In Our Time - Archive: Aphra Behn

Episode Date: August 6, 2026

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

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Your sales order says one thing. Your inventory says another. Your spreadsheet says, good luck. Odu brings your business together on a single platform, from sales and accounting to inventory and marketing. Visit Odu.com to book a demo. It's O'Dbolo.com. Before Achilles found Glory and Odysseus eventually found his way home, Someone had to compose the Iliad and Odyssey, but was their credited author Homer even real?

Hi, I'm Greg Jenner, host of Your Dead to Me, the comedy show that takes history seriously, and we are travelling back to 8th century BCE to trace the origins of the Iliad and Odyssey, epic poems that became backbones of Western literature. Join me and my fantastic guests as we unpack the stories of ancient Greek culture, war and triumph, and have a laugh while we do it.

Listen on BBC.com or where we're a great. wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. All right. This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, and welcome to the first in a series of archive editions of In Our Time, which I found especially fascinating.

I first came across the 17th century dramatist and novelist Afra Ben when studying drama at Bristol University. Long forgotten, in the 1970s, her reputation and works were experiencing a most deserved revival thanks to the powerful injection of feminism in the theatrical and academic worlds. She was quite simply one of the most influential and popular playwrights of the restoration period in English.

This was a joyous response in the arts to the end of the rather dead hand of life under Oliver Cromwell's protectorate, and the return of the monarchy in 1660 under Charles II. Since the 1970s, Ben's place in the world of academia has been secure. Yet in the wider world, she remains relatively unknown, still living in the shadow of playwrights like Congreve and Dryden. This is disappointing because as Melvin Bragg's guests demonstrate in this episode, Ben was not only a hugely successful dramatist, novelist and poet. She forged a career and gained recognition as the first woman to make her living from writing, a world which, until the restoration, women had been prevented from inhabiting and exploring.

That among her other career paths, she indulged in espionage, only adds to the biography of this truly remarkable woman. And even though back in the day I actually read and studied Ben, this episode opened my eyes to many of the things I had missed. I hope it'll do the same for you. Enjoy listening. Hello, Afroben 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 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, or 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 janitor. Todd, former president of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University, Ross Ballister, Professor of 18th century literature and Mansfield College University of Oxford, and Claire Bodech, proposed 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 wet nurse, 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 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. 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 of what was called the Commonwealth and so on. And she's doing that then. But we do know she was a spy in Antwera.

We do know that for sure. Well, you're on your own, Joanna. Where did she go? How did she 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 Ballastard, 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 Killegrew 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 the 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,

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, not so 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, interestingly. So that's James named after James Duke of York, later James I second. And he seems to have been the member of the royal family, the monarch that Ben was

was most loyal to. Here 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 that 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 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 £8 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 Polwell. But as far as we know, they both both only had one play performed, whereas Ben ran for two decades nearly. Can you give us an overview of the sort of plays that Aphraben was writing? Indeed, she started with Traged 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. 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. Yes. 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 prologs and epilogs 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 complementary about her.

But I understood about this time she's being married, but the marriage didn't last very long. How is she living? I have any idea? Is 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. Actresses were thought to be prostitutes by some people at that time. So by putting someone like that on the stage,

she was smacking them in the face with it, wasn't she? 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 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 what ways 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 so on. 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 legitimise the female liberty? I don't think anybody can quite legitimise it. I think a female libertine... You can't quite near it, as I understand.

Well, I think it's... You can't be, I think, in the end, a female libertine. As Helena says, what would I get out of sexual congress before marriage? Well, you know, a cradle full of mischief. The double standard is absolute. And the only people who came near to being female libertines are aristocratic women. And I think Ben admires those, but also knows that it's... pretty difficult to be a Libertine woman further down the social scale.

Even in a wonderful work that she, that's an anonymous work called Love Letters, she has a woman who moves from being the virgin, the desirable virgin, into being 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 but you're at her. 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 own. The notion of the libertine, the term libertine in classical Rome just means a freed slave. So a libertine is someone who, we might say, thinks outside the box, refuses all systems, refuses rule, refuses convention. It's a kind of public blasphemy, arrogance, performance. You can see that in the figure that Ben most admired John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. And his surname, Wilmot, of course, is echoed in the name of the hero of 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. Before Achilles found glory and Odysseus eventually found his way home,

someone had to compose the Iliad and Odyssey. But was there credited. author, Homer, even real. Hi, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy show that takes history seriously, and we are travelling back to 8th century BCE to trace the origins of the Iliad and Odyssey, epic poems that became backbones of Western literature.

Join me and my fantastic guests as we unpack the stories of ancient Greek culture, war and triumph, and have a laugh while we do it. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye. 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 marriage, she's against young women being unhappily contracted.

Equal marriages, yes, yes. But 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, Ben's an odd combination of idealism and pragmatism. So she has this longing for a golden age, a world in which there was no marriage, no contract, people give love freely. She often idealises that. But she also said, you know, she has a poem called The Golden Age in which all of that is idealized. And then right at the end, we realize 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, 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 at least an acquaintance, perhaps even a friend of hers, Nell Gwynne,

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 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 Lucretia's 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 Burditch. She was a very strong supporter of the Stuart Monarchy. Charles 2nd, 425. 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, Tory loyalist, fascinated by the court, dazzled by it really, and a very strong, can we call a feminist without stepping on everybody,

says, can we just use it to be getting on with a 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' 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 kind of 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 favours 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, whether 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 out. I was just going to say, 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, 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? 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 of a puzzle to most of us. She sees him as some sort of extraordinarily 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. Ross, 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 have been the great money spinners of Dryden's plays

except perhaps one or two of them he did three a year on a contract and so 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 in Southern. Do you all take that for granted?

Because it's doubted in your notes, whether or not she did go there. Well, I think critics have doubted it. Historically, they've doubted it. 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 Suriname, 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-in-thenes it's only speculation. And she says her father was given a job as lieutenant-governor of the island.

That seems unlikely if he was a barber. Well, she always, she gets herself into her own works. Her works are really faction. She often puts herself into what she's writing. And when she does that, she nearly always elevates her birth. So to come back to this novel itself, what's most striking about it on the background? I mean, it's a remarkable novel, and it's much studied now. I think probably because it's, we, there's a debate about the extent to which it's making a case against slavery.

But at least one might sort of say that it's a novel which exposes the kind of 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 criticizing 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. murders 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 is 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 the world. 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. Sorry? Unassisted, yes. Well, there's no... We have no evidence, yeah. This is a mantra. We're good at that.

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 of these bodily pleasures. And on the other hand, she is in love with a colonel there called Daring. And she's worried that he wants her for her money. And so she has to put him through these tests where she's checking his... his constancy and his motives because the fact that she's a wealthy widow leaves her with some problems. Because 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 playwright? 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 ranter? Because I think that's a, it's a wonderful play because not only 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,

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 rant her 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 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, you know, 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 16, 1617, 1688, she has 18 plays put on the stage. Dryden has 14 and Durfey 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 and that plays through all of her fiction. One way to put it, 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 of... Sorry, Jan, But she had a reputation as a bawdy writer, didn't she, at the time? Is that true? Yes, yes. What was bawdy about it?

It's very bawdy. Give us one of two examples. It is early, but still, no mind. Well, let's say, I mean, other people were bawdy too. Bordy sex comedy was the mode, and that's why she wrote it. What was thought of as Bordy 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, 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 peccadilloes. She has old men who come into the, to supposedly the bridal chamber, and open their nightgowns and display themselves to the women. I mean, this is pretty bawdy stuff. In fact, she was criticized 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 rover, Sir Patient Fancy, where there's a scene in which the wife of Sir Patient Fancy is trying to hide the lover that she's got stashed behind the bed whilst her husband is trying to find this lover and she says that the women

are the people that attacked her most for that. 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 a strike her out of the lists for two centuries. Her reputation was very high as you pointed out

Ross 18 plays they must have kept wanting more and the picture and the poetry haven't even got to that but she went right her reputation went right down why was that starting with you well I think that the restoration itself

was vilified as you move into the 18th century the whole area the whole period was seen as as corrupt and licentious and the sort of blip on the proper development things suddenly not like licentiousness the world turned

became more moral the Dutch king came in 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 Afrobin 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, I used to love these stories by Afroben. Can you get hold of a few for me? So he's a bit surprised. He goes off finds him. 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 aloud to each of. It's a 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 the morality of the nation very publicly in the late 17th century. And now you, among others, are revivivifying, reasserting, reasserting reputation. Can I just, that quotation I saw. the 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 her 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

her due 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, Tauqua?

I think she's left us a very interesting legacy, because as we've touched on at various points in this programme, She is a mass of contradictions, and several of her characters are matters of contradictions, and there's a lot for people like us and people like your listeners to work out with her. So, you know, we have the feminism and the royalism as sort of contradictory. We have characters in some of her fiction, you know, a nun who's also a bigamist, people like that, the courtesan who's the devoted woman. So there's an awful lot that she has to say that,

captures the fact that we're not all one-dimensional. You know, we do have these 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 so kind of this playing with gender identity and the attraction of ambiguity around. 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 Bowditch. And if you have a topic for us that you think deserves a big radio audience, please send your ideas through our website or Twitter and 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. Yes. We left out. We left out poetry. I came to poetry on the... And the equivocation that is always in her work. But I wanted to say the one thing that at the end of the theatre, it's really one of the tragedies of literary history,

is that Peep's thought he was going. going blind and stopped writing his diary just before Afri-Benz enters the stage. Why didn't you say that? Well, because you didn't give me a chance to do it. No, no. Bagsas and 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 fallen 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,

And, 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.

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. We did, yeah, you make these decisions, don't you? I mean, 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 hopefully some people will go ahead.

Tell 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. Thinking what what?

Well, who exactly has done what with whom? What is it? Where is the sex? Where is it? And is it cerebral? Is it physical? What is it? What's going on? Do you, I mean, do you see how her plays put on? The rover's just been on. At the RSC.

Ah. And we actually did a reading of the... 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. It's a patient fancy, the lucky chance. It's very hit miss. I saw...

I'm not going to name it because I want to put down the directive. I saw, seen a couple of restoration, 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 it's, a lot of it's about, yeah, about training. People don't really train in restoration theatre in the way that they do in Renaissance theatre or in, or in modern theatre. So it's about getting the pace.

right. And it can be too slow or too fast. Too fast. They tend to throw themselves about. Absolutely. Restoration drama as though that's the necessary thing and to be overboardy. 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 Jen 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 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 there are bodies playing these parts. You see the difference between them. You see the contrast between the couples working out physically in front of you, don't you? 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...

That's a very good point. 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 form. But it could be... It sounds like I didn't see the RAC 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 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, I'm sure... But you have to have the audience, don't you? You have to make the hunters come and buy the 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.

I think 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 all of them were talking on the way back about, you know, how do we read this scene? What are we doing 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 really very well. It's just 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 shouldn't be raping. He backs away from it because she's botched. I think you've got your saying about the person. I think that'll, I think that'll, that is the... Percolate. Plenty of people here that. I can't go over it. I think the producer is coming in to make an important announcement.

Thank you to know if you want refreshments. Tea or coffee? I'm okay, thank you. Why do some brilliant business ideas come at Cropper? I'm Sean Farrington and in a new series of toast I'll be looking at five more brands, businesses and wonder products which offered a lot but didn't stick around. Including a budget cinema selling tickets for 20 pence

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But was their credited author Homer even real? Hi, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy show that takes history seriously, and we are travelling back to 8th century BCE to trace the origins of the Iliad and Odyssey, epic poems that became backbones of Western literature. Join me and my fantastic guests as we unpack the stories of ancient Greek culture, war and triumph and have a laugh while we do it. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.