SYMHC Classics: Aphra Behn

This 2017 episode covers the life of Aphra Behn, but there's really not a lot concretely known about the her. In addition to being a spy, was a dramatist, poet, novelist, translator, and the first woman in English literature known to have made her living as a writer.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Before we get into Today's Saturday Classic, just
a quick reminder we have a live streaming event coming
up on March tenth. You can find all the information
about that and buy tickets at looped live dot com.
We also have the ticket link pinned up at the
top of our Facebook and our Twitter. We are super

(00:22):
excited and hope folks will join us for that. Okay,
coming up, we have an episode on Mary Sydney, Herbert,
Countess of Penbroke, who is the first woman known to
have published an English language play that happened in and
as we were recording this forthcoming episode, I had a
moment where I thought, when did Afriban do this same thing?

(00:46):
The answer is almost eighty entire years later, Mary Sydney,
your title is safe. Um. Aside from that, Afraban's life
of spy work and writing was a pretty exciting one.
So we're bringing that episode out as Today's Saturday Classic.
It originally came out on March man Joy, Welcome to

(01:10):
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Today's podcast is a request
from many listeners once again, and they include Georgia, Bree, Laura, Anna, Lauren,

(01:34):
and Tabitha, who asked for it after I had actually
already started working on it, and I'm sure many other people.
It moved up to the top of the list after
sort of tangentially coming up in our Ira Frederick Aldridge episode.
Aldridge played a character called Orinoco in The Revolt of Surinam,

(01:54):
and that was an adaptation of the play Orinoco by
Thomas Southern. And that was an adaptation of Orinoco, a
short work of fiction by today's subject Afraban. There is
really not a lot that's conclusively known about the life
of Afraban, who, in addition to being a spy, was
also a dramatist and a poet, a novelist, a translator,

(02:17):
and probably the first woman in English literature known to
have made a living as a writer. Even though she
was prolific in her work, her gender meant that the
sorts of institutions that were mostly keeping up with the
details of writers and artists lives at the time did
not really include her. Since she wasn't an aristocrat, there
was no official family history, and shouldn't really keep a

(02:41):
diary or write a memoir or or corresponding a lot
of letters, at least not many of that actually survived.
And yet, even though there is so little concrete information,
she's the subject of multiple biographies, and some of them
are quite lengthy. Uh. With so little actual documentation to
go on, a lot of these sort of pick up
tiny pieces of the historical record and then try to

(03:03):
glean details of her life from her written work. And
this means that a lot of biographies about her are
very heavily subject to interpretation. They tend to be influenced
a lot by the biographers focus and their interpretation of
her body of work. Uh. And in some cases, if
you've read the words, probably and may have, you've read
like a quarter of the thing at least. So we're

(03:27):
gonna do our best on this one. I feel like
you're describing some sort of Afroban biographical mad libs kind
of is. I mean, every biography is influenced by the biographer,
even if you're trying, you know, even if the biographer
is trying really hard to have a very objective stance.
This is particularly true with Afriban because there's so much

(03:49):
that's like trying to piece together a teeny little puzzle
with itty bitty pieces to make a whole life out
of yeah, with big gaps in the puzzle, So it
won't s eries you. Having listened to that introduction, that
there is very very little known about Afra Ban's early life,
and most of what we do know has been reconstructed,
as Tracy just mentioned, by following the threads available, a

(04:13):
lot of which are other people's claims about her, and
then the logical conclusions are drawn from there. So it
is generally agreed that she was born sometime around sixteen forty,
probably to a family who lived in why A village
in Kent, England. Colonel Thomas Culpepper claimed that Afraban's mother
was his wet nurse and her father was reported to

(04:35):
be a barber, so this makes the most likely candidates
for her parents, Bartholomew and Elizabeth Johnson. They had a daughter,
e Free spelled e A F F R E y,
and that was one of the many many variations in
spelling for the name Afra at the time. This young
e Free was baptized on December fourteenth of sixteen forty,

(04:56):
although some sources report that as the day of her birth.
With her mother as his wet nurse, Afra would have
been considered Thomas culpeppers foster sister, and the cool Peppers
were a prominent family in the area. This connection to
the cool Peppers would have given Afra access to far
more educational opportunities and a wider social circle than she

(05:17):
would have had as just the daughter of a wet
nurse in a barber Although we don't have a lot
of details about the specifics of her childhood and her adolescence,
we do know that Afra grew up during a period
of huge chaos and change. The English Civil Wars began
when she was still a toddler, and this is a
series of wars that obviously could be at least a

(05:39):
whole episode all by themselves. So very briefly, the English
Civil Wars also involved Scotland and Ireland, and they grew
out of a conflict between King Charles the First and
parliament about who ultimately had control over the military. Following
an uprising in Ireland. During the English Civil Wars, the
Parliamentarians faced off against the Royalists in a series of

(06:02):
conflicts that ultimately led to a victory for the parliamentarians,
the execution of Charles the First in sixteen forty nine,
the exile of his son Charles the Second, and the
political rise of Oliver Cromwell, first Lord Protector of the
Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. The total death toll
in England was almost two hundred thousand. Obviously, that is

(06:26):
that it was like the tiniest possible description of the
English Civil Wars. During the interregnum years that followed from
sixteen forty nine to sixteen sixty, the nation was no
longer actively at war with itself, but it still had
its fair share of strife. Many of those in Parliament
were Puritans, and they started enforcing Puritans standards and views

(06:48):
for the rest of the nation. Cromwell himself had a
reputation as a radical and a fanatic, and his actions
during the Civil Wars had included, among other things, a
massacre in Ireland. Throughout the interregnum, royalists continued to work
toward the goal of restoring the monarchy. There's some speculation
that toward the end of the interregnum, Ben was already

(07:11):
beginning her career as a spy by secretly carrying messages
for Royalist organizations. She would have been connected to these
organizations once again through Thomas Culpepper. Oliver Cromwell died in
sixteen fifty eight, and by sixteen sixty one Charles the
Second had been returned to the throne. So by the
time Aframan hit her twenties, England had already been through

(07:33):
a lot, and with Charles the Second's return, English life
dramatically changed once again and a lot of circles. The
restoration was met with a huge, hedonistic, fairly drunken party,
and it was in this environment that Afra Bend really
flourished a whole lot more than during the more puritanical

(07:55):
interregnum years. In sixteen sixty three, when she was in
her early twenties, Ben traveled to Suriname, and this would
later become the setting for her work of fiction Orinocco.
Orinocco is often discussed as part of Ben's earlier work
because her visit there would have happened, as we just said,
when she was in her early twenties, but in reality

(08:15):
this piece wasn't published until shortly before her death. Orinocco
tells the story of a prince from the Gold Coast
and what is now Ghana, who's invited aboard a ship
and then enslaved before being sold in Surinam, and that's
where he meets the book's narrator. This narrator is an
english woman who had come to Suriname with her father,
but he died during the sea voyage. Some biographies actually

(08:38):
take this plot point from Orinoco and apply it to
Ben's real life father, although he had likely died by
the early mid sixteen sixties. It's completely unclear whether this
aspect of Orinoco is supposed to be autobiographical. There's also
debate about whether the book's narrator is supposed to be
a stand in for Ben herself, and that part similarly faggy.

(09:00):
But since Orinocco does contain a lot of detail about
Surinam and people who really lived there in the sixteen sixties,
it's easy to think of it as evidence that the
trip to Surinam really did happen, regardless of whether the
story it tells is supposed to be autobiographical. Also, although
Ben's own views on slavery are pretty hard to tease

(09:20):
out from her writing, Orinocco itself was considered an abolitionist
work of fiction in both the eighteenth and nineteen centuries. Yeah,
there are a lot of attempts to try to figure
out what her racial views were based on the content
of her writing, and the most logical conclusion is that
she had a lot of the prejudices that we're sort

(09:43):
of ingrained in society, especially English society at the time. Um.
And it's like when you read Orinocco, it a lot
of it is very sympathetic to the people who are
enslaved in the book, but it's it's sort of a
most like proto abolitionist text, like it was definitely read

(10:04):
that way for a couple of centuries. But there's also
a lot of stuff in it that is, you know,
obviously laced with implicit biases and racism because it was
written in the six century, even though Orinoco itself as
a book didn't come out until much later. Afroman was

(10:25):
writing while in Surinam, including an early draft of a
play called The Young King or a Mistake. Like several
of Ben's other plays, it's a tragic comedy and it
tells the story of a royal brother and sister brought
up in opposite roles because of a prophecy. The boy
is quote kept from his infancy and a castle on
a lake, ignorant of his quality and of all the world,

(10:47):
besides never having seen any humane things save only his
old tutor, while the girl is quote bred up in
war and designed to reign in place of her brother.
It plays around with gender and ideas of masculinity and femininity,
which is a hallmark of Ben's later work as well.

(11:08):
Ben's trip to Surinam wasn't particularly long. She returned to
England in sixteen sixty four, and not long after she
was given an audience with King Charles the Second to
report on what she had witnessed there. It's not completely
clear whether the king saw this as part of her
spy career, but she definitely spied for him later, and
we're going to start talking about that, but first we're

(11:29):
going to pause and have a little bit of a
sponsor break. About the same time as she returned from
Surinam in sixteen sixty four, after Ben married a man
whose name was as you would conclude Ben or maybe
being described as quote a merchant of Dutch extraction. It

(11:53):
might have been the Great plague of London which struck
in sixteen sixty five that killed Ben's husband. He was
dead by sixteen six six. On top of the plague,
England was once again at war. The Second Anglo Dutch
War began on March fourth of sixteen sixty and this
was part of a series of four wars between England
and the Dutch Republic and their allies. The first three

(12:16):
were largely trade wars, but the fourth was in response
to Dutch involvement in the American Revolutionary War. Regardless of
whether Ben had officially been doing spy work during the
Interregnum or in Surinam, she definitely was during the Second
Anglo Dutch War because in the code name Astraea. Ultimately
reporting to the Secretary of State, Lord Henry Bennett, she

(12:38):
was assigned to travel to Antwerp, which is now in
Belgium but was then in Spanish Netherlands to meet with
William Scott. Scott's father, Thomas, had been the man who
signed Charles the first death warrant, for which he was
later executed, and Scott himself was essentially acting as a
double agent. He was gathering intelligence for England while also

(13:00):
informing on the English to the Dutch armed with bribe
money and the promise of a pardon. Ben's mission was
to figure out whether Scott had worthwhile intelligence, and if
he did, to get that intelligence back to England. Ben
was likely chosen for this mission because she and Scott
had met in Surinam. They had a bit of a

(13:20):
flirtation there. In theory, this flirtation was nothing serious enough
to jeopardize Ben's judgment, but it was enough of an
existing connection to Scott to sort of soften him up
a little. She was given passage to Spanish Flanders and
enough money to take care of her own needs during
a short stay there. Her brother, who was in the military,

(13:40):
was temporary temporarily released from service to act as her chaperone.
Apparently Lord Bennett wasn't wasn't aware that she was a widow,
which would have given her a little more autonomy than
an unmarried woman would have had. She received her money
and instructions in July of sixteen sixty six, and she
was an antwerp by August, but her time as a

(14:01):
spy was not very successful. She flirted with Scott until
he finally agreed to pass her information, but then he
got her to agree to leave Antwerp and meet him
in the Hague. And if she did that, not only
was she very likely to be captured, but she was
also sure to run out of her already dwindling supply
of money. And this started the pair of them on

(14:22):
a cycle of back and forth, with him getting her
to agree to leave Flanders, and then her pulling back
on that agreement and another hiccup. This back and forth
between Scott and Ben also got tangled up with one
William Corney, a merchant from Amsterdam who was also passing
intelligence back to Lord Bennett. Before long, the three of

(14:42):
them were just continually trying to undermine one another in
this convoluted backstabby triangle, word of which spread to London
and started to threaten Ben's reputation. The idea that Ben's
previous flirtation with Scott wouldn't be a threat to her
also didn't really pan out, as Corny became a greater
threats to both of them. They started to rely on

(15:03):
and confide in each other in a way that didn't
really leave Ben a whole lot of power to try
to get the man to give her information. Eventually, Scott
fled Flanders out of fear that Corny was going to
kill him, and once he was gone, Corny focused all
his attention on Ben, tailing her and forging reports in
her name to discredit her. Scott wound up in prison,

(15:26):
and although he did keep writing to Ben, he couldn't
learn much while behind bars, and she had no way
to pay for a passage home. When Scott was released
from prison in sixteen sixty seven, he was also banished,
leaving Ben with no way of getting whatever intelligence he
still had. Throughout all of this, Ben was using ciphers

(15:46):
and codes to send information back to London, but very
little of this information was of actual value. She's often
reported as having passed on a warning of the Dutch
raid on Medway, which took place in June of sixteen
sixty seven. This raid was a devastating blow to the
British Navy, and while this is technically true, she did

(16:06):
send that information, other agents also delivered the same information
and none of it was heated, not even when another
agent gave Lord Bennett a very specific warning about the
upcoming attack after Ben had already returned to London, and
getting back to London required Ben to beg for the
funds to do so She'd been so low on money

(16:28):
that she'd handed over all her possessions to her innkeeper
as collateral so she wouldn't lose her lodgings along with
everything else. Although she was able to get a couple
of loans to pay off the worst of her debts,
it was only after numerous letters and lots of borrowing
that she was able to get someone to pay for
her passage. And it's unclear who that was, but it

(16:49):
wasn't the administration that had sent her to Antwerp in
the first place. Even though her spy life was not
very effective, it still was pretty crummy that she was
sent on this mission with no way of getting back
home out of hostile territory. According to most accounts, after
Afroban's returned to England in the spring of sixteen sixty seven,

(17:10):
she wound up in a debtor's prison. There's very little
detail on this. She had written multiple letters to the
people who had recruited her into the life of espionage
and to other contacts that she had, all in an
effort to pay off her debts, and it seems as
though she either eventually did get someone to loan her
enough money to get out of prison or she made

(17:30):
arrangement arrangements to pay her debt off gradually as she
was able to earn enough money to do so, And
the way that she earned that money was by writing,
and we're going to talk about that after we once
again paused for a quick sponsor break. After she got
out of the debtor's prison, Afra Bean was able to

(17:53):
make something of a fresh start for herself. By the
summer of sixteen sixty seven. London had recently been through
both the Great Plague and the Great Fire, and although
the raid on Medway had taken place at the mouth
of the Thames River and not up in the city,
it had destroyed much of the British naval fleet and
block hated the city, which left the already shaken people

(18:15):
living there feeling particularly defenseless. So in a fairly dispirited
and anxious city, Ben was able to quietly make a
space for herself, renting lodgings and working as a copyist,
probably copying the sorts of material people would want handled
with more discretion than a commercial printing press could allow.

(18:35):
While copying definitely would have helped her make ends meet,
it was not really enough to live comfortably, and soon
Ben was also writing and publishing poems. She adopted her
code name Austraya for a pseudonym for a lot of
her written work as it was published at the time.
Fortunately for Ben, King Charles the second loved the theater,

(18:56):
and he chartered to theater companies known as the King's
Company the Duke's Company. The King's Company had the rights
to a lot of existing plays, including works by Shakespeare
and Ben Johnson. The Duke's Company didn't, meaning there was
a market for newly written plays. The plays themselves were
often Body and Blue, with women allowed on the stage

(19:17):
rather than having female roles played by men. It's unclear
exactly how Ben first got her foot in the door
as a playwright through her spy work. She did no
Thomas Killigrew, who was head of the King's Men and
later the Master of the Revels, but it was the
Duke's Company and not the King's where her work first debuted.
Of her first play to be staged there was The

(19:39):
First Marriage or the Jealous Bridegroom, a tragic comedy, which
opened on septem Ben was much savvier about playwriting as
an occupation than she had been about her espionage career.
She wanted to make sure she kept the rights to
her plays, and she wanted them to be published, which
would give her an additional source of income to her

(20:00):
plays were also published during her lifetime, although the first
printing of The Forced Marriage, which was probably rushed to
follow the place performance and take advantage of that publicity,
was full of errors, herosism, things printed and completely the
wrong order. It was kind of a mess. Her next
play to be staged opened just a few months later,

(20:22):
and it was named The Amorous Prince, and like its
name suggests, it's full of seductions and it plays around
a lot with gender and cross dressing in a way
that would become a frequent theme in Ben's works. Ben
would go on to write nineteen plays, including the two parts.
The Rover was seventeen of them stage during her lifetime.

(20:42):
She wasn't the first woman to write for the British stage,
but the idea of a woman playwright was still rare
enough that her position was relatively unique, and she got
a lot of criticism for the more risky content of
her work, which was full of innuendo and double entendres.
This was particular literally true since in both her plays
and her novels, she seemed to blur the line between

(21:05):
her narrator and herself. Even so, she pointed to similarities
in the work of her contemporaries and predecessors as evidence
that it would not have been frowned upon if she
were a man. As the theater gradually fell a little
bit more out of favor in the sixteen eighties, Ben
shifted her focus to writing novels, and she penned sixteen

(21:25):
works of fiction, all of which have narrators who were
either obviously female or have no specified gender. She also
continued to write poetry throughout her career, and although some
of her poems were incorporated into her plays and fiction,
many of them were meant for a smaller audience. They
often contained inside references to what was going on in

(21:45):
London society and politics, sometimes with names changed, but otherwise
easily recognizable to people in the nome. Some of her
poems were essentially social and political commentary, rendered in verse
and only really understandable if you knew the context of
what was going on around her. Much of Ben's work,
especially in poetry, was romantic and sensual, and even erotic,

(22:09):
with both women and men as the subjects of her
love poems, some of which also played with themes of
androgyny and gender fluidity. The relationships depicted in her dramas
are all over the map in terms of gender and
sexual orientation. In terms of her personal life, her most
public relationship during her time as a writer was with

(22:29):
John Hoyle, whose own life with threat was threaded through
with lots and lots of scandal, including his relationships with
other men. As Ben's writing career became more lucrative, she
became increasingly more active in London society. She developed a
reputation for being witty and charismatic, and of liking to drink.

(22:49):
She earned the nickname the Incomparable Australia, and in her
poetry people called her the successor to Sappho. After more
than twenty years making a living as a writer, Afroban
died on April sixteenth nine, at roughly fifty years old.
A few days later, a piece called an Elegy upon
the death of Mrs A. Ben, The Incomparable Australia, written

(23:12):
by quote a young lady of quality, was published. It read,
in part quote, let all our hopes to spare and
die our sex forever shall neglected lie. Aspiring man has
now regained the way to them. We've lost the dismal day.
The first biography of her came out in sixteen ninety six,

(23:34):
called Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Ben by a
gentlewoman of her acquaintance, and that was part of her
collected histories and novels. Although its author was likely Charles Gilden,
the first uh. This first biography is definitely a mix
of embellishment, absolute total fiction, and a little bit of fact,
and it was written in part to try to sell

(23:55):
the collection of her work with which it was published.
Even so, that and passages of her fiction that seem
autobiographical have been picked up and repeated as fact over
and over throughout the centuries. Although today Afra Ben is
known as one of the seventeenth centuries most influential playwrights
and a groundbreaking writer in the genre of the novel,

(24:17):
she fell sharply out of favor after her death as
the hedonism and licentiousness and that general drunken party flare
of the Restoration became socially unacceptable. So did Afraban and
her work. Critics decried her as a woman of loose
moral character, and they condemned her work outright. That started
to change, though, in the early twentieth century, when the

(24:39):
English writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group picked
up her life and work as part of feminist history.
Poet and novelist Vita Sackville West wrote Afra Ben The
Incomparable Austraia, which was a biographical fiction that seems to
treat Ben's life as a missed opportunity. Author Virginia Woolfe
wrote of her quote, all women and together ought to

(25:01):
let flowers fall upon the tomb of afro Ben, for
it was she who earned them the right to speak
their minds. It's kind of funny they both seemed to
praise her so highly for having made a living as
a writer. Uh and have an affinity for some of
the like same sex content of her poems and some

(25:21):
of which are read as uh like explicitly lesbian love poems.
But they have this theme, this sort of undertone of
like I wish she hadn't been writing such garbage in
terms of like all this very coarse humor and body sexuality. Um,
but you know, today I think folks are a lot
a lot more accepting of that part of it than

(25:43):
they maybe were in the nineteen hundreds. Heany so much
for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is
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(26:07):
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(26:29):
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