THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

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œuvres of the upright ‘Orinda’ Philips and the notoriously immodest ‘Astrea’ Behn, the contrast was not consciously
fostered by either party. Behn, of indeterminate social origins, seems to have had little formal education, but her
experiences as a colonist in Surinam in the early 1660s almost certainly schooled her in the ways of a dissolute world
more efficiently than any course in classical rhetoric or Roman history. Her facility in French is, however, evident in
her translations of Fontenelle’s The History of Oracles and A Discovery of the New Worlds in 1688 and, in the same
year, of the romance Agnes de Castro. Behn’s reputation as a poet loyally anxious to commemorate any given royal
occasion was rivalled only by her considerable success with the London public as a dramatist. Her first play, The
Forc’d Marriage, was produced at the Duke of York’s Theatre in September 1670; seventeen further plays, the vast
majority of them comedies, were acted and printed during her lifetime. Her comedies are generally energetic intrigues
marked by sexually frank and witty banter between characters. There is little room for gravitas or learning. The
Feign’d Curtezans (1679) (dedicated to Charles II’s mistress, Nell Gwynn) revolves around the amatory negotiations
of two wild local girls and two English gentlemen in Rome, an intrigue varied by distressed ex-fiancés and brothers
and by the folly of Sir Signal Buffoon and his Puritan tutor, Mr Tickletext. Behn’s antipathy to Puritanism and its
political allies is particularly evident in the chaotic comedy The Roundheads (1681/2), a play in which the wives of
prominent Puritan politicians are wooed by two cavaliers (Loveless and Freeman) and in which the interconnection
between pimping and politicking occasionally hits its mark. Behn’s most vividly successful achievement remains the
first part of The Rover (1677), a play based on Thomas Killigrew’s Thomaso or The Wanderer but replete with self
reference. Its dominant male characters, Belvile and Willmore, are the kind of exiled cavaliers that Behn must have
known from her days in Surinam, men in whom she seems to have taken a distrustful pleasure; both are refugees from
political failure in England who espouse the cause of philandery almost as a royalist protest against Puritan restraint.
The flamboyant Willmore wins his true-love in time-honoured fashion by confounding the wishes of her father but in
the process he breaks off his liaison with Angellica Bianca, a ‘famous courtesan’ who shares the playwright’s initials.
When Angellica confronts her faithless lover at the end of the play she attempts to stress the pain of her disillusion;
she had once lovingly hoped to raise his soul ‘above the vulgar’, even to make him ‘all soul ... and soft and constant’,
but she has discovered that what she received in return was ‘no more than dog lust ... and so I fell | Like a longworshipped
idol at the last | Perceived a fraud, a cheat, a bauble’.
Angellica’s picture of herself as a slave to the whims of a fickle male enforces Behn’s constantly implied theme of
the limited choices open to contemporary women. Permissiveness may offer a merry freedom to men, but that freedom
too often relies on the servitude of the other sex. Although she generally draws back from defining and directly
protesting against this servitude in her plays,
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Behn’s most famous novel, Oroonoko, or the History of the Royal Slave (1688), forms an early attack on what she
perceives as the more distant colonial problem of human slavery, degradation, and suffering. Oroonoko is on one level
a clumsy and romanticized account of the betrayal of an African prince into American slavery; on another it is an
early attempt to insist on human dignity and to examine the redemptive force of love. Before his contrived fall, the
hero is described as a man capable of ‘reigning well, and of governing as wisely ... as any Prince civilised in the most
refined schools of humanity and learning, or the most illustrious courts’, but it is through his love of ‘the brave, the
beautiful and the constant Imoinda’ that he is inspired to rebel, to suffer silently the horrible consequences of his
rebellion, and to assert his understanding of a morality which transcends that of his oppressors. As a writer who had
acted out the roles of both colonizer and courtesan, Behn suggests that she possessed a proper insight into the
meaning of oppression.
‘Restoration’ Drama
When the public theatres reopened in 1660, after eighteen years of official displeasure, a tradition needed to be reestablished
which was both responsive to the recent past and a reflection of new tastes and fashions. Two wellconnected
impresarios, both with roots in the courtly and theatrical past, effectively nursed the London stage into
robust health. Sir William Davenant (1606-68), who was rumoured to be the godson and, even more preposterously,
the bastard of Shakespeare, had established his credentials as a playwright and a librettist of court masques in the
reign of Charles I. In 1656 he had managed to evade the government ban on theatrical performances by staging an
opera, or ‘Entertainment after the manner of the ancients’, The Siege of Rhodes. This English opera, with music (now