Oroonoko, the Rover and Other Works Read Online

Oroonoko, the Rover and Other Works (Penguin Classics)

OROONOKO, THE ROVER AND OTHER WORKS

Little is known about APHRA BEHN’S early life, from what religious and social background she came or how she obtained her extraordinary education, which allowed her to translate from French with ease, to allude frequently to the classics and to take part in the philosophical, political and scientific debates of her time. She was probably born around 1640 in Kent and in the early 1660s claims to have visited the British colony of Surinam, which forms the setting of her best-known short story, Oroonoko, or the History of the Royal Slave (1688), an early discussion of slavery and innate nobility. In 1666 she was employed by Charles II’s government as a spy in Antwerp during the Dutch wars; after she received no payment, she turned to literature for a living, writing poetry, political propaganda for the Tory party and numerous short stories, as well as adapting or composing at least nineteen stage plays, many of them extremely successful, such as the comic depiction of Cavalier exile, The Rover (1677), and an early farce, The Emperor of the Moon (1687). During the political upheavals of the end of Charles II’s reign and the beginning of James II’s she wrote her great amorous and political novel, Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister, which both satirizes and comments on the turbulent times. She had strong sympathy for Roman Catholicism but was also drawn to the sceptical and materialist philosophy of the libertines with whom she associated. Virginia Woolf acclaimed her as the first English woman to earn her living by writing, declaring, ‘All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.’

JANET TODD is Francis Hutcheson Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow and an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. Her publications include Women’s Friendship in Literature (1980), Feminist Literary History (1988), The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660–1800 (1989), and three biographies, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (1996), Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (2000) and Rebel Daughters: Rebellion in Ireland 1798 (2003). She is the general editor of the Cambridge edition of Jane Austen’s works.

APHRA BEHN

OROONOKO,
THE ROVER AND
OTHER WORKS

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES
BY JANET TODD

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Published by the Penguin Group

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This edition first published 1992

Reprinted with corrections and a new Chronology 2003

27

Copyright © Janet Todd, 1992, 2003

All rights reserved

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-195887-3

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHRONOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SECONDARY WORKS

NOTE ON THE TEXT

PROSE

THE FAIR JILT

OROONOKO

LOVE-LETTERS TO A GENTLEMAN

PLAYS

THE ROVER

THE WIDOW RANTER

POEMS

Love Armed

Epilogue to Sir Patient Fancy

The Disappointment

To Mr Creech (under the Name of Daphnis) on his Excellent Translation of Lucretius

A Letter to Mr Creech at Oxford, Written in the last great Frost

Song: On her Loving Two Equally

To the fair Clarinda, who made Love to me, imagined more than Woman

On Desire: a Pindaric

A Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to thank most warmly Elizabeth Spearing and Virginia Crompton for their generous help in the preparation of this volume.

CHRONOLOGY

1640? Aphra Johnson probably born in Canterbury, Kent, the daughter of a barber or inn-keeper, Bartholomew Johnson, and his wife Elizabeth.

1642 Outbreak of the Civil War and closing of the theatres.

1649 Charles I beheaded.

1651 Charles II with mainly Scottish troops defeated by Cromwell at the Battle of Worcester; Charles escaped and en route to the Continent hid in oak tree. Lord Willoughby established a colony in Surinam; encouraged settlers, imported slaves.

1653 Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector (died 1658).

1660 Charles II restored to the throne. He founded two theatre companies.

1663/4 She probably visited Willoughby’s colony and encountered William Scot, son of a regicide.

Probably began her play The Young King.

c. 1664 Probably married a London merchant of German extraction; he died or disappeared soon after. By 1666 is signing her name ‘A. Behn.’

December: outbreak of the Great Plague in London.

1665 John Dryden and Sir Robert Howard’s The Indian Emperor produced.

1666 Second Dutch War between England and Holland. July: sent to Antwerp to obtain information about the Dutch from Scot. In debt by late 1666; Scot in a Dutch prison.

2 September: start of the Great Fire of London.

1667 Returned to England, heavily in debt, and may briefly have been imprisoned.

John Milton published Paradise Lost.

1670 First play, The Forc’d Marriage, staged by the Duke’s Company; published the following year.

1671 The Amorous Prince performed and published; published poem to a fellow-playwright Edward Howard.

1672 Published Covent Garden Drolery, a collection of theatrical material, including several poems.

Royal African Company established. Over the next years it shipped thousands of slaves to Barbados in particular.

1673 The Dutch Lover, third performed play, published with an angry preface complaining she had been attacked because she was a woman.

1674–5 May have been kept by a lover John Hoyle, a bisexual lawyer, who seems to have been important to her over several years.

1676 Only tragedy, Abdelazer, performed, based on an earlier play; published the following year. The Town-Fopp, also based on an earlier play, performed.

1677 Another adaptation, The Debauchee, performed. Then The Rover, her most successful play, based on Thomas Killigrew’s Thomaso, or the Wanderer (1664); published anonymously at first, later under her name.

1678 Sir Patient Fancy, one of her bawdiest plays, performed; published with a preface answering charges of plagiarism and bawdiness.

Popish Plot, a largely imaginary plot by which Roman Catholics were to oust Charles II.

1679 The Feign’d Curtizans performed with a prologue making clear her court sympathies; dedicated to Nell Gwyn, Charles II’s mistress. The Young King possibly produced.

1680 Dryden published her poem ‘A Paraphrase on Oenone to Paris’ in his Ovid’s Epistles.

The Revenge, another adaptation, performed. The Second Part of the Rover performed with politically committed prologue; published the following year. Death of the poet the Earl of Rochester, for whom she wrote an elegy.

1681 Song. To a New Scotch Tune published, part of the government’s propaganda against the Whigs. The False Count performed; published the following year. She was described as disputing for ‘the Royal Cause’. Adaptation The Roundheads, her most extreme Tory play, performed; published the following year.

1681–2 Exclusion Crisis: Parliament Whigs tried to exclude Roman Catholic James from the throne. Charles II opposed them. The crisis brought about the creation of the first political parties, Whigs and Tories.

1682 The City-Heiress performed, again including a satire of Whigs. Wrote poem to the aristocratic poet Anne Wharton who had praised her Rochester elegy. Published prologue to Like Father, Like Son, a lost play, and prologue and epilogue to Romulus and Hersilia; the epilogue to the latter referred ungraciously to Charles II’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, and notices for the arrest of Behn and the actress speaking the lines were issued. If they were incarcerated, they seem to have been speedily freed.

Merging of the two dramatic companies, renamed the United Company; fewer new plays now required.

1683 The Young King published.