The Theatre of Aphra Behn

Abstract

Indeed, Hughes goes to great pains to place Behn's work within the theatrical culture in which it belongs and consistently returns not only to essential historical considerations-the militarism of the Civil War period, seventeenthcentury philosophical debates, the uncertainty of the political and theatrical landscape during the Exclusion crisis and the Protestant succession-but also to the specific considerations of the theater itself-everything from casting decisions to reception history, from the use of space onstage to the influence of playwright predecessors and competitors. (A fifteenth play, Like Father, Like Son, is lost, and others of doubtful attribution, such as The Debauchee, are briefly addressed.) The chapters themselves are divided into author-centered thematic categories tracing (some might say determining) Behn's personal and artistic development: following the introductory Background chapter, we are guided through First Attempt, First Impact, Experimentation, Maturity, Political Crisis, Political Triumph, Dearth and Famine, and finally moving from dearth to death (and quoting from the Prologue to her posthumously staged play, The Younger Brother) with a concluding chapter entitled 'Tho' she is now no more'.

Derek Hughes, The Theatre of Aphra Behn. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. viii + 230. $65.00.

Serious re-evaluation of the works ofAphra Behn has virtually exploded in the past decade. Approximately two-thirds of all Behn criticism listed in the MLA database has appeared in the last ten years, a period that has also seen the completion of Janet Todd's seven-volume edition of Behn's Works, the appearance of Todd's lengthy and authoritative biography, and the formation of the Aphra Behn Society in the United States. Given the persistent interest in studies in the history of the novel, it is perhaps no surprise that the majority of this scholarship has focused on her prose fiction, especially Oroonoko. In fact, a cursory tally of this recent scholarship suggests that, excepting essays on The Rover, treatments of her prose fiction are double those of her plays, with the latter more than tripling the amount of criticism explicitly devoted to her poetry. Even taking into consideration the current state of affairs, it is still rather surprising to note, as the dust jacket for the present volume announces, that there has been no previous book-length study of Behn's theatrical output, despite the fact that her involvement in the Restoration theater dominated her professional writing life as well as the age in which she wrote.

For this reason alone, The Theatre ofAphra Behn is a welcome and long overdue contribution to Behn studies. It is also the work of an expert in the history of the theater and of Restoration history and culture more broadly. Indeed, Hughes goes to great pains to place Behn's work within the theatrical culture in which it belongs and consistently returns not only to essential historical considerations-the militarism of the Civil War period, seventeenthcentury philosophical debates, the uncertainty of the political and theatrical landscape during the Exclusion crisis and the Protestant succession-but also to the specific considerations of the theater itself-everything from casting decisions to reception history, from the use of space onstage to the influence of playwright predecessors and competitors. This rich contextual mix provides a compelling backdrop to a series of sustained close readings of each of the plays in Behn's established corpus, fourteen in all. (A fifteenth play, Like Father, Like Son, is lost, and others of doubtful attribution, such as The Debauchee, are briefly addressed.) The chapters themselves are divided into author-centered thematic categories tracing (some might say determining) Behn's personal and artistic development: following the introductory "Background" chapter, we are guided through "First Attempt," "First Impact," Experimentation," "Maturity," "Political Crisis," "Political Triumph," "Dearth and Famine," and finally moving from dearth to death (and quoting from the Prologue to her posthumously staged play, The Younger Brother) with a concluding chapter entitled "'Tho' she is now no more'."

This conventional organization of materials should not suggest, however, that Hughes's work avoids controversy. The work itself is framed by an attack on more theoretical (or to use Hughes's term, "ideological") readings of Behn and her work. His primary target is Catherine Gallagher, who is credited with both the most broadly influential scholarly essay on Behn ("Who Was That Masked Woman? The Prostitute and the Playwright in the Comedies ofAphra Behn") and with the most glaring of misreadings. The book both begins and ends on this note, though Hughes's cautionary concluding gesture-to those readers who "would do well to" avoid "treating [the plays] as mere subjects of ideological enquiry, or fantasy" (195)-only raises the specter of Gallagher & Co. by implication. But to be fair, Hughes's example is well placed. His claim is not simply that broad, ideologically driven presumptions about the role of the embattled woman writer within an oppressive patriarchal society are too heavy-handed and simplistic to be historically accurate (on this count Jane Spencer is also "corrected"). Nor is this argument antifeminist. Rather, Hughes acknowledges the obvious constraints under which Behn labored, and he is sensitive to the complex and sometimes contradictory feminist implications of her works. In order to bring these impressive contributions to light, however, he is primarily concerned that Behn's plays not be treated as purely verbal texts. Rather, as he sensibly insists, they should be restored to their status as plays with a history of performance, an embodiment that necessitates considerations of the visual as much as the verbal: of "spaces, bodies, objects, and actors" (3). This is certainly an important point, and Hughes demonstrates throughout the book just how much attention to these elements can yield and provides some powerfully insightful re-readings of more familiar plays as well as the first detailed consideration of a number of others.

A good example of the way in which Hughes's attentive analysis pays off significantly comes in his reading ofAbdelazer. As he notes, this piece is Behn's one "pure tragedy," centered on the fate of a dispossessed Moorish prince who marries a Spanish noblewoman and, after navigating a variety of violent political and sexual intrigues, comes to be annihilated in prison by all of the male characters who are still alive by the end of the play. Although this work is far less familiar than a perennially popular play like The Rover or her now seemingly ubiquitous fictional masterpiece, Oroonoko, Abdelazer is ripe for more scholarly attention, especially since it shares with Oroonoko a complex and problematic dynamic of racial politics. But what Hughes shows so convincingly in his treatment is that the focus on race and racial alterity in the source text, Lust's Dominion (attributed to Dekker, Day, and Haughton), is actually displaced in Behn's version of the tale. Not only does she challenge the equation of dark skin and darkly threatening moral behavior, but by adopting "the intellectual standpoint of the original villain [Eleazer]" she enacts a "de-demonization of the black man" that "goes hand in hand with her de-sanctification of the body" more broadly as a central locus of signification (62). As Hughes argues, this ultimately includes the body of the king himself-a gesture of no little daring in 1676, with the impending Exclusion Crisis looming on the horizon. So rather than dodging the vexed issues of race endemic to the play, Behn's recasting of the tale daringly re-engages them. But in so doing, according to Hughes, she also suggests that the primary dialectic shaping the play "is not that of black and white, or whoredom and chastity, but masculinity and femininity" (63). In the end, Abdelazer's constant play with insider-outsider relationships betrays a "reciprocal mirroring" that "portrays power relationships which are fixed in structure but endlessly reversible in particular application" (68). Interestingly, this argument does not quite work to exculpate Behn or, against the grain of some current criticism, to argue for her progressive antislavery politics. Rather, more credibly and interestingly, Hughes asserts that Behn's interest in these matters lies "not in the moral character of slavery but in its geometry" (68). Given the dynamics of other works like Oroonoko, this assessment seems particularly astute and convincing. As in his other readings, Hughes resists the urge to ascribe an ideological agenda to Behn, and the result is a convincing case for her serious intellectual character, her creativity, and her complexity.

An exception to this productive and enlightening contextualization emerges in readings of works like The Rover and The Luckey Chance. Both plays revolve around economic concerns, to which Hughes attends especially extensively in the latter play. What is strange in both readings, however, is the extent to which Behn's status as a woman writer in the literary/theatrical marketplace is largely occluded. There is something especially peculiar in this absence given the degree to which the randomness and meaninglessness of economic exchange is foregrounded in The Luckey Chance, and given Hughes's other observations about Behn's astute regard for money. At the end of the study he claims that "no other dramatist writes about money with the depth and ingenuity that she shows" (193), especially in The Luckey Chance, where "[e]conomic forces are allpervasive" (169). Oddly, though, Hughes also observes in this same section that Behn's work conveys an "economic befuddlement" since she "cannot understand surplus value" (168). Whether or not this is a fair assessment based on a reading of the play-one could find this assertion debatable at the very least-it certainly does not follow of necessity that economic forces are merely a thematic preoccupation of Behn's writing. It seems equally likely that the mind of this professional woman writer was also "moving in a direction" that included an awareness-at some times probably quite heightened, especially given her own financial struggles in the 168Os-of her own status as a producer of works that must be consumed by an appreciative audience in order for her to survive. Hughes mentions that this state of hardship led to her efforts at generic "diversification" (principally in poetry, short fiction, and translation), but in his analysis these material realities seem to bear little if any relation to the thematics of her plays of the same period. It is one thing to argue that a play such as The Luckey Chance exposes "the incomprehensibility of economic transactions" (168) in a world where people and things increasingly are reduced to interchangeability; it is quite another to claim that Behn the playwright finds economic transactions to be incomprehensible. If anything, this reasoning seems to displace the intentional complexity Hughes generally would ascribe to Behn's work with an element of "accident" or limitation which need not be presumed at all.

This belief in "befuddlement" might also explain why Hughes is so insistent on debunking the feminist reading that draws a parallel between Behn the playwright and Angellica the prostitute in The Rover. In part, this is a continuation of the quarrel with Gallagher underscored in his challenge to the reading of Behn as "poetess-punk" in the preface to the present volume. In the latter case, his criticism of Gallagher's misreading the context of The Widdow Ranter prologue is a persuasive cautionary tale for critics inattentive to textual history; surely it is vital to realize that this prologue was in fact a publisher's substitute for the actual stage prologue, and that it was originally Dryden's prologue for Shadwell's A True Widow from ten years earlier. But his assertion of the symbol's failure in The Rover is less persuasive, in that he insists that the "sign" as it relates to the prostitute is merely "a numerical formula" and thus bears no relation to the playwright. It would seem clear that such a reading could just as easily apply to the female writer who is struggling with the economic realities of the literary marketplace. In fact, a "world completely regulated by number" (96) is precisely the kind of environment one might expect to come from the imagination of a writer whose daily existence was constantly affected by concerns of the material world. In other words, the identification between Behn and Angellica is not necessarily negated if it fails to apply equally well in both directions; it is not that Angellica's inadeptness at signifying makes her a poor figure for a playwright, but rather that Behn's status as a woman playwright, however popular or successful, makes her a fitting emblem of the prostitute, who must peddle her talents in public in order to survive. One could find other means of contesting the playwright-prostitute association, but Hughes does not succeed in doing so through simple force of conviction-"[t]his is hardly an image of the female writer"-or through a solid but selective reading; the interpretive choices are not mutually exclusive. Here, one would think, is an ideal point for "old" and "new" historicisms to converge, if not more traditional literary reading and literary theory more broadly. Given Hughes's astute attention to the historical shifts at work in the plays-from the weapon to the watch, from the economy of the sword to the economy of the purse-one might expect such a study to consider the significant relation between symbolic and material economies. If one did not begin by assuming that literary history and theory are incommensurable, then it would be possible to entertain a consideration of both artistic intentions and ideological investments.

In general, Hughes's approach to these rich and varied works is sensitive and incisive, and should be especially satisfying to students of the theater. Particularly enlightening is his analysis of the "characteristic use of scenic and corporeal cross-reference" (154) in plays such as The City-Heiress, one of Behn's finest works for the stage. Here, as in other works, his aim is to show the ways in which Behn "created an integration of verbal and visual signs, exploiting significant scenes and spaces, spatially arranged bodies, and props that enforce the social demarcation of gender: the sword, the document, the watch" (2). It would be difficult to imagine how an awareness of staging and casting considerations, inter- and extratextual references, contemporary social and political influences, and shifting venues and shifting tastes could do anything but improve our understanding of Behn's craft. At his best, Hughes masterfully juggles all of these considerations throughout the work, a feat few scholars could realize so ably. His insistence on returning to Behn's full theatrical career as well as to the Restoration repertory succeeds in giving credit where it is most due: to the brilliantly innovative woman playwright who dominated the Restoration stage. In fact, it is another mark of Hughes's success that it does not seem like hyperbole when he finally claims that Behn is "the most various and exploratory of Restoration dramatists," and is perhaps most impressive for her ability to combine "unstoppable creativity" with "extraordinary prolificness" (193).

Readers who come to this study expecting a less orthodox methodological approach or sophisticated theoretical engagement might be disappointed with the chronological sequence of patient, detailed close readings of each play. But the ultimate payoff of this sustained attention is a convincing accretion of evidence that Behn was not only a central player in the world of the Restoration stage but also a formidable intellectual and creative force whose work is fully deserving of more attention than it currently enjoys. Hughes clearly succeeds in making his case for the benefit of reading Behn's plays through the lens of the theater historian. At least two questions remain to be asked. The first is .

methodological: is it really necessary to assume that "history" and "theory" (however one construes these categories) are necessarily oppositional, much less that one has a purchase on truth-claims while the other is merely the stuff of "fantasy"? The second question is more local: what insights might emerge from combining a more traditional historical approach like Hughes's with that of the more theoretically informed varieties of historicism associated with those whose influential work he would debunk? One hopes that such imaginative, synthesizing work remains to be done, and that Hughes's own valuable contribution might help to inspire its emergence.