In Our Time - Aphra Behn

Episode Date: October 12, 2017

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aphra Behn (1640-1689), who made her name and her living as a playwright, poet and writer of fiction under 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. The image above is from the Yale Center for British Art and is titled 'Aphra Behn, by Sir Peter Lely, 1618-1680' With Janet Todd Former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge UniversityRos Ballaster Professor of 18th Century Literature at Mansfield College, University of Oxfordand Claire Bowditch Post-doctoral Research Associate in English and Drama at Loughborough UniversityProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, Afroban was a prolific playwright for the Restoration Stage, a poet, a writer of fiction, and a sometimes spy, and her lifespan one of the most turbulent times, 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 I second 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 Afroben,

for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. Women to discuss Afroben are Janet Todd, former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University, Ross Ballister, Professor of 18th century literature and Mansfield College University of Oxford, and Claire Bauditch, post-doctoral research associate in English and drama at Loughborough University. Chan Todd, how much do we know about Afroven's early life?

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 wetness in a more elevated family. And I think it's probably through that connection that she gets to know a man called Killigrew, who, when the restoration comes, is both involved in the...

secret service and in the theatre. And of course, Ben comes into history first as a secret agent. But in terms of her childhood, Germain Greer said, we must be prepared to live with what we do not know about her early years. That is what we are doing, I think, rather substantially. I hope one day there will be more known. Is it sure that her father was a barber in Kent? It seems to be more sure that her mother was a witness, doesn't it?

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 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 write in all genres. She learns how to comport herself among the learned among men who are at the ends of court. She learns all that somewhere. That was the question I was going to ask you. Where did she learn it?

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. Somehow through the wetness, she got into the libraries, one of two great big houses with libraries and took to reading books. And I think she does... That's the best we can do, is it? 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, the 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. And this is in the terrible civil war period, the 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 Antwer. We do know that, for sure. Well, you're on your own, Jan. Where she go? How did you get to be a spy in Antwer? 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 Astrea, 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 Astrea again, she was sent there to bring in this William Scott and make him turn into a double agent so that he would work for the government of Charles II. And we've actually letters and reports and how she said, I need more money to do this job. 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. Ros Baleson, what was the state of the theatre when Ben began to write? Did she say, why did she begin to write for the study? Well, as Jan said, it seems likely that it's this connection with Thomas Killegru. We know that in her novel that she published in 1688 called Orenoko. Afraben mentions that she sent some Indian feathers from Surinam to Killegru to the King's Company for a performance. 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. And she doesn't seem to have been a very effective spy. So I think she turns to the stage to try and earn money. She probably looks at models like John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell, who were the rising professionals

in the stage at the time. I think it's worth understanding what the theatre's like in this period. Because it had been closed down in 1642. Exactly. It opened up again, but only two. two theatres compared with the massive theatres they were in, as it were, Shakespeare and post-Shakespeare and world. And it's an entirely different kind of theatre. I mean, lots of people sort of say this isn't just a revival or a restoration, it's a reinvention of theatre.

Charles II 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. Killegru runs the King's Company. Davenant runs the Duke's Company. Most of all of Ben's plays until 1682 are performed by the Duke's company. company, interestingly. So that's James named after James Duke of York, later James II. And he seems

to have been the member of the royal family, the monarch, that Ben was most loyal to. He came back as a different thing. What different thing was it? Okay, so it's a patent theatre. It's owned by those managers, whereas previously they were stock companies. Women can play women. Well, the second part, in his second,

in 16, well, a few years later, Charles passes in edict that says all parts for women must be played by women. And interestingly, he says that because he says otherwise there are scurrilous and obscene passages that are given to female parts. So he's saying actually he's going to make the theatre more respectable by having women play these parts.

Our impression is, of course, that this is a kind of enormous novelty and excitement, seeing women playing female parts on the stage. Is it true that women are now legitimately allowed to go to the theatre for the first time? Or had they gone before? I think they'd always gone to the theatre before. I think there are new kinds of parts for women that Ben starts her career writing tragedy comedies actually and those tragedy comedies have amazing parts for women

they're sort of the commandeering powerful woman the woman who kind of commands love with her eyes these extraordinary actresses like Elizabeth Barry John Wilmot Earl of Rochester's mistress and Nell Gwynn who have real stage presence and are really attractive to the audience so they're a draw, they're allure to this new kind of theatre When you say she decided to go to the theatre to make a living,

it was very risky. What sort of living did she make in the beginning? 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, a playwright received 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. So once all of the cost is taken out, you get the profits.

You might, if you run to a sixth or ninth night, you might get those profits. Another bit of earning might come from publishing your play. You might get about £10 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 successful on the stage before Ben. In the late 1660s, 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. She's as good as her last play, basically. And when the theatres go into doldrums, Ben's fortune tends to drop. We see her moving into other genres.

The plays in 1682, the two companies come together. There are far fewer new plays. Ben turns to fiction and then comes back to drama when the theatrical scene revives again. Claire Burditch, were there other women writing plays at the time? writing plays at times. She was the most successful, we know, but were there others around? She was the most successful, but yes,

by the time that she started writing for the stage in 1670, 1671, there were at least two other women around at that time. The first was Francis Boothby, who wrote a tragic comedy. As Ross said, that's where Ben started her dramatic career. The one who came either slightly after or about the same time as Ben was Elizabeth Pole Will. But as far as we know, they both are. only had one play performed, whereas Ben ran for two decades nearly.

Can you give us an overview of the sort of plays that Aphra Ben was writing? Indeed, she started with Tragedy Comedy, and in 1673, for her third play, she moved to comedy. The third play was definitely a trial in comedy. She hadn't quite got the sense of space and how the stage worked down to. 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 tragic comedy. And she's in a very... You've mentioned, Dryden has been mentioned, but there's also Witchley around, and Etheridge around. And Ravenscroft as well. And Ravenscroft and so she's in with a lot of very successful men.

Do they resent her? Do they bring her on? 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? I think amongst her immediate colleagues,

she does command their respect. They write prologues and epilogues for her plays, which might be indeed interpreted as some kind of professional compliment. Even when we get into her prose and some of her translation, she's receiving dedicatory verses from her peers that are extremely complementary. That's not to say that everybody about her was complimentary. complementary about her.

But I understand about this time she's being married, but the marriage didn't last very long. How is she living? I have any idea she living in a little lodging and cheap so. Where is she? We don't know exactly where she was living. We do know that she could keep a servant. So she had about enough money to keep a servant. But in terms of her location, we assume she's immediately London-based

and probably somewhere near the theatre on the Thames. we don't have a location for her. So I understand it, her first notable success was a play called The Rover 1677. Yes. Why was that a success, do you think? 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 a kind of pairing. Two sets of lovers, one, a constant couple who had some opposition to their romantic union. The other was 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 Bianca, who was a courtesan. And Angelica Bianca added a darkness to that play that I think appealed to two different constituencies really. It's quite well because actresses were thought to be prostitutes 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?

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 Afro-B's initials, so she's A-B. So there's some suggestion that Ben may have been playing with expectations about her image in this role. And she was her in one way, was the rober typical of Ben's ideas?

I've read a lot from the three of you about Ben's ideas of masculine, feminine, libertine, women come in liberties and stuff. Could you develop that a bit? Well, I think she develops it more in the later plays, but it certainly starts here. 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 lovelorn women who are a little more experienced are,

it's a feature of Afroben's 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 and therefore lose in the social game.

So I think that's there already. Did you say in some way legitimize the female living? I don't think anybody can quite legitimise it. I think a female libertine... She came quite near it, as I understand. Well, I think it's... You can't be, I think, in the end, a female libertine. As Helen 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 anonymous work called Love Letters,

she has a woman who moves from being the virgin, the desirable virgin, into being 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. But she did want people, well, home to Europe. She did want women to be seen as to be more independent and more liberated than they had been seen until then, as I understand it. What do you say? 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. Yes, that's what I got from your mind. 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 Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. And his surname, Wilmot, of course, is echoed in the name of the hero, the rover, Willmore. 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 around 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 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 life. What plays did marriage play in that scheme of things? She's always very skeptical about marriage. Most of her plays concern young women who are, or the majority of her comedy is concerned, young women who are unhappily contracted to old men and want to get back to their young lovers who they've been separated from.

So let's just be more specific. She isn't against marriages, against young women being unhappyly contracted to old men. I think she's also, I mean, she is against marriages because it's an institution if you take this liberty and ethics. So she has a kind of, men'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 said, 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. But come back to the eye, sorry 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 one or one or two of you, was not something you want to pursue, was not something she wanted to pursue? 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 and 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. And then we're living in the time of acquaintance, perhaps even a friend of hers, Nell Gwynn, who was, very open about her status. Yes. 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 of them, identified with the actress. I just wanted to come in on the idea of the ethical liberty because I agree with Ros 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. Oscar Wilde foretold.

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.

Claire, Clare. Claire Burdage, she was a very strong supporter of the Stuart monarchy of Charles, second, 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, I think a very strong Tory monarchist, or a loyalist, fascinated by the core, dazzled by it really, and a very strong, can we call her feminist without stepping on everybody's, can we just use it to be getting on with her feminist, which is more of a slightly different position.

What would you have to say about that? 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 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 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 the classical heroes are used in place of support of the monarchy or supports 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. Did the court repay her devotion to them? We don't have any specific record of face. that were given to her, for instance.

In 1681, she did dedicate one of her plays, the second part of the rover, to the future James I, and one might assume she was in some sense remunerated for that weather financially or through some kind of court favour. But I think if she'd received any kind of gratuitous favour, she would have been satirised 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. John, you want to come here.

I was just going to say that exactly, we don't know. But towards the end of her life, she was such a propagandist for James II. 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 II. Given James II's Catholicism, and her attitude to religion, did that not irk him, or was it not at odds with her protestations of loyalty? 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 II to 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 II is something. thing of a puzzle to most of us. She 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 II, actually.

Rose, 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 they don't seem to be in the great money spinners of Dryden's plays, except perhaps one or two of them. Three a year on a contract and so on, on Congress plays, however. 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? Well, we've just been talking about James, and it's important to remember that Orenoka is published in 1688, 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 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. hero, it's very evident when you look at this moment in which James and his wife Mary of 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 still, it seems to me, part of her political commitment to James. During this conversation, it's to be taken for granted that she did go to Surinam. Do you all take that for granted? Because it's doubted in your in your notes, whether or not she did go there. Well, I think critics have doubted it. Historically, they doubted it. And there's... Well, you can all say alleged,

unproved and so on. 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 Estreya, which is, after all the name she uses all the way through. I mean, there are state papers that mention the women in Surrey. Surinam and it fits her. Why don't you go to Suriname in the first place? Well, uh-huh. We don't know, but I think she went as an agent right away.

But it's only spec- We're still in the secret service. It's only speculation. I mean, she says her father was given a job as lieutenant, governor of the island. That seems unlikely if he was a barber. Well, 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. So to come back to the... novel itself. What's most striking about it but on the background? I mean, it's a remarkable novel, and it's much studied now, I think probably because it's, 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, and that respect, you could see it as presaging a novel

like Heart of Darkness. Like Marlowe and Heart of Darkness, the narrator is a character in the novel who is complicit with the English colonial government that she's also criticising for its cruelty to this noble African prince who has been enslaved. He leads a slave rebellion, it's put down, he's horribly tortured, murdered his wife, and then he's publicly executed, and his courted parts are sent around the colony. She finishes this mangled spectacle of the king. It's recalling again Charles the first murder,

so it's a wonderful kind of mixture of contemporary allegory and analogy and contemporary critique of the colonial situation. Still on the other side, as it were, of the ocean, not of the life itself, Claire. There's another light play, The Widow Ranta set in Virginia.

Now, what's she doing there and why she's setting it in Virginia? 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 Ros was saying in relation to Arunico

there's a missing governor. So a little bit of a topsy-turvy world. And the two texts definitely share that aspect of... What's the widow ranting about? 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 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 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 unassisted this sorry unassisted yes well

oh there's no evidence we don't know we have no evidence yeah but yes this old skeleton has the good grace to die and leave her this wealthy widow so on the one hand she's enjoying all 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. Because she's going to, they're just going to marry her for her. Exactly. Yeah. Jan, briefly, is there any way you would like to compare her, briefly, her fiction with her plour? Do you think she's a better novel writer, a novelist, than a playwright? I think she's a wonderful both, actually. But her plays are what made her famous at the time. And 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, because I think that's a, it's a wonderful play because not only we have we got the widow ranter 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, a mockery of those people who think that they can rule other people and who think they can, you know, the moment they get into power, they simply serve their own interest. And the moment these people get going in the widow ranta, they make themselves a great big punch bowl. On the subject of her as a fiction writer versus a playwright, I'd say that in her fiction, certainly, you get this sense of theatricality. 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's scripted them already for her plays.

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 1617 and 1688, she has 18 plays put on the stage. Dryden has 14 and Durfie has 14 and that's the highest number for any male playwright over the same period. So she's extraordinarily successful as a playwright and she's really admired for this capacity, what called 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. That plays through all of her fiction.

She's one way to put it to 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. Let's stick, 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? Yes. What was boredy about it? It's very bawdy.

Give us one of two examples. It is early, but still, no mind. Well, let's say, other people were bawdy too. Bordy sex comedy was the mode, and that's why she was. She wrote it. What was thought of as boring then? 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 realizing 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 peccadillos. She has old men who come into the... supposedly the bridal chamber, and open their nightgans and display themselves to the women. I mean, this is 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.

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 boredy 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 Rovers, 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 this lover.

And she says that the women are the people that attacked her most. Can we just... I brought that 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 love. lists for two centuries. Her reputation was very high, as you pointed out, Roz. 18 plays, they must have kept wanting more, and the picture and the poetry, you haven't even got to that, but she went right, her reputation went right down. Why was that? Starting with you,

Jane. Well, I think that the restoration itself was vilified as you move into the 18th century. The whole period was seen as corrupt and licentious and the sort of blip on on the proper development things. Suddenly not like licentiousness? The world turned, became more moral. The Dutch king came in. The Dutch? The Dutch, it's the Dutch.

The world has turned towards a more sentimental version of life. The distinction between men and women is re-established. Women, I suppose, particularly, to be more associated with emotions and religion and with the virtuous side of life.

And so Afraben sticks out now, not just as one of many playwrights who were bawdy, but as a woman who was bawdy. And as such, he is vilified constantly throughout the next century. There's a note in a letter from Walter Scott, which summarises this totally. Yes, it's a wonderful story. Walter Scott.

Although one can't help think about the fact that Walter Scott's making the novel in the early 19th century, so he's sorting it out. Okay, I will get to the point. So Walter Scott has a great aunt who says to him, I used to love these stories by Afrobenk, and can you get hold of a few for me? So he's a bit surprised, he goes off fines,

and 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 60 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.

That's fascinating because she also says, throw them on the fire. Yes. And then she says, but six years ago, people like myself, being a woman of gentility, you sit around and read them a larger issue. It's fascinating little vignette of the way taste can change so swiftly. And it's a complicated question, isn't it?

Because one might sort of think, well, does this mean that women are being recontained in the 18th century? But in a way, they're just being rethought as, in a way, moral agents. They're responsible for the moral credit of the nation. And Ben is seen as someone who discredited morality. She's been writing very publicly in the late 17th century. And now you, among others, are very revivifying, reasserting, repudition. Can I just, that quotation I started a program with about Virginia Woolf laying flowers on her grave. Do you think that, do you go along with that, John?

Did you go and lay flowers on the grave? I did. I thought you might. With Lucy Worcley in a program. But I think it's a tricky one. It's on every book about Afroben 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 adieu as an actual creative writer. So I think 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. Her reputation is being restored by persons like yourself and others, but is her legacy there, Tauklah? 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 cortisans 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 kinds of contradictions. Can you see it percolating through to your students and I'm saying, oh. Absolutely. I mean, I think she's really attractive to students. I mean, she's really attracted 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 playing with gender identity and the attraction of ambiguity around gender disturbance is central to Ben's writing and to what makes her attractive then and makes her attractive now. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Ros Baleser, Jan Todd, Claire Bowdoch. 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 27th of October. One will be the subject of our programme on the 7th 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 Melvin and his guests.

What major thing did we leave out? Poetry. We left out. We left out poetry. I came to poetry and the equivocation that is always in her work. But I wanted to say the one thing that at the end about the theatre is really one of the tragedies of literary history is that Peep's thought he was going blind and stopped writing his diary just before Afroben enters the stage. Why didn't you say that?

Well, because you didn't give me a chance to do it. No, no. In Bangladesh, you could have taken the thing by the horns. I ask the most wide-open questions. No, no, I don't want to be rude. Do I want to be rude? I do not. Actually not to a man who's in such a disadvantage

in being in the minority. Anyway, I don't think the lack of peeps is a sort of great blow to the program. No, I agree. It just seemed to me a rather nice point. I think the poetry is, but I came up to the poetry in the structure and I thought we haven't got time. We'd 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 Pauline reputation and the legacy and the poetry and I just didn't have time. So that's my... I mean, I think it's also... Poetry is a diminishing interest in art now for readers. I mean, 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, Orinoco, 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. But 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 I think it's very... 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 a 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 nymphs resentment's none but I can well imagine or console. Here I am I. I read that. We did, yeah, you make these decisions, don't you? that's what you've got. You've got to make decisions.

And 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 about poetry. Tell me 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, what. And the whole poem leaves you thinking what at the end. You simply don't know. Well, who exactly has done what with whom? What is it? Where is it? Where is it? Is it cerebral? Is it physically? What is it? What is going on? Do you, I mean, do you see how play is put on? The rover's just been on. At the RSC.

Ah. And we actually did a reading of three. How did it go down? 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.

It's very hit and miss. I saw a not going to name because I want to put down the directive. I saw, seen a couple of restorations in the last few years. And they've been very unconvincing. I think 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. I think a lot of it's about training.

People don't really train in Restoration Theatre in the way that they do in Renaissance Theatre or in modern theatre. So it's about getting the pace right. And it can be too slow or too fast. Too fast. They tend to throw themselves about. Absolutely. Restoration drama, as though that's the necessary thing.

And it's very forward-facing theatre. So you 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. Which 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 whole kind of experience of the theatre, is not one that we necessarily have an exact equivalent for. So, yes, I think... 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. I think that's absolutely true, and I think they are very theatrical, which is one reason, in fact, they're not cinematic.

They wouldn't easily be made into a television drama. They're not like that. So I think that she's not in that world, and she has to live in the theatre. And the theatre is not a hugely popular art. But it could be, my time is I didn't see the REC 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...

For instance, so many people have taken a little lump out of Chekhov and turned it into that eight-hour play, which is the first play he wrote, which has been cut into by David Hare, by Michael Frayne, by many others. Anyway, you have to have the audience, don't you? You have to make the hunters come and buy the take. tickets and it's the lack of knowledge. By having a starry cast, that was all that. You've also got a problem with the rake is also, I think, a problem in a lot of modern performance. You know, 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? Especially this morning with what's on the news. Absolutely. Absolutely. 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 very well as. She's evergreen. The fact that the rape backs away from rape because he thinks, oh, actually, this is a genteel woman. So he doesn't back away from it because he doesn't back away from it because she's botched.

I think you've got your saying about the portrait. I think that'll, I think that's the... Plenty people hear that. I can't go over. 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. And for more podcasts on arts and ideas from the BBC.

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