Retraining the Virtuoso’s Gaze: Behn’s Emperor of the Moon, The Royal Society, and the Spectacles of Science and Politics

Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon (1687), so often marginalized in the wealth of recent criticism of her later career, is a savvy deconstruction of what the author calls—adapting Paula Backscheider’s account of Restoration politics—a culture of spectacle in the post-Plot years, in which the feverish political speculations of Whigs and Tories, popular natural philosophy, and “non-rational” entertainments like opera and comedia dell’arte were inextricably enmeshed. A satiric restaging of John Dryden’s Albion and Albanius, Behn’s farce deliberately stimulates her audience’s uncritical wonder in order to retrain it, a strategy shares with the Musaeum Regalis Societatis.