker 06

  and therefore lose in the social game. So I think that's there already.

• 18:38Speaker 05

  Did you say in some way legitimise the female libertine?

• 18:42Speaker 06

  I don't think anybody can quite legitimise it. I think a female libertine is-

• 18:47Speaker 05

  If you came quite near it, as I understand it.

• 18:48Speaker 06

  Well, I think it's, you can't be, I think, in the end, a female libertine, as Helena says, what would I get out of sexual congress before marriage? Well, you know, a cradle full of mischief. The double standard is absolute. And the only people who came near to being female libertines are aristocratic women. And I think Ben admires those, but also knows that it's pretty difficult to be a libertine woman further down the social scale. Even in a wonderful work that she, that's an anonymous work called Love Letters, she has a woman who moves from being the virgin, the desirable virgin, into being

• 19:31Speaker 06

  a free woman. But in the end, she's a sort of wandering whore. There isn't a position in society for the female libertine, I don't think.

• 19:39Speaker 05

  But she did want people, as well, maybe her material, she did want women to be seen as more independent and more liberated than they had been seen until then, as I understand it. What do you say?

• 19:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, I suppose I think I'd want to question, I think it's very, if you're thinking about the libertine as a kind of sexual persona or a form of sexual behaviour, then I think Ben is very clear that it's difficult for women to access that role. But if you think about libertinism as a kind of aesthetic or philosophy, I think Ben really did embrace that idea. So the notion of the libertine, the term libertine in classical Rome just means a freed slave. So a libertine is someone who, we might say, thinks outside the box, refuses all systems, refuses rule, refuses convention. It's a kind of public blasphemy, arrogance, performance. You can see that in the figure that Ben most admired, John

• 20:30Speaker 07

  Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. And his surname, Wilmot, of course, is echoed in the name of the hero of the Rover, Wilmore. So that kind of role is being invoked. And I think Ben clearly identified with that and wanted to be seen as part of that libertine circle, those young court thrusting cavaliers round Charles, who were challenging convention, challenging rule, saw themselves as a new, young generation, taking over from the old Commonwealth men, now manifested as parliamentarians. And there's a very strong kind of libertine ethics or ethos. One way to put it is to sort of say, you know, Ben pursued a career

• 21:13Speaker 07

  in writing, not, she wasn't a kept mistress, we know very little. If she was, she kept that hidden. So it's in her writing that you see this kind of libertarian energy, rather than in her-

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• 24:12Speaker 05

  What place did marriage play in that scheme of things?

• 24:16Speaker 07

  She's always very sceptical about marriage. Most of her plays concern young women who are, or the majority of her comedies concern young women who are unhappily contracted to old men and want to get back to their young lovers who they've been separated from.

• 24:34Speaker 05

  Let's just be more specific. She isn't against marriage, she's against young women being unhappily contracted to old men.

• 24:40Speaker 07

  I think unequal marriages, yes, yes. But she's also, I mean, she is against marriages because it's an institution, if you take this libertine ethic. So she has a kind of, Ben's an odd combination of idealism and pragmatism. So she has this longing for a golden age, a world in which there was no marriage, no contract, people give love freely. She often idealises that. But she also, you know, she has a poem called The Golden Age, in which all of that is idealised. And then right at the end, we realise, this is all spoken in the voice of a man who's just trying to get a woman into bed with him. So this libertarian language she understands is something that rakes use to try and get women into bed.

• 25:16Speaker 05

  But come back to the, sorry, Jan, but can I just pursue this one more time? But the idea of a female rake, which I mentioned earlier, which I've seen in the notes of some, one or two of you, was not something you want to pursue? Was not something she wanted to pursue?

• 25:31Speaker 07

  Well, I think, when you think about the character of Helena in the Rover, there's a wonderful point when Helena says to Wilmore, I'm Helena the constant, Helena the inconstant, and you're Robert the constant. And there she's sort of saying, I'm inconstant in the sense, I can keep making myself into a new character to attract you and keep your attention. Whereas you, supposedly the manifestation of the rake, Wilmore, is actually a bit of a bore, who's completely driven by his sort of sexual appetites, is constantly looking for another woman. So she's the one who has the kind of flexibility, mobility to reinvent herself, make herself into a new kind of character, the sort of freedom that the libertine as an ideal might have.

• 26:14Speaker 05

  And then we're living in a time of, at least an acquaintance, perhaps even a friend of hers, Nell Gwynne, who was very open about her status.

• 26:23Speaker 07

  Yes. I think, I think Ben wants to differentiate herself from actresses. I mean, I think she really wants to be part of this court-wit group, rather than one identified with the actress.

• 26:35Speaker 06

  Right. I just wanted to come in on the idea of the ethical liberty, because I agree with Roz on that very much. And one of the most extraordinary things about Ben is that she goes against religion. And very, very few women of the time could set up for, almost for atheism, in the way that she does. She writes poems where she talks about faith as feeble. She says that Christianity is the last shift of routed argument. She even writes a paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer, in which she says, I haven't had enough daily bread, actually, and I'd like some more. And as for trespasses, well, you should give in to them, good heavens.

• 27:20Speaker 05

  Oscar Wilde, foretold.

• 27:21Speaker 06

  Yes. I mean, she is extraordinary in that respect. And she very much admires the classical philosopher Lucretius, whom she reads in translation. And Lucretius thought that the world was all made up of shifting atoms. And so that when a person dies, then he or she just becomes a series of atoms floating off into the air. So there is no afterlife. And Ben clearly did not believe in an afterlife.

• 27:52Speaker 05

  Claire, Claire Burridge. She was a very strong supporter of the Stuart monarchy of Charles II for 25 years, and then of his brother James, even though he was opposed by a great number of people in the country. And I think maybe one or two of our listeners might think, a very strong Tory monarchist, Tory loyalist, fascinated by the court, dazzled by it really, and a very strong, can we call her feminist without stepping on everybody's toes, can't we just use it to be getting on with, or feminist, which is more of a slightly different position. What would you have to say about that?

• 28:32Speaker 05

  I think that indeed, we, as critics of Ben, struggle to reconcile these two, in one sense, very progressive ideas for her time, in terms of her championing of women in the public sphere, and her really quite staunch royalism. You know, they seem diametrically opposed. In a sense, she's quite clever in how she does reconcile these two things, though. Because what she refrains from doing is looking back immediately to the Stuart line, if you like, in order to contextualise her support for both Charles as a Protestant, or at least a public Protestant, and James as a public Catholic and his heir-

• 29:17Speaker 07

  Presumptive. What she does instead is support them in what might be thought of as quite feminine terms. So for instance, she praises them as fathers, both, you know, fathers of their, in Charles's case, illegitimate sons, and fathers of the nation. So she couches that in domesticity, really. And she also looks back, as Jan was saying, to the classics, and they're the kind of classical heroes are used in place of support of the monarchy, or support specifically of Charles or James. So her support works on really two different levels, I think, one on a quite learned level and one on quite a domestic level.

• 30:03Speaker 05

  Did the court repay her devotion to them?

• 30:06Speaker 07

  Um, we don't have any specific record of favors that were given to her, for instance. In sixteen eighty-one, she did dedicate one of her plays, the second part of The Rover, to the future James, the James the Second. And one might assume she was, in some sense, remunerated for that, whether financially or through some kind of court favor. But I think if she'd received any kind of gratuitous favor, she would have been satirized by somebody and we would know about that. So I think it was probably proportional to either the work that she was doing or what other people were receiving.

• 30:49Speaker 05

  Jan, you want to come in?

• 30:50Speaker 06

  I was just gonna say that exactly, we don't know. But towards the end of her life, she was such a propagandist for James the Second, and very few people were as loyal as she was at the end. So I have a feeling that she was paid at that point. She's always short of money, so you can never really tell from the fact that she's short of money that she isn't being paid. But that slew of propagandist poems at the end, all printed by the King's printer, I would have thought that she was at that point being paid by the government of James the Second.

• 31:27Speaker 05

  Given James the Second's Catholicism and her attitude to religion, did that not irk him? Or was it not at odds with her protestations of loyalty?

• 31:37Speaker 06

  Well, I think she can protest anything when she needs to, and I think she sort of flirts with Catholicism. She certainly likes the bells and smells of Catholicism. She was very keen on the whole panoply of it. So I don't think she would be opposed. And I think she, unlike the majority of the nation, she saw James the Second as somebody who was tolerant. And so when he was imposing Catholicism, she saw in a way that he was allowing tolerance. But her total devotion, or apparent devotion, she's always equivocal, her apparent devotion to James the Second is something of a puzzle to most of us. She

• 32:15Speaker 06

  sees him as some sort of extraordinary heroic man, but somebody who's authentic and, in the end, guileless. And he falls partly because of that. But I don't think she was ever very keen on Charles the Second, actually.

• 32:31Speaker 05

  Roz, she wrote fiction as well as plays, and her best known book is Orinoco. But did she write fiction to make more money? The plays, she wrote a lot of plays, but we don't, they don't seem to be the great money spenders of Dryden's plays, except perhaps one or two of them. He did three a year on a contract and so on, or Congress plays, or whatever. What's striking about this novel? A, did she turn to it for money? Because she's very straightforward about what she did for money and what she didn't. And B, what do you think of it?

• 32:58Speaker 07

  Well, we've just been talking about James, and it's important to remember that Orinoco is published in sixteen eighty-eight, and it's published just as James is in real crisis, the bishops are refusing to cooperate with him. And it's a story, at its heart, it's a story about a romance hero who has a pregnant wife, and he murders her and their unborn child, because he refuses to be, remain in slavery. He's an African prince who's enslaved in South America, in Suriname. He's a Gold Coast prince. So although he's a black African

• 33:39Speaker 07

  hero, it's very evident when you look at this moment in which James and his wife Mary Medina have just given birth to a baby boy, and that's the reason that James is being removed from the throne, that Ben's publishing this novel. So it's still, it seems to me, part of her political commitment to James.

• 34:01Speaker 05

  During this conversation, it's been taken for granted that she did go to Suriname in Suriname. Do you all take that for granted? Because it's doubted in your notes, whether she did, whether or not she did go there.

• 34:11Speaker 07

  Well, I think critics have doubted it. Historically, they doubted it. And there's

• 34:14Speaker 05

  Well, you three, you all say alleged, unproved, and so on.

• 34:17Speaker 06

  Well, we can't be absolute, because we haven't found a diary saying, here I was in Suriname. But there's a huge amount of circumstantial evidence that she was there. And if she wasn't, a woman remarkably like her was there, also calling herself Astraea, which is, after all, the name she uses all the way through. I mean, there are state papers that mention the women in Suriname, and it fits her.

• 34:40Speaker 05

  Why didn't she go to Suriname in the first place?

• 34:42Speaker 06

  Well, aha, we don't know. But I think she went as an agent right away. But it's

• 34:47Speaker 05

  All right, we're still in the Secret Service.

• 34:49Speaker 06

  It's only speculation.

• 34:50Speaker 07

  I mean, she says her father was given a job as lieutenant governor of the island. That seems unlikely if he was a barber.

• 34:57Speaker 06

  Well, she always, she gets herself into her own works. Her works are really faction. She often puts herself into what she's writing. And when she does that, she nearly always elevates her birth.

• 35:07Speaker 05

  So to come back to this novel itself, what's most striking about it, but on the background?

• 35:12Speaker 07

  I mean, it's a remarkable novel, and it's much studied now. I think probably because it's, we, there's a debate about the extent to which it's making a case against slavery. But at least one might sort of say that it's a novel which exposes the kind of savagery at the heart of colonial government. In that respect, you could see it as presaging a novel like Heart of Darkness. Like Marlowe in Heart of Darkness, the narrator is a character in the novel who is complicit with the English colonial government, that she's also criticizing for its cruelty to this noble African prince that, who has been enslaved. He leads a slave

• 35:52Speaker 07

  rebellion, it's put down, he's horribly tortured, murders his wife, and then he's publicly executed, and his courted parts are sent around the colony. She finishes saying this mangled spectacle of the king. It's recalling again Charles the First's murder. So it's a wonderful kind of mixture of contemporary allegory and analogy, and contemporary critique of the colonial situation.

• 36:21Speaker 05

  Still, on the other side, as it were, of the ocean, not of the life itself, Claire, there's another late play, The Widow Ranta, set in Virginia. Now, what's she doing there? And why is she setting it in Virginia?

• 36:33Speaker 07

  Well, part of the real charm of The Widow Ranta is its collection of very varied characters. Because part of the cast is made up of Englishmen who have been transported to the colonies. So they've committed a petty crime in England, and they've been transported over there. And because of the lack of government, it's up to them to form some kind of order. So there's, on the one hand, there's that going on, as Roz was saying, in relation to Orinoco, there's a missing governor. So a little bit of a topsy-turvy world. And the two texts definitely share that, share that aspect of the world.

• 37:17Speaker 05

  What's The Widow ranting about?

• 37:19Speaker 07

  The Widow Ranta is possibly as close as we might come, in Ben, to that female rake, for one particular reason, which is that she revels in smoking. She smokes a pipe, she gets drunk, she's mostly drunk by lunchtime. And those kinds of physical pleasures that we might associate with libertinism are kind of embodied in The Widow Ranta. But on the other hand, she's, she's a wealthy widow. So she herself was transported as an indentured slave. When she got to the colonies, she was bought off the boat to pay for her

• 38:00Speaker 07

  passage, and as such, had to work for the man who'd bought her. The man who'd bought her married her within six months, and he was a wealthy colonel there, and had, I think, she phrases it, the grace to die quite soon thereafter, and leave her this...

• 38:16Speaker 05

  Unassisted.

• 38:16Speaker 07

  Sorry?

• 38:17Speaker 05

  Unassisted.

• 38:17Speaker 07

  Unassisted, yes. Well, there's no... We don't know. We have no evidence, yeah.

• 38:23Speaker 06

  That mantra.

• 38:25Speaker 07

  We're good at that. But yes, this old skeleton has the good grace to die and leave her this wealthy widow. But so on the one hand, she's enjoying all of these bodily pleasures. And on the other hand, she is in love with a colonel there called Daring, and she's... Worried that he wants her for her money. And so she has to put him through these tests where she's checking his constancy and his motives, because the fact that she's a wealthy widow leaves her with some problems.

• 38:54Speaker 05

  Because she's going, they're just going to marry her for her money.

• 38:57Speaker 07

  Exactly, yeah.

• 38:58Speaker 05

  Jan, briefly, is there any way you would like to compare her, briefly, her fiction with her playwright, do you think she's a better novel writer, novelist than a playwright?

• 39:07Speaker 06

  I, I think she's a wonderful both, actually, but her plays are what made her famous at the time, and they are, a lot of them are wonderful. But we don't put on that many Restoration plays now, so there's no doubt that at the moment, it's Orinoco and the other short stories that people tend to read if they're reading anything. But if I can just go, can I just say one more thing about The Widow Ranta, because I think that's a, it's a wonderful play, because not only have we got The Widow Ranta in there, and we've got the heroic bacon, but we've also got the sort of farce of government which goes through all her plays, her mockery of those people who think that they can rule

• 39:49Speaker 06

  other people, and who think they can, you know, the moment they get into power, they simply serve their own interests, and the moment these people get going in The Widow Ranta, they make themselves a great big punchbowl.

• 40:01Speaker 07

  On the subject of her as a fiction writer versus a playwright, I'd say that in her fiction, certainly, you, you get this sense of theatricality. She's, she's very good at describing bodies in space, she's very good at describing expressions on people's faces in the way that she scripted them, you know, already for her plays. And, and I think we mustn't underestimate her success as a playwright, whether you're thinking of her as a female playwright or not. I mean, between sixteen, sixteen seventy and sixteen eighty-eight, she has eighteen plays put on the stage, Dryden has fourteen, and Durfee has fourteen, and that's the highest number for any male playwright over the same period.

• 40:44Speaker 07

  So she's extraordinarily successful as a playwright, and she's really admired for this capacity, what are called her, her stage management, the way she manages stage space, the discovery scene, that moment when the shutters come back and you find a young couple in bed, is much admired, and that plays through all of her fiction. She's, she's, one way to put it, say, I mean, fiction is a really new form, the novel's really new, and she's bringing a lot of theatrical convention into the novel.

• 41:09Speaker 05

  Let's take as it were with a couple in bed for a moment or two. She had a reputation, sorry, Jan, but she had a reputation as a bawdy writer, didn't she, at the time? Is that true?

• 41:17Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 41:18Speaker 05

  What was bawdy about it?

• 41:19Speaker 06

  It is very bawdy.

• 41:20Speaker 05

  Well, can you give us one or two examples? It is early, but still, never mind, we can get through.

• 41:25Speaker 06

  Well, let's say, I mean, other people were bawdy too. Bawdy sex comedy was the mode, and that's why she wrote it.

• 41:30Speaker 05

  And you're likely to know what was thought of as bawdy then.

• 41:31Speaker 06

  Well, the second play, for example, opens with two people getting out of bed, clearly having had sex and not being married. She has plays in which people go to bed with each other without realising who they are, but it doesn't really matter. In the morning, they say, well, that was fun, wasn't it? People are not punished for their peccadilloes. She has old men who come into the, to supposedly the bridal chamber and open their, their nightgowns and display themselves to the women. I mean, it's just pretty bawdy stuff. In fact, she was criticised for quite a lot of it, once this kind of sex comedy had gone out of fashion.

• 42:15Speaker 07

  Although she does say that she gets more criticised for it because she's a woman writer, so she says, other playwrights are just as bawdy as me, they don't get this kind of trouble. Yes, I think that she says that in the play that comes immediately after the Rover, Sir Patient Fancy, where there's a scene in which the wife of Sir Patient Fancy is trying to hide the lover that she's got stashed behind the bed whilst her husband is trying to find, you know, this lover, and she says that the women are the people that attacked her most.

• 42:47Speaker 05

  Can we just, I, I brought that up partly just to talk about it, because it was talked about, but partly because it was that aspect of her work which seemed to, as it were, strike her out of the lists for two centuries. Her reputation was very high, as you've pointed out, Roz, eighteen plays, they must have kept wanting more, and the fiction and the poetry, we haven't even got to that, but she went right, her, her reputation went right down. Why was that, starting with you, Jan?

• 43:16Speaker 06

  Well, I think that the Restoration itself was vilified as you move into the eighteenth century. The whole area, the whole period was seen as, as corrupt and licentious, and the sort of blip on, on the proper development things.

• 43:29Speaker 05

  Why didn't the people suddenly not like licentiousness?

• 43:31Speaker 06

  The, the, the world turned, became more moral, the, the Dutch king came in.

• 43:37Speaker 05

  The Dutch?

• 43:38Speaker 06

  The Dutch, it's the Dutch. It, it's a, the, the world has turned towards a more sentimental version of, of life. The distinction between men and women is re-established. Women are supposed particularly to be more associated with emotions and religion and with the virtuous side of life. And so Aphra Ben sticks out now, not just as one of many playwrights who were bawdy, but as a woman who was bawdy, and as such, she is vilified constantly throughout the next century.

• 44:11Speaker 05

  There's a, there's a note in a letter from Walter Scott which summarises this totally.

• 44:16Speaker 07

  Yes, it's a wonderful story, so Walter Scott, although one can't help that you think about the fact that Walter Scott's making the novel in the early nineteenth century, so he's sorting it out.

• 44:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, we've got to get to the point there.

• 44:25Speaker 07

  Okay, I will get to the point. So Walter Scott has a great aunt who says to him, you know, I used to love these stories by Aphra Ben, can you get hold of a few for me? So he's a bit surprised, he goes off, finds them, he sends them to her in brown paper, because they're kind of a bit embarrassing to send. She writes back, sends them back and says, these are appalling, I can't believe I like these. She said, sixty years ago, I sat in company and we read these out loud and we loved them, and now I see just how crude they are.

• 44:51Speaker 05

  But that's fascinating, because she also says, throw them on the fire.

• 44:54Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 44:55Speaker 05

  And then she says, but sixty years ago, people like myself, being a gent, a woman of gentility, you sit around and, and read them aloud to each other. It's fascinating, little vignette of the way taste can change so swiftly.

• 45:07Speaker 07

  And it's a, it's a complicated question, isn't it? Because one might sort of think, well, does this mean that women are, are being re-contained in the eighteenth century? But in a way, they're just being rethought as, in a way, moral agents, that they're responsible for the moral credit of the, of the nation, and Ben is seen as someone who discredited the morality of the nation very publicly in the late seventeenth century.

• 45:29Speaker 05

  And now you, among others, are re, re, revivifying, reasserting your reputation. Can we, can I just, that, that quotation I started the programme with about Virginia Woolf laying flowers on her grave, do you think that, do you go along with that, Jan? Did you go and lay flowers on her grave?

• 45:44Speaker 06

  I did, I did, with Lucy Worsley in a programme. But I, I think it's a tricky one, it's on every book about Aphra Ben pretty well on the cover. But Virginia Woolf, I think, brings her up or back into history to some extent, but as a woman, as an amazing woman writer. And I don't think that Virginia Woolf really gave her her due as an actual creative writer. So I think it's, it's, it's a, it's a good quotation, and Virginia Woolf is famous, so it's useful that she said it, and it's very quotable. But it doesn't do justice to the great writer.

• 46:21Speaker 05

  Her reputation is being restored by persons like yourself and others, but is her legacy there at all, Claire?

• 46:28Speaker 07

  I think she's left us a very interesting legacy, because as we've touched on at various points in this programme, she is a mass of contradictions, and several of her characters are matters of contradictions, and there's a lot for people like us and people like your listeners to work out with her. So, you know, we have the feminism and the royalism as sort of contradictory. We have characters in some of her fiction, you know, a nun who's also a bigamist, people like that, the courtesan who's the devoted woman, so there's an awful lot that she has to say that captures the fact that we're not all one-dimensional, you know, we do have these, these kinds of contradictions about ourselves.

• 47:12Speaker 05

  Can you see it percolating through to your students and them saying, oh?

• 47:16Speaker 07

  Absolutely. I mean, I think she's really attractive to students, and she's really attractive to modern culture, because she's so adept at this blurring of gender boundaries. She's praised for the combination of manly wit and feminine grace. In a way, she's a kind of, this, this playing with gender identity and the attraction of ambiguity around gender, around gender disturbance is central to Ben's writing and to what makes her attractive then and makes her attractive now.

• 47:42Speaker 05

  Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Roz Balister, Jan Todd, Claire Bowditch. And if you have a topic for us that you think deserves a big radio audience, please send your ideas through our website or Twitter at BBC In Our Time by the twenty-seventh of October. Warne will be the subject of our programme on the seventh of December. Next week, we're discussing the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic Wars, which settled the balance of power across Europe for the next hundred years. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now. With a few minutes of bonus material from Melvyn and his guests. What major thing did we leave out?

• 48:18Speaker 06

  Poetry.

• 48:18Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 48:19Speaker 06

  Clarinda. We left out poetry and yes.

• 48:22Speaker 05

  I came to poetry on the.

• 48:23Speaker 06

  And the equivocation that is always in her work. But I wanted to say the one thing that at the end of the about the theatre is really one of the tragedies of literary history is that Peeps thought he was going blind and stopped writing his diary just before Aphra then enters the stage.

• 48:39Speaker 05

  Why didn't you say that?

• 48:40Speaker 06

  Well, because you didn't give me a chance to do it.

• 48:42Speaker 05

  You didn't give me a chance to do it. You could have taken the thing by the horns. I asked the most wide open questions.

• 48:48Speaker 06

  No, no, no. I don't want to be rude. Do I want to be rude? I do not. Especially not to a man who's in such a disadvantage in being in the minority.

• 48:59Speaker 05

  Anyway, I don't think the lack of Peeps is a sort of great blow to the programme.

• 49:02Speaker 06

  No, I agree. It isn't. It just seemed to me a rather nice point.

• 49:06Speaker 07

  But it would be wonderful to.

• 49:06Speaker 05

  I think the poetry is, but I did I came up to the poetry and the structure and I thought we haven't got time. We'd spent we just spent quite a good time and I knew that would be a proper discussion between the three of you. And I wanted to get to the fallen reputation and the legacy and the poetry and I just didn't have time. So that's my.

• 49:25Speaker 07

  I mean, I think it's also poetry is a diminishing interest in art now for readers. I mean, it's it's really interesting that Ben, you know, Ben's reputation has grown because people have become so fascinated by the novel and the history of the novel. And that novel, Aronoko, is particularly fascinating. So I think, and again, one could say restoration poetry is not widely read now. And it's a shame because it's beautiful. It's occasional. It's got a real tone and temperament to it that people can enjoy so much because it's really intimate and personal, like Rochester. She leaps out of the page and talks to you in her poetry.

• 50:01Speaker 06

  But there are and there are poems that are often written in a social space and they're all answering each other, even things like the disappointment, the famous one about male impotence or premature ejaculation, whichever. That is obviously in a social setting where several others are writing poems like that. So it's, I think it's very.

• 50:23Speaker 07

  And if we were thinking about libertinism, I suppose that would have been the space that we could have said, in the poetry, what you see her doing is taking a style of poetry or turn of poetry that men speak in and making women's voices heard in it. So at the end of this disappointment poem, there's a little line that says, the nymph's resentment's none but I can well imagine all can sow, you know. Here I am.

• 50:45Speaker 05

  We did. Yeah, you make these decisions, don't you? I mean, that's, that's what you've got. You've got to make decisions. And I actually, what you said convinces me that I made the right decision for the programme, but it's a pity we didn't. On the other hand, this podcast is going to millions of people. So bang away with our poetry.

• 51:01Speaker 07

  I'm telling you to just Google this wonderful title, To Fair Clarinda Who Made Love To Me Imagined More Than Woman. It's a title that leaves you thinking.

• 51:09Speaker 06

  It's wonderful. And the whole poem leaves you thinking, what at the end? You simply don't know.

• 51:14Speaker 05

  Thinking what, what?

• 51:15Speaker 06

  Well, who exactly has done what with whom?

• 51:18Speaker 07

  What's what the sex or gender is of the love object?

• 51:20Speaker 06

  Where is it? And is it cerebral? Is it physical? What is it? What's going on?

• 51:25Speaker 05

  Do you, I mean, you put, do you see her plays put on these days?

• 51:29Speaker 06

  The Rover's just been on.

• 51:30Speaker 07

  At the RSC.

• 51:31Speaker 06

  The RSC.

• 51:33Speaker 07

  And we did, actually did a reading of the.

• 51:34Speaker 05

  How did it go down?

• 51:36Speaker 06

  Very well. It was, we were discussing it before and I thought it was slightly too singing and dancing as a production, whereas the previous one with Jeremy Irons had been darker some years ago. But it shows the fact that it is repeatedly put on. It shows that she is actable. I just wish they would do some others. The patient fancy, the lucky chance.

• 51:56Speaker 05

  It's very hit and miss. I saw, I don't want to put down the directive, but I saw, seen a couple of restoration, restorations in the last few years, and they've been very unconvincing. I mean, everybody thinks if I'm because it's all powder and that I've got to go, it's artificial from the start in a way that's, it misses the point.

• 52:17Speaker 07

  I think it's, a lot of it's about, about training. People don't really train in restoration theatre in the way that they do in Renaissance theatre or in, or in modern theatre. So it's about getting the pace right. And it can be too slow or too fast.

• 52:31Speaker 06

  Too fast. They tend to throw themselves about, I think, in restoration drama as though that's the necessary thing.

• 52:36Speaker 07

  And it's very forward facing theatre. So your actors have to really engage the audience and pull them into the story. They can't be just doing it in front of you. In restoration plays, there were pauses between acts where there would be a musical interlude and so on. Yes. So which we don't, we don't have a modern equivalent for that. So unless you compensate or adjust for the pace in some kind of way, and I actually disagree with John and think that the Rover did it very well at the RSC with various musical interludes. But the, the whole kind of experience of the theatre is not one that we necessarily have an exact equivalent for. So yes, I think.

• 53:19Speaker 07

  I also think it's a shame that we don't see them because actually, when you try and read the plays, they're quite hard to follow. People say this about The Country Wife and The Man of Mode as well. Everyone seems to be called Will something or Bell something. And there are three different couples with different names. When you see it on stage, you understand how perfectly blocked these plays are so that you, you know, there are bodies playing these parts. You see the difference between them. You see the contrast between the couples working out physically in front of you, don't you?

• 53:45Speaker 06

  I think that's absolutely true. And I think they are very theatrical, which is one reason. In fact, they're not cinematic. They're not, they wouldn't easily be made into.

• 53:55Speaker 05

  That's a very good point.

• 53:56Speaker 06

  Into a television drama. They're not like that. So I think that she's, she's not in that world and she has to live in the theatre. And the theatre is not a hugely popular art form.

• 54:08Speaker 05

  But you could be, it sounds like I didn't see the RSC thing, but these things could be reimagined. We've got some very good, very good indeed, directors and actors who are taking older plays and saying, let's redo it like this. I mean, and it's working very well. For instance, so many people have taken a lump out of Chekhov and turned it into that eight hour play, she first play he wrote, which has been cut into by David Hare, by Michael Frayn, by many others. And anyway.

• 54:38Speaker 06

  But you have to have, you have to have the audience, don't you? You have to make the punters come and buy the tickets. And it's the lack of knowledge.

• 54:45Speaker 05

  By having a starry cast, that would solve that.

• 54:48Speaker 07

  You've also got a problem with the rake is also, I think, a problem in a lot of modern performance. I think, you know, that that kind of predatory threatened rape scene is really hard to manage in front of a modern audience. I took my students to see the RSC production. They managed it very well, actually. But they were, all of them were talking on the way back about, you know, how do we read this scene?

• 55:09Speaker 05

  Especially this morning with what's on the news.

• 55:13Speaker 07

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 55:15Speaker 06

  Yes, what she's talking about doesn't go away. I mean, all the things she raises from the idea of rape and predatory men in power, because the relationship of power and sex is something very strong in Ben. From that to the farce of government, I think all this is really very relevant.

• 55:31Speaker 07

  Just evergreen. The fact that the rake backs away from rape because he thinks, oh, actually, this is a genteel woman. So he doesn't back away from it because he shouldn't be raping. He backs away from it because she's posh.

• 55:41Speaker 05

  Well, I think you've got your saying about the poetry. I think we've got it. It'll, I think that'll, that is the, actually, plenty of people hear that. I think the producer is coming in to make an important announcement. I need to know if you want refreshments, tea or coffee? I'm okay, thank you.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  Why do some brilliant business ideas come a cropper? I'm Sean Farrington and in a new series of Toast, I'll be looking at five more brands, businesses and wonder products which offered a lot but didn't stick around, including a budget cinema selling tickets for twenty pence and the toilet paper we knew from school. I remember worrying about getting paper cuts in an area that you wouldn't wish to be getting a paper cut. Finding out what we can learn from their disappearance. Toast from BBC Radio Four. Listen first on BBC Sounds.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organisation with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.