The Works of Aphra Behn
Chapter 1 : The Works of Aphra Behn.by Aphra Behn.PREFACE.It is perhaps not altogether easy to appre

The Works of Aphra Behn.

by Aphra Behn.

PREFACE.

It is perhaps not altogether easy to appreciate the multiplicity of difficulties with which the first editor of Mrs. Behn has to cope. Not only is her life strangely mysterious and obscure, but the rubbish of half-a-dozen romancing biographers must needs be cleared away before we can even begin to see daylight. Matter which had been for two centuries accepted on seemingly the soundest authority is proven false; her family name itself was, until my recent discovery, wrongly given; the very question of her portrait has its own vexed (and until now unrecognized) dilemmas. In fine there seems no point connected with our first professional auth.o.r.ess which did not call for the nicest investigation and the most incontrovertible proof before it could be accepted without suspicion or reserve. The various collections of her plays and novels which appeared in the first half of the eighteenth century give us nothing; nay, they rather c.u.mber our path with the trash of discredited _Memoirs_. Pearson's reprint (1871) is entirely valueless: there is no attempt, however meagre, at editing, no effort to elucidate a single allusion; moreover, several of the Novels-- and the Poems in their entirety-- are lacking. I am happy to give (Vol. V) one of the Novels, and that not the least important, _The History of the Nun_, for the first time in any collected edition. Poems, in addition to those which appeared in Mrs. Behn's lifetime, and were never reprinted after, have been gathered with great care from many sources (of which some were almost forgotten).

It is hoped that this new issue of Mrs. Behn may prove adequate. Any difficulties in the editing have been more than amply compensated for by the interest shown by many friends. Foremost, my best thanks are due to Mr. Bullen, whose life-long experience of the minutiae of editing our best dramatic literature, has been ungrudgingly at my service throughout, to the no small advantage of myself and my work. Mr. Edmund Gosse, C.B., has shown the liveliest interest in the book from its inception, and I owe him most grateful recognition for his kindly encouragement and aid. Nay, more, he did not spare to lend me treasured items from his library so rich in first, and boasting unique, editions of Mrs. Behn. Mr. G. Thorn Drury, K.C., never wearied of answering my enquiries, and in discussion solved many a knotty point. To him I am obliged for the transcript of Mrs. Behn's letter to Waller's daughter-in-law, and also the Satire on Dryden. He even gave of his valuable time to read through the Memoir and from the superabundance of his knowledge made suggestions of the first importance. The unsurpa.s.sed library of Mr. T. J. Wise, the well-known bibliographer, was freely at my disposal. In other cases where I have received any a.s.sistance in clearing a difficulty I have made my acknowledgement in the note itself.

MEMOIR OF MRS. BEHN.

The personal history of Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman to earn her livelihood by authors.h.i.+p, is unusually interesting but very difficult to unravel and relate. In dealing with her biography writers at different periods have rushed headlong to extremes, and we now find that the pendulum has swung to its fullest stretch. On the one hand, we have prefixed to a collection of the _Histories and Novels_, published in 1696, 'The Life of Mrs. Behn written by one of the Fair s.e.x', a frequently reprinted (and even expanded) compilation crowded with romantic incidents that savour all too strongly of the Italian novella, with sentimental epistolography and details which can but be accepted cautiously and in part. On the other there have recently appeared two revolutionary essays by Dr. Ernest Bernbaum of Harvard, 'Mrs. Behn's _Oroonoko_', first printed in _Kittredge Anniversary Papers_, 1913; and-- what is even more particularly pertinent-- 'Mrs. Behn's Biography a Fiction,' _Publications of the Modern Language a.s.sociation of America_, xxviii, 3: both afterwards issued as separate pamphlets, 1913.

In these, the keen critical sense of the writer has apparently been so jarred by the patent incongruities, the baseless fiction, nay, the very fantasies (such as the fairy pavilion seen floating upon the Channel), which, imaginative and invented flotsam that they are, acc.u.mulated and were heaped about the memory of Aphra Behn, that he is apt to regard almost every record outside those of her residence at Antwerp[1] with a suspicion which is in many cases surely unwarranted and undue. Having energetically cleared away the more peccant rubbish, Dr. Bernbaum became, it appears to us, a little too drastic, and had he then discriminated rather than swept clean, we were better able wholly to follow the conclusions at which he arrives. He even says that after '1671'[2] when 'she began to write for the stage ... such meagre contemporary notices as we find of her are critical rather than biographical'. This is a very partial truth; from extant letters,[3] to which Dr. Bernbaum does not refer, we can gather much of Mrs. Behn's literary life and circ.u.mstances. She was a figure of some note, and even if we had no other evidence it seems impossible that her contemporaries should have glibly accepted the fiction of a voyage to Surinam and a Dutch husband named Behn who had never existed.

[Footnote 1: _Kalendar of State Papers, Domestic_, 1666-7. --ed. Mrs.

M. A. E. Green (1864).]

[Footnote 2: This is inaccurate. Mrs. Behn's first play, _The Forc'd Marriage_, was produced in December, 1670.]

[Footnote 3: e.g. to Waller's daughter-in-law; to Tonson. cf. also the Warrant of 12 August, 1682; the Pindaric to Burnet, &c.]

Ayfara, or Aphara[4] (Aphra), Amis or Amies, the daughter of John and Amy Amis or Amies, was baptized together with her brother Peter in the Parish Church of SS. Gregory and Martin, Wye, 10 July, 1640, presumably by Ambrose Richmore, curate of Wye at that date.[5] Up to this time Aphra's maiden name has been stated to be Johnson, and she is a.s.serted to have been the daughter of a barber, John Johnson. That the name was not Johnson (an ancient error) is certain from the baptismal register, wherein, moreover, the 'Quality, Trade, or Profession' is left blank; that her father was a barber rests upon no other foundation than a MS.

note of Lady Winchilsea.[6] Mr. Gosse, in a most valuable article (_Athenaeum_, 6 September, 1884), was the first to correct the statement repeatedly made that Mrs. Behn came from 'the City of Canterbury in Kent'. He tells how he acquired a folio volume containing the MS. poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea,[7] 'copied about 1695 under her eye and with innumerable notes and corrections in her autograph'. In a certain poem ent.i.tled _The Circuit of Apollo_[8] the following lines occur:--

And standing where sadly he now might descry From the banks of the Stowre the desolate Wye, He lamented for Behn, o'er that place of her birth, And said amongst Women there was not on the earth, Her superior in fancy, in language, or witt, Yet own'd that a little too loosely she writt.

[Footnote 4: Aphra now appears on Mrs. Behn's gravestone, and is the accepted form. This is, however, in all probability the third inscription. _The Antiquities of Westminster_ (1711), quoting the inscription, gives Aphara. Sometime in the eighteenth century a certain Thomas Waine restored the inscription and added to the two lines two more:-- Great Poetess, O thy stupendous lays The world admires and the Muses praise.

The name was then Aphara. The _Biog. Brit._, whilst insisting on Aphara as correct and citing the stone as evidence, none the less prints Apharra. Her works usually have Mrs. A. Behn. One Quarto misprints 'Mrs. Anne Behn'. There are, of course, many variants of the name. Afara, and Afra are common. Oldys in his MS. notes on Langbaine writes Aphra or Aphora, whilst the _Muses Mercury_, September, 1707, has a special note upon a poem by Mrs. Behn to say 'this Poetess' true Name was Apharra.' Even Aphaw (Behen, in the 1682 warrant,) and Fyhare (in a pet.i.tion) occur.]

[Footnote 5: He died in 1642.]

[Footnote 6: The Vicar of Wye, the Rev. Edgar Lambert, in answer to my inquiries courteously writes: 'In company with Mr. C. S. Orwin, whose book, _The History of Wye Church and College_, has just been published, I have closely examined the register and find no mention of "Johnson", nor of the fact that Aphara Amis' father was a "barber".']

[Footnote 7: Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1660-1720), sometime Maid of Honour to Queen Mary of Modena. She had true lyric genius. For a generous appreciation see Gosse, _Gossip in a Library_ (1891).]

[Footnote 8: Then unprinted but now included in the very voluminous edition of Lady Winchilsea's _Poems_, ed. M. Reynolds, Chicago, 1903.]

To these is appended this note: 'Mrs. Behn was Daughter to a Barber, who liv'd formerly in Wye, a little Market Town (now much decay'd) in Kent.

Though the account of her life before her Works pretends otherwise; some Persons now alive Do testify upon their Knowledge that to be her Original.' It is a pity that whilst the one error concerning Aphra's birthplace is thus remedied, the mistake as to the nature of her father's calling should have been initiated.

Aphra Amis, then, was born early in July, 1640, at Wye, Kent. When she was of a tender age the Amis family left England for Surinam; her father, who seems to have been a relative of Francis, Lord Willoughby of Parham, sometime administrator of several British colonies in the West Indies, having been promised a post of some importance in these dependencies. John Amis died on the voyage out, but his widow and children necessarily continued their journey, and upon their arrival were accommodated at St. John's Hill, one of the best houses in the district. Her life and adventures in Surinam Aphra has herself realistically told in that wonderfully vivid narrative, _Oroonoko_. [9]

The writer's bent had already shown itself. She kept a journal as many girls will, she steeped herself in the interminable romances fas.h.i.+onable at that time, in the voluminous _Pharamond_, _Cleopatre_, _Ca.s.sandre_, _Ibrahim_, and, above all, _Le Grand Cyrus_, so loved and retailed to the annoyance of her worthy husband by Mrs. Pepys; with a piece of which Dorothy Osborne was 'hugely pleased'.

[Footnote 9: In 'Mrs. Behn's _Oroonoko_' Dr. Bernbaum elaborately endeavours to show that this story is pure fiction. His arguments, in many cases advanced with no little subtlety and precision, do not appear (to me at least) to be convincing. We have much to weigh in the contrary balance: Mrs. Behn's manifest first-hand knowledge of, and extraordinary interest in, colonial life; her reiterated a.s.severations that every experience detailed in this famous novel is substantially true; the a.s.sent of all her contemporaries. It must further be remembered that Aphra was writing in 1688, of a girlhood coloured by and seen through the enchanted mists of a quarter of a century. That there are slight discrepancies is patent; the exaggerations, however, are not merely pardonable but perfectly natural. One of Dr. Bernbaum's most crus.h.i.+ng arguments, when sifted, seems to resolve itself into the fact that whilst writing _Oroonoko_ Mrs. Behn evidently had George Warren's little book, _An Impartial Description of Surinam_ (London, 1667), at hand. Could anything be more reasonable than to suppose she would be intimately acquainted with a volume descriptive of her girlhood's home? Again, Dr.

Bernbaum bases another line of argument on the a.s.sumption that Mrs.

Behn's father was a barber. Hence the appointment of such a man to an official position in Surinam was impossible, and, 'if Mrs. Behn's father was not sent to Surinam, the only reason she gives for being there disappears'. We know from recent investigation that John Amis did not follow a barber's trade, but was probably of good old stock.

Accordingly, the conclusions drawn by Dr. Bernbaum from this point cannot now be for a moment maintained.]

It was perhaps from the reading of La Calprenede and Mlle de Scuderi Aphra gained that intimate knowledge of French which served her well and amply in after years during her literary life; at any rate she seems early to have realized her dramatic genius and to have begun a play drawn from one of the most interesting episodes in _Cleopatre_, the love story of the Scythian King Alcamene, scenes which, when they had 'measured three thousand leagues of s.p.a.cious ocean', were, nearly a quarter of a century later, to be taken out of her desk and worked up into a baroque and fanciful yet strangely pleasing tragi-comedy, _The Young King_.

In Surinam she witnessed the fortunes and fate of the Royal Slave, Oroonoko, of whom she writes (with all due allowance for pardonable exaggeration and purely literary touches), so naturally and feelingly, that 'one of the Fair s.e.x' with some acerbity makes it her rather unnecessary business to clear Aphra from any suspicion of a liaison. It was Surinam which supplied the cognate material for the vivid comedy, the broad humour and early colonial life, photographic in its realism, of _The Widow Ranter; or, The History of Bacon in Virginia_. Mistakes there may be, errors and forgetfulness, but there are a thousand touches which only long residence and keen observation could have so deftly characterized.

We now approach a brief yet important period in Mrs. Behn's life, which unless we are content to follow (with an acknowledged diffidence and due reservations) the old Memoir and scattered tradition, we find ourselves with no sure means whatsoever of detailing. It seems probable, however, that about the close of 1663, owing no doubt to the Restoration and the subsequent changes in affairs, the Amis family returned to England, settling in London, where Aphra, meeting a merchant of Dutch extraction named Behn, so fascinated him by her wit and comeliness that he offered her his hand and fortune. During her married life she is said to have been in affluence, and even to have appeared at the gay licentious Court, attracting the notice of and amusing the King himself by her anecdotes and cleverness of repartee; but when her husband died, not impossibly of the plague in the year of mortality, 1665, she found herself helpless, without friends or funds. In her distress it was to the Court she applied for a.s.sistance; and owing to her cosmopolitan experience and still more to the fact that her name was Dutch, and that she had been by her husband brought into close contact with the Dutch, she was selected as a meet political agent to visit Holland and there be employed in various secret and semi-official capacities. The circ.u.mstance that her position and work could never be openly recognized nor acknowledged by the English government was shortly to involve her in manifold difficulties, pecuniary and otherwise, which eventually led to her perforce abandoning so unstable and unsatisfactory a commission.

In the old _History of the Life and Memoirs of Mrs. Behn_ (1696; and with additions 1698, &c.), ushered into the world by Charles Gildon, a romance full as amorous and sensational as any novel of the day, has been woven about her sojourn at Antwerp. A 'Spark whom we must call by the name of _Vander Albert_ of _Utrecht_' is given to Aphra as a fervent lover, and from him she obtains political secrets to be used to the English advantage. He has a rival, an antique yclept Van Bruin, 'a _Hogen Mogen_ ... _Nestorean_' admirer, and the intrigue becomes fast and furious. On one occasion Albert, imagining he is possessing his mistress, is cheated with a certain Catalina; and again when he has bribed an ancient duenna to admit him to Aphra's bed, he is surprised there by a frolicsome gallant. [10] There are even included five letters from Mrs. Behn and a couple of ridiculous effusions purporting to be Van Bruin's. It would seem that all this pure fiction, the sweepings of Aphra's desk, was intended by her to have been worked up into a novel; both letters and narrative are too good to be the unaided composition of Gildon himself, but possibly Mrs. Behn in her after life may have elaborated and told him these erotic episodes to conceal the squalor and misery of the real facts of her early Dutch mission. It is proved indeed in aim and circ.u.mstance to have been far other.

[Footnote 10: Both these incidents are the common property of Italian novelle and our own stage. Although not entirely impossible, they would appear highly suspicious in any connection.]

Her chief business was to establish an intimacy with William Scott, son of Thomas Scott, the regicide who had been executed 17 October, 1660.

This William, who had been made a fellow of All Souls by the Parliamentary Visitors of Oxford, and graduated B.C.L. 4 August, 1648, was quite ready to become a spy in the English service and to report on the doings of the English exiles who were not only holding treasonable correspondence with traitors at home and plotting against the King, but even joining with the Dutch foe to injure their native land. Scott was extremely anxious for his own pardon and, in addition, eager to earn any money he could.

Aphra then, taking with her some forty pounds in cash, all she had, set sail with Sir Anthony Desmarces [11] either at the latter end of July or early in August, 1666, and on 16 August she writes from Antwerp to say she has had an interview with William Scott (dubbed in her correspondence Celadon), even having gone so far as to take coach and ride a day's journey to see him secretly. Though at first diffident, he is very ready to undertake the service, only it will be necessary for her to enter Holland itself and reside on the spot, not in Flanders, as Colonel Bampfield, who was looked upon as head of the exiled English at the Hague, watched Scott with most jealous care and a growing suspicion.

Aphra, whose letters give a vivid picture of the spy's life with its risks and impecuniosity, addresses herself to two correspondents, Tom Killigrew and James Halsall, cupbearer to the King.

[Footnote 11: He was at Margate 25 July, and at Bruges 7 August.]

On 27 August she was still at Antwerp, and William Scott wrote to her there but did not venture to say much lest the epistle might miscarry. He asks for a cypher, a useful and indeed necessary precaution in so difficult circ.u.mstances. It was about this time that Mrs. Behn began to employ the name of Astrea, which, having its inception in a political code, was later to be generally used by her and recognized throughout the literary world. Writing to Halsall, she says that she has been unable to effect anything, but she urgently demands that money be sent, and confesses she has been obliged even to p.a.w.n her ring to pay messengers. On 31 August she writes to Killigrew declaring she can get no answer from Halsall, and explaining that she has twice had to disburse Scott's expenses, amounting in all to 20, out of her own pocket, whilst her personal debts total another 25 or 30, and living itself is ten guilders a day. If she is to continue her work satisfactorily, 80 at least will be needed to pay up all her creditors; moreover, as a preliminary and a token of good faith, Scott's official pardon must be forwarded without compromise or delay. Scott himself was, it seems, playing no easy game at this juncture, for a certain Carney, resident at Antwerp, 'an unsufferable, scandalous, lying, prating fellow', piqued at not being able to ferret out the intrigue, had gone so far as to molest poor Celadon and threaten him with death, noising up and down meanwhile the fact of his clandestine rendezvous with Aphra.

No money, however, was forthcoming from England, and on 4 September Mrs.

Behn writing again to Killigrew tells him plainly that she is reduced to great straits, and unless funds are immediately provided all her work will be nugatory and vain. The next letter, dated 14 September, gives Halsall various naval information. On 17 September she is obliged to importune Killigrew once more on the occasion of sending him a letter from Scott dealing with political matters. Halsall, she a.s.serts, will not return any answer, and although she is only in private lodgings she is continually being thwarted and vilipended by Carney, 'whose tongue needs clipping'. Four days later she transmits a five page letter from Scott to Halsall. On 25 September she sends under cover yet another letter from Scott with the news of De Ruyter's illness. Silence was her only answer. Capable and indeed ardent agent as she was, there can be no excuse for her shameful, nay, criminal, neglect at the hands of the government she was serving so faithfully and well. Her information[12]

seems to have been received with inattention and disregard; whether it was that culpable carelessness which wrecked so many a fair scheme in the second Charles' days, or whether secret enemies at home steadfastly impeded her efforts remains an open question. In any case on 3 November she sends a truly piteous letter to Lord Arlington, Secretary of State, and informs him she is suffering the extremest want and penury. All her goods are p.a.w.ned, Scott is in prison for debt, and she herself seems on the point of going to the common gaol. The day after Christmas Aphra wrote to Lord Arlington for the last time. She asks for a round 100 as delays have naturally doubled her expenses and she has had to obtain credit. Now she is only anxious to return home, and she declares that if she did not so well know the justness of her cause and complaint, she would be stark wild with her hard treatment. Scott, she adds, will soon be free.[13] Even this final appeal obtained no response, and at length-- well nigh desperate-- Mrs. Behn negotiated in England, from a certain Edward Butler, a private loan of some 150 which enabled her to settle her affairs and start for home in January, 1667.

[Footnote 12: There do not appear to be any grounds for the oft-repeated a.s.sertions that Mrs. Behn communicated the intelligence when the Dutch were planning an attack (afterwards carried out) on the Thames and Medway squadrons, and that her warning was scoffed at.]

[Footnote 13: Had he been imprisoned for political reasons it is impossible that there should have been so speedy a prospect of release.]

But the chapter of her troubles was by no means ended. Debt weighed like a millstone round her neck. As the weary months went by and Aphra was begging in vain for her salary, long overdue, to be paid, Butler, a harsh, dour man with heart of stone, became impatient and resorted to drastic measures, eventually flinging her into a debtor's prison. There are extant three pet.i.tions, undated indeed, but which must be referred to the early autumn of 1668, from Mrs. Behn to Charles II. Sadly complaining of two years' bitter sufferings, she prays for an order to Mr. May[14] or Mr. Chiffinch[15] to satisfy Butler, who declares he will stop at nothing if he is not paid within a week. In a second doc.u.ment she sets out the reasons for her urgent claim of 150. Both Mr. Halsall and Mr. Killigrew know how justly it is her due, and she is hourly threatened with an execution. To this is annexed a letter from the poor distracted woman to Killigrew, which runs as follows:--

Sr.

if you could guess at the affliction of my soule you would I am sure Pity me 'tis to morrow that I must submitt my self to a Prison the time being expird & though I indeauerd all day yesterday to get a ffew days more I can not because they say they see I am dallied w{th} all & so they say I shall be for euer: so I can not reuoke my doome I haue cryd myself dead & could find in my hart to break through all & get to y{e} king & neuer rise till he weare pleasd to pay this; but I am sick & weake & vnfitt for yt; or a Prison; I shall go to morrow: But I will send my mother to y{e} king w{th} a Pit.i.tion for I see euery body are words: & I will not perish in a Prison from whence he swears I shall not stirr till y{e} uttmost farthing be payd: & oh G.o.d, who considers my misery & charge too, this is my reward for all my great promises, & my indeauers. Sr if I have not the money to night you must send me som thing to keepe me in Prison for I will not starue.

A. Behn.

Endorsed:

For Mr. Killigrew this.

[Footnote 14: Baptist May, Esq. (1629-98), Keeper of the Privy Purse.]

[Footnote 15: William Chiffinch, confidential attendant and pimp to Charles II.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: (Letter transcribed in body text)]

There was no immediate response however, even to this pathetic and heart-broken appeal, and in yet a third pet.i.tion she pleads that she may not be left to suffer, but that the 150 be sent forthwith to Edward Butler, who on Lord Arlington's declaring that neither order nor money had been transmitted, threw her straightway into gaol.