Enlightened Female Homoeroticism and Social Transformation in Catharine Trotter's Agnes de Castro

Tell me, lovely loving PairWhy so kind, and so severe?Why so careless of our Care,Only to your selves so dear?By this cunning change of Hearts,You the Power of Love controul;While the Boy's Deluded DartsCan arrive at neither Soul.

- Edmund Waller

Although written forty-one years prior to Catherine Trotter's Agnes de Castro; A Tragedy (1696), the above excerpt from Edmund Waller's "On the Friendship betwixt two Ladies" encapsulates both the plot and themes of Trotter's play. On one level, Waller's poem may be read as a speaker's objection to the close yet platonic friendship between two women that precludes either from accepting "the boy's" love. On another level, however, the "lovely loving" pair's "cunning" exchange of "hearts" may be read as indicative of a sexual intimacy that ensures the boy's "deluded" dart is unable to penetrate either woman's "soul." Like Waller's playful poem, Trotter's first play centers on the loving "friendship betwixt two Ladies," but it illuminates even further a cultural awareness of the erotic possibilities attached to female relationships in Restoration England. In the decidedly phallocentric social milieu of Agnes de Castro, we find Constantia and Agnes who have successfully carved out for themselves a love more "dear . . . than Kindred, Country" (43).¹ It is a relationship characterized by homoerotic desire and imbued with a permanence and rationality not typically associated with women in this period.

That Trotter would emphasize and privilege the bond between her heroines is surprising given that Agnes de Castro retells the famous fourteenth-century love story of King Pedro of Portugal and Inés Perez de Castro.² Much of this shifted emphasis can be attributed to Trotter's source, Aphra Behn's 1688 novella, Agnes de Castro, or the Force of Generous Love. And indeed, as Kendall points out, "Trotter borrowed whole sections of Behn's work verbatim" ("From" 11). Reading Trotter's play alongside Behn's novella quickly reveals Trotter's debt as the sentimental devotion between the two friends, Agnes' initial denial of love for Prince Pedro, the jealousy of Elvira and Alvaro, and the King's hatefulness towards Agnes all derive from Behn's work.

Still, at the level of plot and theme, Trotter diverges from Behn in important ways that serve to elevate and transform the relationship between the two women. In Behn, Constantia doubts Agnes' loyalty and dies of grief, after which Agnes declares her love for Pedro and secretly marries him, thus "love . . . triumphed over friendship" (252). Alvaro then assassinates Agnes with the King's approval and in retaliation Pedro begins a civil war. In Trotter's reworking of Behn, Constantia only briefly doubts Agnes, and she dies not of grief but is murdered mistakenly by Elvira. Trotter's Agnes dies also, not by a state-sanctioned assassination however, but by accident when Alvaro stabs her in his attempt to kill the Prince (Pedro).³ The most telling way in which Trotter moves beyond Behn (and actual history) is that a relationship between Agnes and the Prince never occurs. While these changes maximize dramatic action, they also throw in sharp relief the intimate bond between Constantia and Agnes, transforming that bond from a strong friendship plagued by doubt to one of both homoerotic desire and moral transcendence. The women's love becomes that which all other relationships in the play are set against in sharp relief.

The scholarship on Agnes de Castro most often locates Trotter's play within the romantic friendship literary tradition.⁴ Critics tend to place it along a platonic-erotic continuum relative to whether they read the highly sentimentalized language and romantic tropes employed as conventional expressions of platonic love or as a coded rhetoric of same-sex desire. Most scholars focus upon the play's gynocentric morality while assuming the heterosexual desire of its heroines. For example, Margarete Rubik reads the women's friendship, and the play on the whole, as an "unsentimental" aim at "moral edification" (67-8), while Jacqueline Pearson notes how...