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Not Just the Tudors
Aphra Behn: Revolutionary, Author, Spy
00:40:26
The first woman to earn a living by writing, how did Behn craft her public persona while challenging cultural and sexual norms?
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward/subscribe.
- [00:32]
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- [02:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Dramatist, spy, political propagandist, revolutionary. The first woman to earn a living from her pen, Aphra Behn led a life as remarkable as it is impossible to define. In a world of heightened public attention, she fashioned herself like a question for which there are a multitude of answers. Her origins, like much of her story, are a matter of speculation and doubt. One of the first self made women, Ben was a writer of over 19 plays, including the phenomenally successful the Rover. Her most famous novel, Oronoko, was probably based on her own time in the British colony of Suriname. Ben was daringly vibrant. Her public personality would seem to adhere to the Restoration stereotype of brash sexuality and outspoken politics. Yet her private self was kept largely unknown. She was twice arrested, once for debt and once for writing an abusive and scandalous text on the Duke of Monmouth. And her circle included the actress Nell Gwynne and the infamous John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester. Hers is the story of a true original. Joining me this episode is Dr. Janet Todd, historian of the long 18th century and women's writing. As an academic, Dr. Todd has worked across the world in India, Ghana, England, Puerto Rico and North America, and is the former president of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. Her pioneering work in the field of women's literature has seen her revisit the works of Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft. But today we're talking about her landmark study, A Secret Life, which deftly weaves together the disparate pieces of a truly extraordinary life. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb and you are listening to Not Just the Tudors from history hit. Dr. Todd, welcome to the show.
- [04:35]
Dr. Janet Todd
Thank you for having me. It's lovely to be here.
- [04:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So let's start at the very beginning. It's a very difficult place to start.
- [04:41]
Dr. Janet Todd
In this instance, it's extremely difficult.
- [04:43]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Germaine Greer famously wrote that Ben had scratched herself out from her own history. Why is her early life so difficult to pinpoint?
- [04:52]
Dr. Janet Todd
Well, I think she probably hid it. No, I spent a long time trying to find her. Canterbury obviously had decided to adopt her and there's now a statue. But whether she was born in Kent, I can't be sure. A book recently suggested she was born in America. Other people suggested other places, who knows? I suspect it's probable that she was born in Kent, but not absolute. But the Restoration is full of people needing to remake themselves, to have masks, the politics of the time, if nothing else, demanded that you kept reinventing yourself. And I think a lot of her past history is typically hidden from us. Or maybe she just didn't care to expose herself. She clearly isn't well born. She's certainly from the lower orders. But what interests me actually a lot more than where she was born or whether her father was a barber or whatever, is how on earth did she get her extraordinary education? Where did she get all that literary knowledge? How did she manage to just get into London and put on a play? Where did she see the plays? Where did she get to understand about stagecraft? How did she understand about ethics and pastoral. And maybe a very clever girl can kick this up very quickly. I don't know. I'm not a genius and not many geniuses are around. And maybe she could. But I would have thought there must be somewhere in the background a great library, a teacher, somebody, something. And I don't know what it is. I speculate, but it's only speculation.
- [06:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What an amazing mystery. Where do we first pick up the threads of her life with some degree of certainty?
- [06:40]
Dr. Janet Todd
I think probably Suriname. It's definite when we get her as a spy in Antwerp during the Dutch wars. But since you have the same names in Suriname, and since she claims in a very sort of fixed fact story called Oronoko, which you've mentioned, which uses some of the people who were there in Suriname, it seems very likely, at least I have speculated, that she was also an agent in Suriname and that she was trying to follow one of the king's enemies there and spy on the probably rather mismanaged colony, which harboured a good number, I think, probably of the king's enemies. And then she goes again, following possibly the same man to Antwerp. Her effort is to try and bring him in as a double agent. And I think there may be all sorts of some sort of amorous goings on as well. But it's also possible that as an agent, it was her business to use his sexuality as well as her cleverness and cunning to bring in an agent.
- [07:51]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's interesting, isn't it, when we think about Oronoko and as you say, sort of fact, fiction combined. Because so often when it comes to literature, especially early modern literature, we're advised that artistic works may not be the most appropriate place to search for the authorial self. And yet in this instance, she appears to be directing us.
- [08:11]
Dr. Janet Todd
She does. But then the figure that's there is so different from the kind of figures of herself, the masks of herself, whatever you want to call them the images that she puts elsewhere. This is a person who comes there, apparently as the daughter of the lieutenant General of many islands, which is extremely unlikely. And then when it comes to high moments, when she is supposed to protect a man that she's apparently giving protection to the Strathe Prince Oronoko, she's not there. She has no power, she falls away. And there's almost a sort of feminine passivity that comes over her. It is a bit odd. And then, of course, she comes in loudly at the end, saying, my pen will give him immortality. It is my pen that will let him live and gives him his being in literature. So it's a funny kind of presence of herself in that. In other ones, I think she seems to me to be closer to some of the sort of jolly, bibulous, congenial, friendly, gregarious women whom she creates in her poems and in her plays. So, yes, she's there, but I wouldn't say that was the best place to find her, if anywhere.
- [09:27]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And in terms of her personal life, her marriage has been another contention for historians. Why is that?
- [09:33]
Dr. Janet Todd
We don't know anything about him. She suddenly is Mrs. Ben, I think. There was a Mr. Ben. I was doing my work before databases, so I was breaking a band in phone books trying to find out where there were Bens. And he was supposed to be a Dutch merchant, which is Deutsche merchant, which is German. And there are a lot of bends around Hammerbar, so, yes, so there are possible bends. And do you own boats? And he may well be one of those, but he certainly disappears out of her life. And she is the widow, then. And she could, of course have died in the plague, which happens at about this time. He could have been drowned at sea, but he doesn't seem to be much mourned. There's not a lot about a husband who is missed, shall we say. She appears when she appears on the stage or at the theatre as woman. Alone. I shouldn't say alone. She's got a family in Orinoko, and there's mention of a mother and a sister and a brother, but they fade out pretty quickly because after all, Orinoko is talking about her life when she was a young woman, when these people were alive, but they disappeared from her life. She is a woman on her own, I think. Extraordinary, Absolutely extraordinary in this period.
- [10:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It is extraordinary and it remains extraordinary to me that we have in the summer of 1666, her being recruited, as you said, by the King's spymasters. How active was her career as an Agent, where did it take her?
- [11:05]
Dr. Janet Todd
I think there probably were quite a few of them, but I don't think she was very good. The archives show that she's always asking for money. Obviously no good at budgeting, and all her life she was bit in debt, she spent quite freely. I think she was generous, she was hopeful. She always thought if she sent some good reports it would be fine and she'd get her money. But the way that the King's court acted was that they didn't trust anybody, so they always sent a spy to look at another spy. So you have a whole heap of agents who are spying on each other and it causes this extraordinary web of interlocking and interacting narratives. And if you look at the archives, there is one man talking about the she spy sitting there giving away all the secrets, and then you'll have her saying, look at this ridiculous man who keeps following me, who turns out to be yet another spy looking at her. So they're all trying to curry favour back in London by doing down the activities of each other. Now, some people say she did warn the British government that there was going to be an invasion by the Dutch up the Medway. Yeah, probably. But a lot of people suggested it and they didn't really value her because they wouldn't pay her by the end. And I think I tried to prove it and I think I proved it, but I'm not sure everybody would agree that the man she came to spy on particularly and attract, through whatever means, body or mind that she had, was called Scott. And as far as I could see, by the end, she was a triple agent. And while she was trying to bring him in and she was begging money from the King so that she could pay him, so that she could come over properly, he was writing to the Dutch, asking for money too. Who knows? I think she really did fail to understand just how slippery he was and also just how frightened he was. He was a man whose father had been a regicide and had been executed. He was a man afraid for his life. He probably did want to come in, but possibly he didn't. Anyway, she didn't really succeed with him. I'm not sure if she really succeeded with much, but she got some good copy out of it. She clearly started writing funny stories at about this time. And I suspect, though, that she might have been used as an agent at some other times. I feel suddenly she has a kind of competence in French that she doesn't seem to have at the beginning. I think maybe she went over with an embassy to France. I even speculate she might have got to Venice, a couple of words and so on, but none of this is proven. Maybe one day there will be, but there are moments where there are months missing in her life when she may well have been an agent again.
- [14:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you mentioned her communication with the King. Would she have been in personal contact with Charles ii?
- [14:09]
Dr. Janet Todd
No, not really. She wants to be of the court desperately, but she isn't. The only time when it sounds there, she's quite close, is where she says, when a king wouldn't pay her, she can't get back. She hasn't got enough money to get back from Antwerp. And she said, when I get there, I'm going to throw myself by his knees and beg him for the money he owes me. Did she or didn't she? And did she go to prison or didn't she? I don't know. I doubt if she spoke to him. I can't imagine that it was often and I don't think she actually. Although she loved the idea of royal power and the idea of Charles ii, she doesn't show much affection for him as a man. The affection that she shows is for his brother, which is always hard for us, any of us, to understand. James, Duke of York, who becomes James II and makes a hash of kingship, but to him she gives really undivided loyalty for a very long time. But Charles, I think, I don't think she ever forgives him for leaving her, cutting her loose in Antwerp. She does get back, but what if she couldn't? I think he was, to her was a slightly difficult personality.
- [15:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And I know that there are 19 of her letters that the National Archives sent from Antwerp to London. I suppose they're a major source for thinking about how unsuccessful she was. What else do they have to tell us?
- [15:29]
Dr. Janet Todd
I tell her how desperate she is for money. They're also quite well written. Aphra can write a decent letter. She can do it properly. She says later, or at least as your pseudobiographer, when she's dead says, that she began writing stories when she was in Antwerp because she used her time to make up connections. And I suspect that one could mine the letters for suggestions of stories within them. But essentially they show a working woman, I think, and somebody who is perhaps as for, adept in that situation, but who wouldn't be? It's full of men who are all fighting with each other and they certainly want to bring her down.
- [16:11]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So given that money is an issue, do you think her financial circumstances are what inspired her career as a writer?
- [16:18]
Dr. Janet Todd
Oh, I think so. She writes because she has to. She obviously loves it. You don't write that amount if you don't like him, if you aren't extremely good at it. One of the interesting things I found about her is that in her prefaces and little bits that she writes for the publication of her plays, she starts by saying, oh, it's not such a big deal writing plays. When people track her for not being educated, not being a man, not having Latin. She works pretty easy writing plays, actually, that need much. I do it because I know I'm good at it and my plays are good and I need the money is how she goes on. But as you get to the end of her life and she's had a lot of success, real success, she's starting to say, I'm not writing just for money. I write to be celebrated. I write to be famous. I write to be honoured for the power of my writing. So she'd really changed from being a hack writer to. To being what she regards, I think, as a real poet. And in one of her very last poems, as she's translating, she puts a little bit into this translated poem and says, with Sappho and Arinda, and give my verses immortality. You do with the other two female poets who have some kind of status in the world. Let me be with them. I want that immortality. So I think she moved on. It's very interesting to think about how she was seen a lot of the time when it's just a matter of wanting good plays. Nobody cared whether she was a man or a woman. She had the extraordinary freedom to write exactly as she wanted to write because she has no antecedents, really. But when people want to attack her, they start attacking her as a woman and she starts to feel, I think, the burden of that. She comes back again and again to saying, you're attacking me because it's a female pen, when in fact I write the same as any man or better than any man.
- [18:25]
Aphra Behn
All I ask is the privilege for my masculine part, the poet in me, if any such. You will allow me to tread in those successful paths my predecessors have so long thrived in, to take those measures that both the ancient and modern writers have set me and by which they have pleased the world so well. If I must not because of my sex, have this freedom, but that you will usurp all to yourselves. I lay down my quill and you shall hear no more of me. No, not so much as to make comparisons, because I will be kinder to my brothers of the pen. Than they have been to a defenceless woman. For I am not content to write for a third day only. I value fame as much as if I had been born a hero. And if you rob me of that, I can retire from the ungrateful world and scorn its fickle favours.
- [19:22]
Dr. Janet Todd
She comes fully formed onto the stage. This is where I come back to. Where does she get her knowledge of the theatre like that? I think she'd got three players ready. Whether she wrote those since her announcement or when she got back in a few years, between the spying and starting at the theatre. They're all in the style of the time. They're tragi comedies, they're all about restoration. They're all full of this sort of rather worthiness of a king coming back into his own. A prince being discovered, Bo Wei realising that he should be a prince when he doesn't understand how to do it. They're all like that, but they understand stagecraft, they're good on that. And you can already see her creating clever female characters who know how to use their sexuality and know how to use their beauty. But they're not wild successes. But then later, as the court becomes very much more louche and wants rather more sexy, bawdy comedy than they did at the beginning, a bit sick of all this rather pompous playwriting. And the man of Mode by Etheridge, the one that really changes things. And she gets into the Mode very quickly. She tries it with the Dutch Lover, it doesn't quite work. And then comes the Roga, which is a success. I don't think it's her best play, but it's perhaps her easiest to take. And it's a bit like when you go back to Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. That's what everybody loves. Is it her best books? Probably not, but this is the one. It catches the moment. It does everything that the play should do or a novel. And it's got all the elements that she then plays with through the rest of her time and which people love. She's got the gay couple, which goes back to Shakespeare. The witty sparring of a man and a woman, where the woman often will win with her wit. But the man has, of course, always the power and hierarchy and masculinity. So there's a kind of equality that comes together of these. So you have that. You get the fools, you get the comic provincials, the Essex man, the Devonshire squire, people outside London. You get the remnants of the old puritans, whom she really hated and she always feared would come back and take over the country again. And they prate and they hypocritical. They're hiding a kind of lust and greed and so on, so forth. And then she's got some things that we find now quite difficult to take. That comes much clearer in her later plays. A kind of amorality that is really quite shocking. I don't think we're likely to be shocked by all the sex anymore, though. Obviously the 18th century was deeply shocked when they suppressed it, basically. But the amorality is quite weird to us. For example, the way she treats rape, really. A woman should avoid it. And if you're about to be raped, then play for time. It's not regarded with the horror that we would regard it and the man is not blamed for it. And that gets worse as time goes on, where you get some really unpleasant sort of rape scenes. Now, in some ways, I think that's partly because rapes were on the stage and they were passed. They were big tragic scenes. And I think Ben probably rightly saw that these were really ways of exposing and exploiting the female body. That's what they were there for. Here you see a woman in undress, and so perhaps for that reason she made them comic. And then in the later plays is a kind of amorality where the good people often fall by the wayside and the cunning, the shry and the tricksters, these are the ones who win. That, I think, now gives you quite a turn and you think, surely this is going to be right. It Surely this won't happen, but it does. But with the Rovers, she's still got a balance. I think you've still got this sort of witchy man who wins all. But he is made comic because he's drunk most of the time. He's both very attractive and masculine and dominating all that. He's also drunk and gets it wrong and it's ridiculous. But later that figure, I think, can become more threatening and then the whole plays become, I think, darker. So, yes, I think the rove is very good. The only thing is, one of the reasons why it's so good is that it doesn't have the darkness that goes into a lot of the plays of the time, because she sets it before the Restoration, when it's a simple. The Puritans are bad and they've got the kingdom and the king and his followers are good because we haven't seen what they're like. By the end of the 1670s and into the 80s, the court is seen as rather corrupt and bankrupt and, oh, Ludricious and unpleasant in certain ways and it's hard, I think, to make so attractive that cabinet for the redcish figure.
- [24:42]
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- [24:45]
Dr. Janet Todd
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- [25:12]
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- [26:50]
Dr. Janet Todd
What.
- [26:50]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
You'Re saying suggests that she's really challenging cultural and sexual standards and her work is often dazzlingly modern, you know, within its internal conflict. But I wonder how it was perceived in her lifetime. And whether you think we should see her writing as a kind of act of subversion.
- [27:11]
Dr. Janet Todd
She isn't modern. I think this is one thing that I would he keeps stressing. She really isn't. And the interesting thing is that she's speaking to us from an age that we can't really understand. We try and we normalize it and we insist on putting our views onto it, but in fact, it's really quite unknowable. This isn't the Regency where we do the same thing, which is a lot closer. This is really an unstable, very tricky time that has just killed a king and is about to depose another one. It's a very unstable, very odd time. And the notion of religion, that there's such a force in the country, is, again, something that we don't have. It's very hard for us to get hold of it. I don't think she would see herself as subverting, because her point, the lower time, is that she has the freedom to write as a man. She has exactly the same freedom that a man has, and her pen is the same as a man's pen. And as you move into the 18th century, that's absolutely not accepted. The idea in the 18th century is that men writing have certain subjects and women write in a very different way. They are purer creatures, they are preachers of sensibility and sentiment, and they write differently. The body is different and Ben doesn't have that. The mind is the same almost in her world, and she thinks that she can write as well as and the same as any man.
- [28:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And just thinking about this sexual licentiousness, I wondered about the connection to John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester. What should we make of that?
- [28:45]
Dr. Janet Todd
She admired aristocracy enormously. Coming from the lower orders, she also admired hierarchy. She thought that hierarchy was important. This is something we don't associate with feminism now, but she certainly did believe in the aristocrats from the court and so on. And so she was very pleased to be, I think, close to Rochester. And I think she was in that little circle of witty men and women. Now, what they got up to in bed, I don't know, but they certainly got up to a lot with their pen. And she wrote some things, like the disappointment, which she talks about male premature ejaculation, basically, which is not a subject that any woman will write about until the 20th century again. But she's doing it within this group and they've all writing poems about this. What is clever about her is that it's A French poem. Initially they go on with how the man recoups himself. Her man doesn't recoup himself. And it stops there.
- [29:45]
Aphra Behn
Nature's support without whose aid she can no human being give itself now wants the art to live faintness, its slackened nerves invade. In vain the enraged youth essayed to call its fleeting vigor back. No motion twill from motion take excess of love his love betrayed in vain he toils, in vain commands the insensible fell weeping in his hand Chloris, returning from the trance which love and soft desire had bred her timorous hand she gently laid or guided by design or chance upon that fabulous Priapas, that potent God as poets feign. But never did young shepherdess, gathering a fern upon the plain More nimbly draw her fingers back, Finding beneath the verdant leaves a snake.
- [30:47]
Dr. Janet Todd
So she plays around with things like that. And I think that she must have been very pleased to be in that circle. She wrote a poem called Ar Cabal fairly early on. Where people are hidden. And Rochester's not in that. He's above that. But quite a lot of people around him are probably involved in that. So you can spend all the time working out who's who. But she does move in a circle of people who are playing with writing. And I think they have a lot of writing games. They write poems to each other. They're verse epistles. And I think her love affairs or her flirtations or whatever. Are carried on also in poetry and writing. And some of the other poems, I suspect. Maybe even the famous one called Ver Clarinda. Which seems to be about a man is a woman or a man, or a lesbian or hermaphrodite or whatever. Or for sexuality of some sort. Again, that may be part of a group poem. And there are several like that. Or they may be poems that were part of her own life. The one thing I should say about her love life, the only one that is definite. Is that she does have a relationship with a rather unpleasant character, as far as one can see. A bisexual, violent, free thinking that is anti Christian at this point. Man called Hoyle. And several sources say that he kept her for some years and then they broke up. And there is, around the time when this appears to be happening. Quite a lot of poems that describe tyrannical masculinity. And perhaps almost a fascination for it as well. In the way that you get in female literature. He may be behind a very good lyric, which is in her one tragedy. Which is a very violent, nasty tragedy based on an earlier work called Abdul Aza. And this. She sees love as a tyrannical thing, and it's masculine, and that she is its victim. It's a very powerful vision.
- [32:46]
Aphra Behn
Love in fantastic triumph sat Whilst bleeding hearts around him flowed for whom fresh pains he did create and strange tyrannic power he showed. From thy bright eyes he took his fire which round about in sport he held but twas from mine he he took desire enough to undo the amorous world.
- [33:13]
Dr. Janet Todd
At the same time, of course, she has written that poem, she has made the whole thing. So you get always, I think, this complicated play whereby these men are powerful, they're amazing and rakish and witty and so on, but they're created by her, they're put into prosecution on the stage or with him, by a woman.
- [33:36]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
You mentioned that she was attacked because of her femininity, and I'd like to know a little bit more about that. Presumably much of it was to do with envy, and I want to know to what extent this stuck. Can we have any sense of how she received the criticisms?
- [33:53]
Dr. Janet Todd
Because of second wave feminism, which brought her back into light, really. Obviously, Virginia Woolf mentions her, but not really as a proper writer. She's come back with a sexy label and we look for attacks on her as a woman. I would say that. I don't know, I haven't counted them. But she's attacked just as much for being a royalist, for being of the party. This is the period where it seems to be a rerun of the whole Civil Wars. And this is when you get the two political parties starting, the Whigs and the Tories, and she is a firm Tory royalist as these shape up. And she's attacked for that. She's attacked for a lot of her political positions, as well as for her plays and her bawdiness. She's attacked for being a plagiarist, though, again, that's pretty silly, because everybody was taking other people's praise. That's the way you did. You took an old play and you remade it. But she was rather stupid herself, because the one where she was really attacked was for the Rover, which was based on an early play called Tommaso, and it's clearly based on it. Her play is much, much better because she takes little bits of it and it's honed and it's succinct and it's clever, but it's based on Tommaso. And when she's blamed for this, she says, rubbish, All I Took was the Sign of Angelica, which is where a prostitute hangs out a sign to get customers. She took hugely more than that. So why did she have to hide something that everybody knew was the case? And so she doesn't always do herself a favour and she does take umbrage when somebody attacks her plays and she quickly says it's because I'm a woman, whereas sometimes it may be for other reasons. And I think we very much jump on that. She was also very much a court poet. She was a panegyrist. She wrote to order, she was paid by the court to write big praise poems of various members of the royal family. And as things happened, and particularly at the end of her life, and she was so good. And again, she's not the kind of poetry that we read or want to read, nor do we care much about James ii, it has to be said. But she stuck with him and tried to help him, as it were. And at the end of her life, when the new regime is coming in and the propagandist from that new regime called Burnet is looking for help because his man William III is coming in. He's got an army, but he's not very popular. He doesn't know how to behave and people don't like him. And what does he do? He goes to Ben, who he doesn't like, who he's blamed for her bawdiness and her lack of femininity. And he goes to her and said, please write a poem for William that suggests you know, what power she had as a court poet.
- [36:55]
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- [37:25]
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- [38:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It'S so interesting, isn't it? Because you've got evidence like that or something like the pamphlet the false count 1682, which is defending the actions of the English monarchy or. But you also see in. It feels like in some of her works, like the Rover, that we're seeing a kind of mocking of the social wars of the time, or a critique of the political status quo and engaging with kind of themes of power and control and freedom. I mean, is her political position for hire or to what extent is this political propagandism?
- [38:34]
Dr. Janet Todd
It's a bit of both. She's never one thing. All those rake heroes. As I said, the Rover is drunk half the time, or more than half. Others are slightly unpleasant, although very attractive. Some there are the lucky chance the man is a prostitute himself. He prostitutes, shoots himself out so that he makes money to court his married mistress. It's all over the place. So everything is a bit complicated. Her royalism when she's writing these great poems is clear. But there are other places where she might not be. There are other works where you think, did she write down? Maybe she did. She was a pen. She was for hia. I doubt that she would have gone so completely over the other side ever. But at the end, had she gone on living, she would certainly have had to make her peace. She was already moving slightly. After all, James II has been deposed by the time she dies and she's already agreed, although she won't do it to William. She's written a poem to Mary, James daughter, because she is of the line, james II is still fighting for his crown. He's going to wage war back on England to try to get back. It never occurs to her to stay with him at that point she's calling herself an exile and she talks about him as her fallen leader in a way, so it's quite clear that she was having to move on. She's a court poet, she needs a court and that's all. He's true. And I always think she's. No position is absolute with Ben. Everything is performative, I think. And it's just extraordinary just how much I think she's post truth almost, you can put it like that, are no real certainties. And this is where you come to one of the things that I think is most striking, and that is nearly all early women proclaim their Christianity, proclaim their religiousness in some way or another. Ben is really clearly irreligious and she actually seems to doubt Christianity. She gets very excited when she reads a translation of a classical poem and learns about other ways of looking. That people are made of atoms and when they die, they're completely dead. There is no afterlife. And she buys into that clearly, big time, to such an extent that she shocks the man to whom she sends a poem about, this poem that she's read. So she needs to be, however, a little careful. This is still a religious age. So whatever she does, it seems to me that she would leave a way to get out of it. Whatever she serves, there is a shadow of that truth.
- [41:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
You've already started to answer this question. But how much of her public Persona was created by others? And how much do you think was self fashioned then?
- [41:28]
Dr. Janet Todd
Well, I think most of it's self fashioned. I think she's of the theatre at the end of her life. She wrote a play, the first play that was set in America, the widow rancher. At the center of this is something completely unlike Ben in that she's illiterate and she was an indentured servant who married her master. But she's jolly and gregarious and loving and she goes off to the man she wants. She's in charge and she's in charge of her big punch bowl and so on. It's something of an image of the widow then, I think, as well as the widow rancher at the same time it isn't. Because even the word rancher is a word taken from the Protestant side or the puritanical side in the civil wars. So nothing is clear. But there are images, I think. I think she self fashions herself, but then other people fashion her as incredibly bawdy. This sort of over sexy woman who seems to be putting herself about everywhere. It seems extremely unlikely, especially towards the end of her life when she talks a lot about pain. She is not well off by this point though I think she's better off than she says sometimes. But she has a lot of physical pain towards the end. She has some kind of arthritic condition. And at one point she says, I've been dying this mass 12 months and she talks about the problem. So while she's being still created as this image of her, a very sexy, louche and lewd writer, she's probably a scribbling woman in considerable pain. But that's not an image she wishes to give. And then when she dies, people exploit the image of the sexy woman. And I think a fair number of works are foisted on her that she probably did not write.
- [43:21]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Finally then, Dr. Janet Todd, what would you say is Ben's defining legacy?
- [43:27]
Dr. Janet Todd
Just that she is. That she exists and that she is inimitable. There is absolutely no one like her and that she's an incredible genius. We've already touched a few things. Okay. The Rover, I think one of her best poise is a patient, fancy and extraordinarily dark play that is incredibly funny. Dorothy Chance is a very good play. Some of the poems or Anoka because we're interested in slavery or Anoko. But the fair Jilt, again, extraordinary work of female manipulation of a situation both of religion and of hierarchies and so on. And then that big long thing called Love Letters between Noblemen and His Sister where she writes about politics and sex as intertwined and which is being written as the political events that's based on are actually happening. And far more, more than I can say just like that. I think that range of hers and the fact that she is such an extraordinary woman at a time of extraordinary women, I think there can be nobody like her. I spent quite a long time over quite a long life with a lot of early women. They weren't very well known. When I started my teaching life, everybody was really very interested. Now they've come up and I think it's wonderful. But if I had to say who was the greatest in terms of actual genius of writing, I would say that Aphrod Ben and Jane Austen are there and there's nobody comes up to them. And I only wish that Jane Austen had been able to read Aphrodite.
- [45:06]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, thank you for this wonderful introduction to her. And clearly we all need to read a lot more of her and see a lot more. I've only ever seen the Rover. I would love to see more of her plays performed and I've got a lot more to read as well. Thank you so much for this really insightful introduction.
- [45:24]
Dr. Janet Todd
Thank you, Susanna. It's been great.
- [45:27]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors from History.
- [45:40]
Dr. Janet Todd
Hit.
- [45:51]
Holly Fry
Your old or broken phone can let you down when you need it most. But at Verizon, trade in any old phone from our top brands and get the most for it up to $2,000 in value for an amazing new iPhone 16 Pro with Apple Intelligence and a new line on my plan and iPad and apple watch series 10. That's like a three for one. And you can get it on any plan at Verizon. Trade in your old phone for a brand new iPhone 16 Pro, iPad and Apple Watch. The other guys won't give you that. Visit verizon.com today. Additional terms apply. Service plan required for Apple Watch and iPad. Up to $2,000. Value based on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.
- [46:22]
Dr. Janet Todd
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- [46:44]
Holly Fry
I don't have kids.
- [46:45]
Dr. Janet Todd
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