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Princes, Power, and Politics in the Early Plays of Aphra Behn

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Princes, Power, and Politics in the Early Plays of Aphra Behn PRINCES, POWER, AND POLITICS IN THE EARLY PLAYS OF APHRA BEHN by JESSICA KATE BENTLEY PIRIE A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English Literature College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham February 2019 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract My thesis explores Aphra Behn’s early plays and their portrayal of monarchical power within the political contexts of Charles II’s reign. The plays are studied chronologically, beginning with The Young King – which Behn claimed she wrote in c.1664 – and continuing through the first four of her works performed on the Restoration stage: The Forc’d Marriage, The Amorous Prince, The Dutch Lover, and Abdelazer. These works have been largely neglected by previous Behn studies, dismissed as experimental forerunners of her better-known works, like The Rover. By contrast, this thesis argues that these plays contain complex analogies of the political concerns and events troubling Charles II’s reign. Behn is popularly remembered as an ardent monarchist and staunch supporter of the Stuart crown. However, these plays chart Behn’s increasingly questioning, troubled perception of Restoration politics. In them, she explores with progressively irreverent criticism the problematic nature of the divine right and absolute rule. She dramatizes the court’s rapacious reputation, queries popular sentiments regarding the Third Anglo-Dutch War, and confronts the looming Succession Crisis while constantly asking what it is that makes a king a rightful ruler. Ultimately, Behn’s early plays reveal her royalism was once far more conditional than how it is remembered. Dedicated to my mother and father. Acknowledgments I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr Gillian Wright and Professor Richard Cust for their unwavering support, confidence and patience in supervising this thesis. Their willingness to share their vast knowledge and valuable time with me was inspiring and invaluable. I would also like to thank Gillian for welcoming me into the Aphra Behn Europe Society. My thanks go to that organisation as well, for allowing me to present papers based on this thesis to their biennial conferences, and the wonderfully helpful, expert feedback and advice I received there. Among the many established academics who have so graciously helped me in my research, Dr Mel Evans kindly discussed her most recent research into the problematic dating of The Young King with me. Similarly, Dr Timothy de Paepe and Professor Hubert Meeus contributed their knowledge of Antwerp’s mid-seventeenth-century theatre companies. Dr Jules Whicker also provided an invaluable contribution to my comparison of The Young King to La vida es sueño, answering my many questions about the original Spanish text. I also owe a great debt to my family and friends; in particular my parents (for everything they have done for me) and my sister Lorna Hawes, who kindly proof-read this thesis for me in its final drafts. Finally, I wish to thank James, Cloé and Xavier Minogue for always making space for me to work in their home, and for all the love, support and cups of tea they brought me whilst I did. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One 23 Of Gods and Kings: The Influence of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura on The Portrayal of Kingship in The Young King. Chapter Two 67 Of Kings and Men: Men’s Bodies and the Body Politic in The Forc’d Marriage and The Amorous Prince. Chapter Three 125 The Boor and the Whore: Foreign and Domestic Policy in The Dutch Lover. Chapter Four 175 The Many Faces of Abdelazer: Race, Religion and Politics in The Moor’s Revenge. Conclusion 241 Bibliography 250 Note on Textual Conventions Unless otherwise stated, references to Aphra Behn’s plays and poetry are taken from Janet Todd’s The Works of Aphra Behn. In citing other Early Modern dramatic works, I have consulted the most modern and reliable scholarly editions, where ones are available. Otherwise, quotations from Early Modern works come from their first editions and have been sourced from Early English Books Online [EEBO]. These quotations retain original spellings and capitalisation. In my footnotes, I abbreviate the five plays by Aphra Behn which I refer to most frequently as the following: The Young King – YK The Forc’d Marriage – FM The Amorous Prince – AP The Dutch Lover – DL Abdelazer – Abd INTRODUCTION ‘Your Majesty’ The Hague. 4 February 1649. Miles from his family, home and crown, Charles Stuart learned he was now King of England, Scotland and Ireland. His beloved father, Charles I, had been publicly executed the week before.1 There are two accounts of how Charles’s exiled court of loyal followers broke the news to him. In the first, Charles was in a crowded room; in the second, Stephen Goffe – royalist agent and Catholic chaplain – stood before him and pronounced him king with a chillingly expedient, ‘Your Majesty’.2 In both versions, Charles’s response was to burst into tears. As Ronald Hutton writes, ‘The whole weight of ideals, loyalties, responsibilities, and dilemmas which had confounded and killed his father had just crashed on to his eighteen-year-old shoulders’.3 Charles II’s preparation for the throne had been an adolescence of battles and banishment. At this grief-stricken moment of succession, his once close family was scattered across Europe. Whilst Charles wept for his father in The Hague, his widowed mother and fifteen-year-old brother James were exiled in St Germain. His sister and youngest brother were still in London, prisoners of the very men who had murdered their father. Stephen Goffe’s own brother, William, was one of those regicides.4 As this moment in history epitomises, the Civil War and execution of Charles I had divided families and politics. England stood on the brink of an uncharted and blood-stained political landscape. When Charles I’s decapitated head struck the deck of the execution platform, kingship as 1 Historical information for this thesis largely taken from Antonia Fraser, King Charles the Second (London: W&N, 2002); Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and his Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (London: Penguin, 2006); Ronald Hutton, Charles II: King of England, Scotland and Ireland (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1991); and John Spurr, England in the 1670s: ‘This Masquerading Age’ (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2000). 2 Hutton, Charles II, p.33. 3 Ibid. 4 Charles Spencer, Killers of the King: The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) p.50. 1 a concept was also severed from the political body. No British monarch had ever been, or has since been, deposed in such a way. Kings had been murdered by their rivals in private or slaughtered on the battlefield. Queens had been executed at the orders of other queens. In the last two hundred years, Richard III, Lady Jane Grey and Mary Queen of Scots had all met bloody ends to facilitate or protect another monarch’s reign. However, no British king or queen had ever been publicly executed by their subjects as a step towards abolishing the monarchy. No matter how contested its occupancy, the throne itself had always stood. The nature of kingly power had been dramatically, violently and irreversibly changed. As Charles II faced what would be a decade-long fight for his throne, the future poet, novelist and playwright Aphra Behn was growing up in obscurity, probably somewhere in the Kentish countryside. Little is known about her childhood, but Janet Todd imagines at the Restoration in May 1660 she might have been ‘one of the maidens who strewed herbs along the leisurely royal route through Kent and wondered at the height and swarthiness of the new King’.5 Behn’s early plays, the focus of this thesis, demonstrate a fascination with the concept of monarchy. On 4 February 1649, Charles was thrust to the threshold of a new world, a world in which he was both king and not a king. Aphra Behn’s early plays are all about such moments, the moment where a prince becomes a king, or a boy becomes a man. 5 Janet Todd, Aphra Behn: A Secret Life (London: Fentum Press, 2017) p.3. Behn’s birth and family evaded church and tax records and therefore we do not know a lot for certain about her life prior to her playwriting career. In 1696, a posthumous publication of her play The Younger Brother included ‘An Account of the Life of the Incomparable Mrs Behn’. Later the same year a collection of works called The Histories and Novels of the Late Ingenious Mrs Behn was also published, beginning with an account of ‘The Life and Memoirs of Mrs. Behn. Written by One of the Fair Sex’. After her death, her self-proclaimed foster brother Colonel Thomas Colepepper included some details of her life in his manuscript ‘Adversaria’. The poet Anne Finch made a jibe about Behn’s lowly background as the daughter of a barber from a decaying little Kentish town in the marginalia of her manuscript poems ‘The Circuit of Apollo’. See Mary Ann O’Donnell, ‘Aphra Behn: the documentary record’, in The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, ed.
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