[In this essay, Kinney outlines similarities between Behn's and Centlivre's careers and examines a play by each writer in which “female experience, including the experience of female authorship, is dramatized.”]

Aphra Behn's contribution to the history of literature is, by now, well known. In 1929, in her study of women and literature A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf marks Aphra Behn's career as a “very important corner on the road,” a turning point. With Behn, Woolf argues

We leave behind, shut up in their parks among their folios, those solitary great ladies who wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delight alone. We come to town and rub shoulders with ordinary people in the streets. Mrs. Behn was … forced … to make her living by her wits … She made, by working very hard, enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote, … for here begins the freedom of the mind, or rather the possibility that in the course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes. For now that Aphra Behn had done it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance; I can make money by my pen.

(66-67)

While we have no way of knowing for certain the number of women who actually decided to make their livings as writers as a direct result of Behn's pioneering career, the connection between Susanna Carroll Centlivre's career and Behn's is perhaps the most direct. In 1700, eleven years after Behn's death, Susanna Centlivre wrote her first play, A Perjur'd Husband. From the mid-1680s to 1722—the years that Centlivre worked in the theatre as both playwright and player—Aphra Behn's works were performed on a regular basis. The Rover, for instance, was produced 70 times between 1700 and 1725. While we can only assume that Centlivre saw—perhaps even acted in—a number of Behn's plays, her general opinion of Behn was a matter of public record in 1701. In one of the letters included in Familiar and Courtly Letters (1700), Centlivre praises Behn's “genius” and wishes an equivalent talent for herself. In letters that she contributed to Letters of Wit, Politicks and Morality (1701), Centlivre's use of the nom de plume Astraea—the name that Behn was known by a generation earlier—is a defining gesture, not only a conscious act of homage, but a conscious act of appropriation as well.

For Centlivre, the act of appropriating Behn's poetic name implies her own desire to be like Behn, to share in the nominal and monetary rewards associated with being a successful woman playwright. Certainly, a need to identify with someone who had lived through similar experiences would not have been out of the question for Centlivre, for many of her experiences in the theatre were remarkably similar to Behn's. Chief among these similarities is the fact that the plays of Behn and Centlivre were attacked because they were written by women. Not surprisingly, they responded to this criticism in much the same way. In the Preface to The Dutch Lover, which was first produced in 1673, Behn writes:

I printed this Play with all the impatient haste one ought to do, who would be vindicated from the most unjust and silly aspersion, Woman could invent to cast on Woman; and which only my being a Woman has procured me: That it was Baudy, the least and most Excusable fault in the Men writers, to whose Plays they all crowd, as if they came to no other end than to hear what they condemn in this: But from a Woman it was unnaturall.

Centlivre, in her dedication to The Platonick Lady (1707), expands upon this analysis when she chastises

the Carping Malice of the Vulgar World; who think it a proof of their Sense, to dislike every thing that is writ by Women.

A Play secretly introduc'd to the House, whilst the Author remains unknown, is approv'd by every Body: The Actors cry it up, and are in expectation of a great Run; the Bookseller of a Second Edition, and the Scribler of a Sixth Night: But if by chance the Plot's discover'd, and the Brat found Fatherless, immediately it flags in the Opinion of those that extoll'd it before, and the Bookseller falls in his Price, with this Reason, It's a Woman's. Thus they alter their judgment, by the Esteem they have for the Author, tho' the Play is still the same. They ne'er reflect, that we have had some Male Productions of this Kind, void of Plot and Wit, and full as insipid as ever a Woman's of us all.

While these frontispieces show that Behn and Centlivre were capable of recognizing and exposing the absurd ideology of the dramatic criticism that was practiced upon their plays, the very criticisms they were protesting became the basis for much of what has been said about them in the last 250 years. In 1754, for instance, John Duncombe was expressing a popular attitude when he wrote The Feminiad:

The modest Muse a veil with pity throws
O'er Vice's friends and Virtue's foes;
Abash'd she views the bold unblushing mien
Of modern Manley, Centlivre, and Behn;
And grieves to see One nobly born disgrace
Her modest sex, and her illustrious race.
Tho' harmony thro' all their numbers flow'd,
And genuine wit its ev'ry grace bestow'd,
Nor genuine wit nor harmony excuse
The dang'rous sallies of a wanton Muse

This belief that the plays of Behn and Centlivre were dangerous lasted until well after the end of the Victorian era; in a 1905 edition of Behn's novels, for instance, Ernest Baker charged that Behn's plays were “false, lurid and depraved.” As a result of this type of criticism, Behn was seen as a “colossal and enduring embarrassment to the generations of women who followed her into the literary marketplace” (Gallagher 23). It was not until 1929, when Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own, that the process of reclamation began.

As Susanna Centlivre understood when she took the name Astraea, the similarites between her career and Behn's were many. Perhaps the most ironic similarity given the criticisms they endured for being women is that both wrote immensely popular plays. Behn's The Rover (1677) was performed 158 times from 1700 to 1760 (Link xiii). Centlivre's The Busie Body (1709) was performed in London 475 times between 1709 and 1800 (Frushell 16). They were both accused of plagiarism, for although it was very common for dramatists to borrow from and rewrite the works of other playwrights, both Behn and Centlivre turned other playwrights' ideas to their own purposes and suffered virulent criticism as a result. Knowing that publication of their names could result in serious personal consequences, both—without success—tried to publish plays anonymously. Perhaps most interesting though is the fact that both were forced, due to the circumstances of their lives, to support themselves through the money they received from writing plays. In mid-1663, Aphra Behn's father was appointed Lieutenant General of Surinam, a commission which promised to make his fortune. On the voyage to South America, however, he became ill and died. Though Behn completed the journey and spent a short time in Surinam (a period in which she enjoyed unusual autonomy and had the experiences that would later contribute to her novel, Oroonoko), she had neither income nor prospect of income when she returned to London in 1664 (Goreau 71). Pressed by circumstance, she became a spy for Charles II during the second Anglo-Dutch War. But this occupation, far from making her self-sufficient, led to a substantial debt, and she may have spent time—from late 1668 to the middle of 1669—in a debtor's prison. It was only after these extraordinary experiences that Behn decided to become a writer. If Susanna Centlivre's life was less adventurous, it was no more secure financially. While the details of her early life are sketchy and difficult to substantiate, several accounts suggest that Centlivre left home before she was fifteen with little money and no connections (Bowyer 7; Lock 15-16). To support herself, she joined a company of strolling players. She was married twice before 1700, but neither marriage lasted much longer than a year and neither provided her with any financial security. In 1700, The Perjur'd Husband was produced, and she became a professional. Despite her early successes, however, she was forced to supplement her income by acting. While her marriage to Joseph Centlivre, one of the Queen's cooks, in 1707 provided Centlivre with a degree of financial security, she continued to write plays until 1722, a year before she died.

Other similarities emerge from a study of their writings. In “Aphra Behn and Sexual Politics: A Dramatist's Discourse with her Audience,” for instance, Cheri Davis Langdell focuses on the addendum to the plays—the prologues, epilogues, and dedications. Because these writings were not governed by the conventions that the plays themselves were, Langdell argues, they were a place where Behn's views about her own role in the theatre could find fuller, more honest expression. As a result, Langdell concludes that Behn's “writing and her attitude toward it are acts of sexual politics”: they exemplify “woman's resourceful exertion of whatever power she may have—sexual, social, economic, or political—so as to redress the social and psychosexual balance ever so slightly in her favour” (113). Langdell also points to the Centlivre's prologue to The Platonick Lady (the one which I have excerpted above) as a continuation of Behn's sexual politics, an illustration of the extent of Behn's legacy and her influence on Centlivre in both content and attitude.

I would like to suggest a reading of Aphra Behn's The Rover and Susanna Centlivre's The Busie Body in which these concerns—the sexual politics of both writers—are not marginalized, are not extrinsic to the plays. Within the texts of the plays, female experience, including the experience of female authorship, is dramatized. Because of this unique perspective, Behn and Centlivre began to establish what Susan Carlson, in Women and Comedy, calls a “countertradition” to what was (and still is in many respects) a male-dominated theatre. Their plays, like all others, are governed by social and literary conventions, conventions that conform to established attitudes about appropriate behavior for women. And, as in all drama of these periods, these conventions erupt most forcefully into the plays' endings. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis says in Writing Beyond the Ending, “social convention is like a ‘script,’ which suggests sequences of action and response, the meaning we give these, and ways of organizing experience by choices, emphases, priorities” (2). These social scripts control the whole of narrative or plot, but the endings are the place where plot meets ideology most forcefully. Not surprisingly, the priorities of the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century scripts demanded that the ending of the plots either deemphasized or completely silenced any potential for women characters beyond those conventions. For these reasons, my objective here will be to recover the narrative middle from these plays—to reclaim any possible revolutionary characterizations, attitudes, or structures—before they are sacrificed for the common good known as communal values. At the same time, I would like to recover from the endings any trace of ambiguity over the scripted resolution, for as DuPlessis says, “Any resolution can have traces of the conflicting materials that have been processed within it. It is where subtexts and repressed discourses can throw up one last flare of meaning; it is where the author may sidestep and displace attention from the materials that a work has made available” (3).

Early in her career, Behn saw herself and her work as outside the tradition of male playwriting. In the epilogue to Sir Patient Fancy (1678), for instance, Behn criticizes the traditionalists who are more concerned about unities than audience:

Your way of Writing's out of fashion grown.
Method, and Rule—you only understand;
Pursue your way of fooling, and be damn'd.
Your learned Cant of Action, Time and Place,
Must all give way to the unlabour'd Farce.

In the prologue to her first play, The Forc'd Marriage; or, the Jealous Bridegroom (1671), Behn describes a different approach to drama. She outlines the differences she sees between female writers and their male counterparts:

Women those charming Victors, in whose Eyes
Lie all their Arts, and their Artilleries,
Not being contented with the Wounds they made,
Would by new Strategems our Lives invade.
Beauty alone goes now at too cheap rates;
And therefore they, like wise and Politick States,
Court a new Power that may the old supply,
To keep as well as gain the Victory.
They'll join the force of Wit to Beauty now,
And so maintain the Right they have in you.

Uttered by a male actor, this prologue warns the audience that playwriting, which requires the writer join a new weapon (her wit) to her old weapon (her beauty), has become a means of extending and exerting female power. As Catherine Gallagher says in “Who Was That Masked Woman? The Prostitute and the Playwright in the Comedies of Aphra Behn,” Behn “creates the possibility of a woman's version of sexual conquest [in this prologue]. She will not be immediately conquered and discarded because she will maintain her right through her writing” (25).

Certainly, these prologues and epilogues are statements of intention, the place where Behn articulates her dramatic theory most directly. They point to the fact that her purpose in writing these plays was to carve out a countertradition in the theatre, one that would not only defy the classical unities, but would value both female writers and female experience as well. This feminist countertradition is one that still exists. Susan Carlson, for instance, sees the connection between Behn and contemporary feminist comedy in the following way:

despite the qualified nature of her comic rebellion, in her controversial women and their unorthodox behavior Behn still manages to sketch the outlines of what I would like to call a “countertradition” of comedy. In her shaping of women characters and especially in her frank portrayal of women's sexuality, she prefigures contemporary British comedy by women, a comedy that still more clearly asserts a tradition of its own.

(128)

If Aphra Behn first envisioned this countertradition, Susanna Centlivre certainly benefited from her vision. In her prologues, epilogues, and dedications, she too carried on the struggle to win legitimacy for the female voice and female experience in the early eighteenth-century theatre. In her preface to Love's Contrivance, Centlivre outlined her own method of writing plays, a method that she contrasts with traditional ones:

The Criticks cavil most about Decorums, and cry up Aristotle's Rules as the most essential part of the Play. I own they are in the right of it; yet I dare venture a wager they'll never persuade the Town to be of their Opinion, which relishes nothing so well as Humour lightly tost up with Wit, and drest with Modesty and Air … I do not say this by way of condemning the Unity of Time, Place, and Action; quite contrary, for I think them the greatest Beauties of a Dramatick Poem; but since the other way of writing pleases full as well, and gives the Poet a larger Scope of Fancy, … why should a Man torture, and wrack his Brain for what will be no Advantage to him.

This statement of dramatic theory is similar to Behn's: Centlivre criticizes what Behn called “Cant of Action, Time and Place.” Her “other way of writing,” which gives the Poet “a scope of fancy” beyond the conventional, can be seen as the equivalent to Behn's “new Strategems”: her “Humour tost up with Wit.” Because too many rules confine the poet, they not only inhibit the playwright's creativity, but fail to produce entertaining drama as well. This final point is important, for throughout part of her career, Centlivre felt compelled (perhaps because she had learned from Behn's experience) to please her audience. The popularity of her plays proves this other way of writing was successful.

So, while both of these playwrights were inevitably constrained by the tradition of comedic drama that they inherited, they also both envisioned their work as being somehow distinct from this tradition. How successfully their feminist visions were translated into the texts of their plays, however, is a controversial issue. Many contemporary readers and critics have perceived a gap between the intentions that they articulated in their prologues, epilogues, and dedications and their ability to accomplish these intentions. In Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England, for instance, Katharine M. Rogers says that “[n]either Behn nor Centlivre … wrote plays distinguishable from men's. They might protest vigorously against sexual discrimination in their prefaces, but they followed literary forms that provided no scope for feminine perceptions or feminine experience” (100). While the plays of Behn and Centlivre certainly seem conservative to a modern reader, we must also acknowledge, as Moira Ferguson does in First Feminists, that the definition of feminism changes with time and place—what seems extreme or revolutionary in one age often becomes part of the mainstream culture in another (xi). For their respective historical periods, these plays were clearly viewed by audiences as nontraditional, as “dang'rous sallies of a Wanton Muse,” a fact that becomes clear through a comparison of their early plays and their later plays. Over the course of their careers, due (we can only assume) to the increasing virulence of the criticism they received, both Behn and Centlivre began to conform to audience tastes for tradition in two ways: overall, fewer women appeared in their later plays, and the women who were in these later plays spoke fewer lines than their sisters in the earlier plays (Pearson 146, 209).

Aphra Behn's The Rover and Susanna Centlivre's The Busie Body are amazingly similar comedies. They both operate within the Spanish intrigue comedy tradition, and both focus primarily on two couples—the witty couple and the romantic couple—who are attempting to thwart the wishes of the father or male guardian of the woman. Both end in multiple weddings. They were also, as I noted above, extremely popular plays, so popular in fact that their writers subsequently penned sequels to them: The Rover, Part II (1681) and Mar-Plot (1710). Their most remarkable similarities, however, can be found in the ways they diverge from tradition. In both The Rover and The Busie Body, a critique of the way women are treated is an essential element of the plot. At the same time, both Behn and Centlivre attempt to create a positive space outide of that critique, a place where their women characters can have supportive friendships with one another, a place where strong women characters can make their own decisions and act on them, a place where their characters' actions do not have to be driven along a linear and unified path to a predetermined end such as marriage. Finally, in the characters of Angellica and Miranda, Behn and Centlivre inscribed images of the woman playwright into their plays. Because they wrote plays in a period that undervalued their abilities and their contributions, both of these dramatists attempted to create a positive space wherein the woman playwright could exist.

The Rover and The Busie Body begin—in keeping with traditional dramatic structure—by establishing a status quo. In The Rover, the “virtuous” women—Florinda and Hellena—are under the control of their father, who has planned their futures in advance: Hellena will take vows and enter a nunnery, and Florinda will make an advantageous marriage to an unattractive aristocrat. A critique of this position of authority is facilitated by the fact that the patriarch himself does not appear in the play. Instead, Don Pedro, the brother of Florinda and Hellena, is the patriarch's spokesperson in the scheme of the play; as a member of the younger generation, however, Pedro's ability to protect and sustain the status quo is ineffectual. Because there is no vocal, embodied representation of the view that women should submit to the law of their fathers, then, Behn's critique of patriarchal authority is achieved rather easily. Florinda, for instance, makes the following comment about her forced marriage to Pedro: “I hate Vicentio, sir, and I would not have a man so dear to me as my brother follow the ill customs of our country and make a slave of his sister” (I.i). Hellena sides with Florinda, of course; she comments on her father's choice of a husband for Florinda and—indirectly—on her own probable future as a nun: “Marry Don Vincentio! Hang me, such a wedlock would be worse than adultery with another man. I had rather see her in the Hostel de Dieu, to waste her youth there in vows, and be a handmaid to lazars and cripples, than to lose it in such a marriage” (I.i). In the course of the play, when both Florinda and Hellena extricate themselves from the control of their father and assert their love and sexual attractions to their respective prospective husbands, the audience approves their triumph.

This approval, of course, was not socially acceptable during the period. As Rogers points out, “Marriage was more or less forced on women, as their only way to a recognized position in society … [It] ranged from mild subjection to virtual slavery” (7); “[w]omen who married contrary to their parents' wishes were apt to find themselves without portion or inheritance and with reputations damaged by such evidence of uncontrolled passion and willfulness” (11). In the play, the concept of forced marriage is often seen in terms of slavery (as Florinda points out). Often in Behn's play, relationships are viewed in terms of power struggles. In forced marriages—like the one Florinda is destined for at the beginning of the play—women usually lose this struggle. But in marriages of choice—like the Hellena/Willmore match—women often win the struggle. Because of this differential in sexual politics, Behn takes on the institution of forced marriage in her plays in order to criticize its unjust control over women. As Jacqueline Pearson says in The Prostituted Muse, Behn often “attacks the control exerted on the young and unmoneyed, both male and female, by patriarchal authorities, fathers and guardians and husbands, but the emphasis most often falls on the suffering of women” (160).

Pearson's observations could just as easily apply to Susanna Centlivre, for a similar resistance to the status quo is represented in The Busie Body. Sir Francis Gripe and Sir Jealous Traffick, as the ruling patriarchs in the scheme of the play, have ultimate control over virtually all the characters. Whether it is for consent to marry (as is the case with Miranda and Isabinda), or for payment of an inheritance (as is the case with Marplot, Miranda, Isabinda, and Charles) most of the characters in this play must rely upon the protection and support of these two domestic tyrants. Because they appear in the play as actual characters, though, Centlivre can critique them in both their characterizations and the speeches of other characters. Both Sir Francis and Sir Jealous are depicted as insidious money-grubbers and foolish old lechers. Sir Francis' lack of good faith pervades the administration of all of his duties. Once he has convinced his brother patriarchs to place their estates in his control, he abuses his power. In one of his most insidious acts, he becomes Miranda's pimp; he sells her time—one hour for 100 pounds—to Sir George as if she were a prostitute. Not satisfied with a mere 100 pounds, however, Sir Francis sets his goal at nothing less than Miranda's money and body: “Some Guardians wou'd be glad to compound for part of the Estate, at dispatching an Heiress, but I engross the whole [by marrying her myself]” (III). Sir Jealous is only slightly better than Sir Francis. His obsession with Spanish customs makes him appear only foolish at first. But in his desire to make Isabinda live according to Spanish customs—“No Galloping abroad, no receiving Visits at home; for in our loose Country [England], the Women are as dangerous as the Men” (II)—Sir Jealous' actions are as motivated by monetary considerations as Sir Francis'. Deeply suspicious, he attempts to control all of Isabinda's actions: from her walks on the balcony to the choice of her husband. He is consistently locking her in her rooms in order to prevent “some sauntering coxcomb” from thinking that “by leaping into her arms, [he can] leap into my estate” (II).

The women in The Busie Body—Miranda and Isabinda—actively (though sometimes covertly) rail against these treacherous oppressors and their ultimate weapon, marriage. Both women resist the marriages which Sir Francis and Sir Jealous have contrived for them, and both women succeed in achieving the marriages they desire, an ending that is—like the ending of The Rover—approved in the scheme of the play. At the same time, however, Miranda resists the confines of marriage itself, first to Sir George in act I: “Matrimony! Ha, ha, ha; what Crimes have you committed against the God of Love, that he should revenge 'em so severely to stamp Husband upon your forehead” (I). Later, Miranda tells Sir George during their scaled-down version of the proviso scene that marriage is a “terrible Bugbear” (IV); she knows that she is trading her dependence upon a certain tyrant for dependence upon a possible tyrant. Even though Sir George is a “man of sense” and not as unreasonable and disagreeable as Sir Francis, Miranda knows that “If he should despise, slight or use me ill, there's no Remedy from a Husband, but the Grave” (V). This attitude toward marriage—the ultimate patriarchal institution—is supported by the end of the play. There, Whisper and Scentwell (two people who because of their class would seem to have less control over their lives than their employers) are given the choice to marry or not. Given this choice by Charles, both Whisper and Scentwell claim an equal distaste for the “terrible Bugbear.” They both opt for the benevolence and loyalty they have found in service over the forced servitude of marriage.

In both of these plays, many of the social conventions that solidify the oppression of women are critiqued by Behn and Centlivre. Yet, as dramatists, they do not settle for mere critique of social and dramatic conventions. One of the counter-strategies that they offer to these limited views and treatments of women characters is the possibility of female friendship. Unlike their counterparts in plays like The Way of the World, The Man of Mode, The Tragedy of Jane Shore, and The Beggar's Opera, where women only pretend friendship and later turn out to be rivals and enemies, the women in these two comedies create a space where women can not only cease to be rivals, but actually understand, sympathize with, and respect each other. One of the most remarkable aspects of The Rover, for instance, is its opening scene; this play is one of the few in Restoration drama that opens with a woman-only scene. This fact is significant, for it allows the audience to view the rest of the play—particularly the actions of men—through the perspective of the women who appear in the scene. A similar woman-only segment occurs in the beginning of act III, scene i as well, before the men enter the scene. Pearson has surveyed all of Behn's plays and concludes that she is unusual “in allowing women to speak first in plays so often, and in including so many scenes in which only women appear, scenes which are often particularly vivid and convincing” (146). What is even more unusual in The Rover, though, is how women characters who are set up into rival positions react to one another. In act IV, scene ii, Angellica and Hellena (dressed in man's clothing) find themselves in the same room with Willmore. Instead of fighting each other, they both question Willmore's intentions and character. Hellena, who knows that Willmore is involved with Angellica, does not attack her rival, but warns her of Willmore's “inconstancy” (IV.ii). When Hellena tells her story, Angellica—while she does not know Hellena's true identity—immediately reacts by questioning Willmore—“Is't thus you pay my generous passion back?” (IV.ii)—and promises revenge not on Hellena but on Willmore—“I am resolved to think on a revenge / On him that soothed me thus to my undoing” (IV.ii).

While Susanna Centlivre does not use as many women-centered scenes as Behn does in The Rover, the friendship that is established between Miranda, Isabinda, and Patch is a much more thorough one. Miranda and Isabinda are genuinely friends in this play. Miranda works as hard to extricate her friend from the clutches of a controlling father and an unknown mate as she does to free herself from Sir Francis' grip. She arranges for Patch to act as Isabinda's servant, a sacrifice that helps Isabinda gain intermittent freedom to see Sir Charles. Patch, in effect, becomes the conduit of their friendship. Both Miranda and Isabinda receive news of each others' circumstances from the servant that they both love and trust. And the only woman-only segments that occur in the play are between Miranda and Patch, and later Isabinda and Patch. Ironically, Isabinda and Miranda, who appear in the same scene only at the end of the play, never speak to each other. At the same time, their sisterhood is an integral part of the play.

Another counter-strategy used by these two playwrights involves their characterizations of women. Consistently, Behn and Centlivre imagine strong, witty, and active women, women who are capable of setting goals and making them a reality. The Rover's most effective character in fact is not the title character, who is represented as either passive, ineffectual, or drunk, but Hellena. From early in the play, Hellena knows that she does not want to take her vows and join the convent. She wants marriage, and not just any marriage: “I don't intend every he that likes me shall have me, but he that I like” (III.i). She pursues her desired mate, effectively using disguises both at the carnival and in the confrontation scene with Angellica and Willmore. Throughout the play, she is active and effective in a way that the the Rover himself is not. As Pearson says, “Willmore is a passive centre of the intrigues of the women rather than, as they are, an active mover” (153). (Pearson's “they” is important here, for even the most passive woman character in the play—Florinda—acts with the purpose of escaping a forced marriage.)

Two other female characters in Behn's play help round out this pattern of behavior. The two prostitutes, Lucetta and Angellica, represent what Pearson calls the “most extreme examples of female power” and male powerlessness in the play. Both of these themes are demonstrated in the Lucetta/Blunt subplot. After luring Blunt to her home, she does not sleep with him, but instead robs him and has him dumped in the sewer. The most surprising aspect of this subplot is that it has no—realized—consequences. Lucetta is never punished for her treatment of Blunt, and Blunt's revenge—the attempted rape of Florinda—is thwarted as well. Angellica also provides an example of these themes when, in act V, she draws a pistol and threatens Willmore's life. This, according to Pearson, is the kind of sexual reversal that often occurs in Behn's plays. “Male sexuality in Behn is often an instrument of power, and she allows women to compete for this by allowing them to share the phallic power of swords, daggers, and pistols” (158). And while Angellica's revenge—like Blunt's—is never accomplished, this equality in representation is itself a mark of progress.

Representations of female power can also be found in The Busie Body, but they are representations of a kind of power that, like Hellena's, is often wielded indirectly—through disguise and manipulation—instead of directly as in the case of Lucetta and Angellica. Like Hellena, Miranda resists any attempt at masculine control. She is talking about Sir Jealous, for instance, when she tells Patch, “Suppose he could introduce his rigid Rules—does he think we cou'd not match them in contrivance? No, no; Let the Tyrant Man make the laws he will, if there's a Woman under the Government, I warrant she finds a way to break 'im” (I). Miranda's strategem to free both herself and Isabinda from their respective dictators reflects a more comprehensive power than Hellena's, for while Hellena can only affect her own fate, Miranda's actions affect every character in the play. Through her actions—her providing Isabinda a loyal servant in Patch, her manipulation of Sir Francis, and her ability to procure the “authentick papers” at the end of the play—the two couples achieve the economic independence they need to marry. Her greatest achievement is her manipulation of Sir Francis. In spite of the fact that he has technical control of both her body and her money, Miranda manages to outwit his scheme to become her husband and permanent master. Her strategem begins to take shape at the beginning of act 2, when she says to her guardian, “I am not to possess my Estate, without your Consent, till I'm Five and Twenty; you shall only abate the odd Seven Years, and make me Mistress of my Estate to Day, and I'll make you Master of my Person to Morrow.” In act 3, scene 4, Miranda's plan has been revised, her argument substantiated:

Sir Fran: [W]hen shall we marry, ha?

Miran: There's nothing wanting but your Consent, Sir Francis.

Sir Fran: My Consent! what do's my Charmer mean?

Miran: Nay, 'tis only a Whim: But I'll have every thing according to form—Therefore when you sign an Authentick Paper, drawn up by an able Lawyer, that I have your Leave to marry, the next Day makes me yours, Gardee.

Sir Fran: Ha, ha, ha, a Whim indeed! why is it not Demonstration I give my Leave when I marry thee.

Miran: Not for your Reputation, Gardee; the malicious World will be apt to say, you trick'd me into Marriage, and so take the Merit from my Choice. Now I will have the act my own, to let the idle Fops see how much I prefer a Man loaded with years and Wisdom.

Ultimately, this strategem works, for Miranda escapes the confines of a marriage to that “delicate bedfellow” Sir Francis by manipulating him with language. She is not, however, above using the disguise of silence when it suits her purposes. In the dumb scene in act 2, Miranda uses silence to resist a similar type of control by Sir George Airy. After he purchases the right to speak with her, Miranda, in Pearson's words, “punishes him for treating her as a commodity by refusing to speak”: “It is only when he gives up his attempt to control her that she uses her powers over language to win him” (221).

Because of their depictions of women, both as individuals and friends, The Rover and The Busie Body become dialogues about sexual politics. What Aphra Behn originated with Hellena and Angellica, Susanna Centlivre continued with her portrayal of Miranda. Yet, despite these considerable successes in creating a tradition of their own in comedy, there are, as I pointed out in the beginning of this essay, considerable problems as well. Despite their ground-breaking depictions of women in their courtship and marriage plots, the endings of these two plays are extremely conventional. Both follow linear plots constructed on the desire of two young couples to marry and focus on the ways that their desires are acheived. Behn's The Rover ends shortly after the marriage of Florinda and Belvile, shortly before the marriage of Hellena and Willmore. Centlivre's The Busie Body ends with the marriage of both couples—Miranda and Sir George Airy and Isabinda and Charles. Because of their conventional closings, many of the revolutionary aspects of these plays that I have outlined above—the critique of marriage and the strong, independent women—seem to be undercut by the total immersion into the patriarchal institution of marriage. They are as Elin Diamond says in “Gestus and Signature in Aphra Behn's The Rover,” “recuperated back into the economy they rebel against” (540). In effect, these endings trap the women they are about (and by) in the ideology of the times during which they were written. Carlson summarizes these concerns when she writes, “while a comic ending restores men to their power in the social heirarchy, it restores women to powerlessness” (22).

There are, in these two plays, however, traces of ambiguity over their endings, traces of ambiguity that highlight the concerns that I have outlined above. Much of this ambiguity can be found in the characterizations of Angellica and Marplot. Angellica and Marplot have been described by many critics as the most striking characters to take the stage in their respective plays. Both have also been the center of critical controversies because they seem to rattle around in their respective plays' marriage plots like loose cogs. Angellica disappears from the play half way through the final act. And Marplot, while he is forgiven by the other characters and receives control of his own estate at the end of the play, is the only character in the younger generation who does not get married. This failure to include these two powerful characters in their resolutions has often been seen as a sign of weakness. As Regina Barreca says in her introduction to Last Laughs, “The refusal to supply closure has been misread as an inability to do so, as a failure of imagination and talent on the part of the writer” (17). Instead of reading these two characters as failures as so many critics have in the past, I suggest we read them as examples of what Elin Diamond calls a feminist version of Brechtian Gestus: a moment in a feminist text where the contradictory meaning of both theatrical and social conventions “for female fictions and historical women” become apparent to the spectator or reader (524).

In this context, the character of Angellica can be seen as a symbol for the commodification of women. Because she is a prostitute, Angellica's body is, in Marx's terminology, a commodity. But, unlike the other more virtuous women in the play, Angellica has no owner, no father, husband, or brother to act as her trader. She sets her own price, and the market is then regulated only by whether or not a would-be purchaser can afford her price. Angellica, unlike the other women in these plays, is in control of her only commodity—her body. In a conversation at the end of act II, scene II, Angellica and Willmore exchange the following words about her value:

Willmore: Take heed, fair
creature, how you raise my hopes,
Which once assumed pretends to all dominion:
There's not a joy thou hast in store
I shall not then command.
For which I'll pay you back my soul, my life!
Come, let's begin th'account this happy minute!
Angellica: And will you
pay me then the price I ask?
Willmore: Oh, why dost
thou draw me from an awful worship,
By showing thou art no divinity.
Conceal the fiend, and show me all the angel!
Keep me but ignorant, and I'll be devout
And pay my vows forever at this shrine.
Angellica: The pay I mean
is but thy love for mine.
Can you give that?
Willmore: Entirely.

As Diamond says, “By eliminating her value-form [the fetishized, market form of the commodity which alienates the producer from the product], Angellica attempts to return her body to a state of nature, to take herself out of circulation” (533). But thematically, here, Angellica is more than just a symbol of Marxist political philosophy. Her character is, as Diamond points out, an example of Brechtian gestus, a place where the play itself (Angellica's characterization), the theatre apparatus (the actress and the female playwright), and the social struggle (an analysis of the commodification of women) intersect. Accommodating Angellica in the ending of the play, into the marriage plot, would have diminished her gestic significance. Angellica's function in the play is to reveal the contradictions inherent in a society which treats human beings as material objects and, as Laura Brown says in English Dramatic Form, reduces “human relationships to economic exchange” (62).

Marplot's character undergoes a similar symbolic transformation in The Busie Body. Like Angellica, his significance as a character can be seen as a result of his role in the sexual economy of the play. On one hand, Marplot is desexed in the play; he is a “curiously unmale figure, in some ways an embodiment and parody of stereotypical views of women” (Pearson 210). One the other hand, Marplot is like Willmore, the rake. He moves through this play in much the same way that Willmore moves through The Rover. Like Willmore, Marplot's chief pleasure is in knowing everybody's “business,” a common pun for sex in Restoration drama. One of his primary functions is to “subvert male sexuality” (Pearson 210): he, like Willmore, continually interferes with the sexual intrigues of his friends. Furthering this ambiguity about Marplot's sexuality is his function in the plot. Marplot, more than any other character in The Busie Body, occupies the position of “Other” in this play. Throughout the play, he wants to be part of the action, part of the courtship plot; continually, however, he is marginalized by the other characters. Like Angellica, then, Marplot's characterization as Other becomes a gestic moment in the text. His ambiguous sexuality functions as comic relief in the play itself. Through his characterization, however, the theatre conventions of the rake and the Spanish intrigue comedy are parodied. Marplot is the rake who is actually desexed, no longer a potent force in the drama itself. Through his ineffectualness, he also parodies the male-originated form of the intrigue comedy, a form of drama that depends upon intelligence. Because he is not accommodated into the resolution of the play, Marplot also becomes a symbol of the contemporary social struggle over gender roles and exclusion, a subject that is very real to Centlivre as a woman writer in the eighteenth century.

In these two characters—Angellica and Marplot—Behn and Centlivre add gestic characters whose significance cannot be integrated into the conventional endings of the plays. But that fact does not undercut, I think, the importance of these characters within the schemes of the plays. In fact, this refusal to “supply closure” in these instances is one of the projects of feminist drama today. As Barreca points out, feminist drama depends “on the process, not on the endings” (17):

Resolution of tensions, like unity or integration, should not be considered viable definitions of comedy for women writers because they are too reductive to deal with the non-closed nature of women's writings. As [Mary Ellmann in Thinking About Women] asserts, the woman writer cares less for what is resolved than for what is recognized in all its conceivable diversions into related or, for that matter, unrelated issues. Once rules are suspended, admirable and remarkable “exceptions are released,” recognised, and embraced.

(17)

Being confined by the dramatic conventions that limited the power of women in the theatre led Behn and Centlivre to create other possibilities in their plays. Because conventional comedy generally ended with marriage, and because Behn and Centlivre were writing for an audience that expected this type of ending, both of these writers gave their publics what they wanted. At the same time, this confinement, as Isabinda says in The Busie Body, can “sharpen the invention.” This sense of confinement that Behn and Centlivre inevitably felt writing in a male centered tradition accounts for the final innovation that can be found in these two plays. In The Rover and The Busie Body, Behn and Centlivre inscribe a space where women writers can exist, and in doing so, they release another exception to tradition. As Diamond says about The Rover, “As a woman writer in need of money, Behn was vulnerable to accusations of immodesty; to write meant to expose herself, to put herself into circulation; like Angellica, to sell her wares. Is it merely a coincidence that Angellica Bianca shares Aphra Behn's initials, that hers is the only name from Thomaso that Behn leaves unchanged?” (536). Similarly, in The Busie Body, Miranda—because of the way she orchestrates the action of the play through language—can be read as a stand-in for the writer.

There is a significant difference, though, between these two characterizations, an ambiguity that their conflicted endings highlights. Angellica, as I have noted above, does not participate in the ending of the play; at great personal cost, she succeeds in remaining outside the control of the communal values that try to define her. As a result, her creator achieves a similar degree of literary freedom. Miranda, on the other hand, has a place in the resolution of the plot, a telos which reasserts the status quo. Similarly, Centlivre as a playwright—because of the changes that had occurred between Behn's time and her own, in the theatre and its audience's expectations—had less control than the previous Astraea. In the early eighteenth century, the British theatre was more conservative than it was during the Restoration. When Behn began writing, a relaxation of moral strictures was occurring in both society in general and the theatre in particular, a laxity that provided an opening for a freer, more innovative, drama. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, though, an increased sentimentalism led to a demand for a more moral drama. As J. H. Smith says in The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy, “In the first half of the eighteenth century it becomes the principal business of comedy (if this term may still be used to describe the plays) to empty … standard patterns, to repress rakishness and coquetry, and to recommend contrary ideals” (199).

This diminution in the acceptance of women in the theatre from Behn's time to Centlivre's was a precursor to what would happen to theatre in general—and specifically feminist theatre—in 1737 when the Licensing Act was passed. At this time, women writers in the theatre became even more rare. As Pearson says,

The intention of this legislation was to bring the theatre under very firm government control and to ‘limit the production of legitimate drama to two patent houses and place the licensing of plays under the Lord Chamberlain.’ The Act was particularly troublesome to women like Charlotte Charke who were working in ‘alternative’ theatres and dramatising anti-establishment views; but by increasing the legal control over drama, it may have offered a more general deterrent to women, who were already nervous about appearing in public as writers. The Act also discouraged risk-taking by theatre managers, which may also have hit women disproportionately.

(20)

Whatever the intention of the Licensing Act, its repercussions for women were long-felt: women playwrights were scarce between the periods when Behn and Centlivre wrote and the beginning of the twentieth century. And the prohibitions were not only institutional. Virginia Woolf was correct in pointing out that after girls began telling their parents they could make money by their pens, “the [parents'] answer for many years to come was, Yes, by living the life of Aphra Behn! Death would be better! and the door was slammed faster than ever” (67). By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the lives of Behn and Centlivre—and their nascent visions of a dramatic countertradition—no longer seemed so dangerous. Between 1900 and 1920, some four hundred British women wrote plays (Carlson 164).

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