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Retraining the Virtuoso’s Gaze: Behn’s Emperor of the Moon, The Royal Society, and the Spectacles of Science and Politics
- Eighteenth-Century Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 41, Number 4, Summer 2008
- pp. 481-506
- 10.1353/ecs.0.0007
- Article
- Additional Information
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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.