Of Love and War: The Political Voice in the Early Plays of Aphra Behn (review)

In Of Love and War: The Political Voice in the Early Plays of Aphra Behn, Judy A. Hayden asserts the following claims. She argues that we should not “view [Aphra Behn’s] plays solely as feminist” (p. 13), that Behn is a staunch royalist, and that this political allegiance is apparent not only in the plays written subsequent to the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis but also in her earliest works, in particular her first five plays: the romantic tragicomedies The Young King (1683), The Forc’d Marrriage (1670), The Amorous Prince (1671), The Dutch Lover (1673), and the tragedy Abdelazer (1676). As Hayden states, “Behn does not abruptly board the political bandwagon during the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis” (pp. 4–5). Her early plays then, like her later ones, “consistently express political content” and, as such, must be read “in the context of plays by her male colleagues” (pp. 5, 16). Accepting Hayden’s claims as true is not difficult; conceding, however, that they were contested to begin with is. That Hayden insists on presenting her argument as a corrective to previous “misreadings” of Behn’s early career as a playwright compromises what would otherwise prove an intriguing study of the roots of Behn’s historic foray into the theatrical and political arena (p. 13).

It is true that other critics take a more nuanced stand on both Behn’s feminism and her royalism in these early plays than Hayden does. Most notably, Derek Hughes in The Theatre of Aphra Behn (2001) repeatedly returns to Behn’s atypical use of “gendered space and boundaries,” but he does so in the context of “discourag[ing] the habit of reading the plays simply as ideological texts” rather than “demonstrat[ing] her supreme skill . . . in using all the resources of meaning offered by the theatre.”¹ To make the case for Behn’s skill is not to make the case against her political content. Indeed, he states quite flatly that the typical drama of the period—one which celebrates the restoration of the king while cautioning the king against promiscuity—is “the kind of drama which Behn wrote in her early years” (p. 15). Nor do Susan Owen or Jane Spencer, two critics Hayden singles out for misreading Behn’s feminism, deny the politicality of her early work. Owen may caution against reading Behn as a “fanatic” or “Tory ideologue,” but she posits first that “Behn was a staunch Tory at the time when Toryism first developed.”² Similarly, Spencer chooses to focus on the politics of Behn’s plays at the time of the Exclusion Crisis, but choosing to focus one’s argument is not the same thing as “wholly failing to notice the politicality of [Behn’s] early plays” (Hayden, p. 2).³ Rather, these critics operate within another difficult-to-contest claim: “The relationship of politics and sexual politics in Behn’s drama is complex” (Owen, p. 79).

To be fair, I do not think Hayden would refute that this relationship is complex. Her introductory chapter, in fact, briefly discusses Behn’s use of cross-dressing in her plays, suggesting not only its potential to represent sexual transgression but also sexual submission. One must not only don the costume of the male, her argument suggests, but also take it off again. Which gesture should we read as more significant? Behn’s early plays often conclude with women’s return to their proper attire and by implication proper place. They follow the typical inheritance plot, where the usurped king is restored to power, often at the expense of the female’s temporary reign. As Hayden argues, Abdelazer makes this point most directly; the queen is killed by her lover, and her son is subsequently restored to the throne. These early works manifest a clear pattern: “The natural social and gender order of the patriarchal hierarchy is re-established and...