‘A Woman's Reason’: Aphra Behn Reads Lucretius

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Notes

¹ M.P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), B179.

² See K. Philips, in ‘A Friend’: ‘If no soules no sexes have, for men t'exclude / Women from friendship's vast capacity,/ Is a design injurious and rude,/ Onely maintain'd by partiall tyranny’, in The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, edited by P. Thomas (Stump Cross, Essex: Stump Cross Books, 1990), vol. 1, no. 64, ll. 19–22. I. Maclean cites Saint Jerome and Saint Thomas Aquinas as authorities for the views, respectively, that ‘sex is not of the mind’ and ‘sex is not of the soul’, in The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 43. See also L. Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1, 168–70.

³ W. Cartwright, The Lady-Errant (1651) in The Plays and Poems of William Cartwright, edited by G.B. Evans (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951), line 1228. On the relationship between the humours, the uterus and women's psychology as seen by medieval and Renaissance doctors, see Maclean, Renaissance Notion, 40–3.

⁴ The Works of Aphra Behn, edited by J. Todd, 7 vols (London: Pickering, 1992–96), vol. 6 (1996), 79, line 19, italics reversed. Further line references appear in the text. This edition is referred to hereafter as Works.

⁵ B. Makin, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673), introduced by P.L. Barbour, Augustan Reprint Society 202 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 1980); F. Poulain de la Barre, The Woman as Good as the Man, or, The Equallity of both Sexes, trans. A.L. (London, 1677). On Makin, see H.L. Smith, Reason's Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 102–5. For an account of Poulain as a committed Cartesian, see M.A. Seidel, ‘Poulain de la Barre's The Woman As Good As The Man’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 35:3 (1974), 499–508; see also J. Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 94.

⁶ H. Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers 1650–1689 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 160.

⁷ C. Gallagher, ‘Who Was That Masked Woman?: The Prostitute and the Playwright in the Works of Aphra Behn’, in Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace 1670–1820 (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), Chapter 1; Chalmers, ‘Female Authorship as Heroic Eroticism’, in Royalist Women Writers, 153–63 (161); W. Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 165.

¹⁰ Dryden, Letter to Elizabeth Thomas in The Letters of John Dryden, edited by C.E. Ward (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1942), 127.

⁸ J.G. Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), x.

⁹ J.G. Turner, ‘The Properties of Libertinism’, ‘’Tis Nature's Fault’: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment, edited by R.P. Maccubbin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 75–87 (79); R. Pintard, Le Libertinage Érudit dans La Première Moitié du XVIIe Siècle (Paris: Boivin, 1943). An important study of sexual libertinism is Chernaik's Sexual Freedom, cited in note 7.

¹¹ K. Romack, ‘“I wonder she should be so infamous for a whore?”: Cleopatra Restored’, in Cavendish and Shakespeare: Interconnections, edited by K. Romack and J. Fitzmaurice (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 193–211 (209–10).

¹² M.L. Stapleton, ‘Aphra Behn, Libertine’, Restoration 24 (2000), 75–97 (87). In his article and monograph, Admired and Understood: The Poetry of Aphra Behn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), Stapleton views Behn as providing a corrective to libertinism in its Rochesterian mode.

¹³ A. Snider, ‘Atoms and Seeds: Aphra Behn's Lucretius’, Clio, 33 (2003), 1–25 (1).

¹⁴ On Gassendi, see H. Jones, The Epicurean Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 166–85; M.J. Osler, ‘Baptizing Epicurean Atomism: Pierre Gassendi on the Immortality of the Soul’, in Religion, Science, and World View, edited by M.J. Osler and P.L. Farber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 163–83.

¹⁵ M. Johnson and C. Wilson, ‘Lucretius and the History of Science’, in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, edited by S. Gillespie and P. Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 131–48 (137).

¹⁶ The Uncollected Verse of Aphra Behn, edited by G. Greer (Stump Cross, Essex: Stump Cross Press, 1989), 10.

¹⁷ S. Ellenzweig, The Fringes of Belief: English Literature, Ancient Heresy, and the Politics of Freethinking, 1660–1760 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 15.

¹⁸ G. Duchovnay argues that Behn was a Roman Catholic, in ‘Aphra Behn's Religion’, Notes and Queries, 221 (1976), 234–7.

¹⁹ L. Cottegnies, ‘Aphra Behn's French Translations’, in The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, edited by D. Hughes and J. Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 221–34 (227). See also E. Spearing, ‘Aphra Behn: The Politics of Translation’, in Aphra Behn Studies, edited by J. Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 154–77; M. Ferguson, ‘“With All Due Reverence and Respect to the Word of God”: Aphra Behn as Skeptical Reader of the Bible and Critical Translator of Fontenelle’, in Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, edited by H.B. Hackel and C.E. Kelly (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 199–216.

²⁰ For a discussion of women and libertinism focused on Queen Christina of Sweden and Margaret Cavendish, see S. Wiseman, ‘Rule and Representation: The “Libertine” Case of Queen Christina’, in Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Chapter 6. Stephen Clucas proposes that ‘In her witty defenses of the “honest liberty” of philosophical discourse Cavendish is not only perhaps seventeenth-century England's first significant woman natural philosopher, but also its first woman libertine philosopher’, ‘Variation, Irregularity and Probabilism: Margaret Cavendish and Natural Philosophy as Rhetoric’ in A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, edited by S. Clucas (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003), 199–209 (207).

²¹ Behn, ‘A Letter to Mr. Creech at Oxford, Written in the last great Frost’, Works, vol. 1 (1992), no. 55, lines 47–8. Further references to this volume will give the poem number, followed by line reference.

²² Behn, ‘On the Death of the late Earl of Rochester’, Works, vol. 1, 53, lines 68–9; J. Spencer, Aphra Behn's Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 28–9.

²³ Jones, Epicurean Tradition, 186–213; S. Clucas, ‘The Atomism of the Cavendish Circle: A Reappraisal’, The Seventeenth Century, 9:2 (1994), 247–73. E. Rees devotes a chapter of her study of Margaret Cavendish to the ‘suggestive’ influence of Lucretius on Cavendish's Poems and Fancies (1653), in Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 55.

²⁴ In 1675, Hutchinson presented her translation, composed during the 1650s, to Arthur Annesley, first Earl of Anglesey. See Lucy Hutchinson's Translation of Lucretius: De rerum natura, edited by H. de Quehen (London: Duckworth, 1996), 10–11. See also Rees, ‘“A horrible precipice”: Lucy Hutchinson's Lucretius’, Appendix to Margaret Cavendish, 190–6; and R. Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 264–8.

²⁵ For a comprehensive survey of Lucretius in English literature see W.B. Fleischmann, Lucretius and English Literature 1680–1740 (Paris: Librarie Nizet, 1964), and more recently, D. Hopkins, ‘The English voices of Lucretius from Lucy Hutchinson to John Mason Good’, in Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, Chapter 16.

²⁶ Snider, ‘Atoms and Seeds’, 2.

²⁷ Stapleton, Admired and Understood, 87.

²⁸ Dryden, ‘Epilogue to Tamerlane the Great’, in The Works of John Dryden, general editors H.T. Swedenborg and E.N. Hooker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–1989), vol. 2 (1972), 179, line 3.

²⁹ Ovids Epistles translated by severall hands (London, 1680).

³⁰ Ovids Epistles, sig. a4r.

³¹ M.A. O'Donnell, ‘Aphra Behn: Tory Wit and Unconventional Woman’, in Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century, edited by K.M. Wilson and F.J. Warnke (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 341–74 (347).

³² O'Donnell, ‘Aphra Behn’, 347.

³³ ‘Letter of Mrs. Aphra Behn, the Poetess, to Tonson, the Bookseller’, Gentleman's Magazine, 159 (1836), 481–2.

³⁴ See M. Bell, ‘Restoration culture can be argued to have fed, rather than damped down, the marketability of “woman” as saleable commodity – in playhouse and brothel as well as in print’, in ‘Women Writing and Women Written’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4, edited by J. Barnard, D.F. McKenzie and M. Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 431–51 (439).

³⁵ J. Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 291. Tonson confirms his commissioning of a tribute from Behn, alongside tributes from Richard Duke, a Cambridge man and the playwright Thomas Otway, in a letter to his nephew and business partner, written over thirty years after the first publication of Creech's translation. See Jacob Tonson in Ten Letters by and about him, edited by S.L.C. Clapp (n.p. [Austin:] University of Texas Press, 1948), 9–12.

³⁶ Behn, Works, vol. 1, no. 11. Todd, who uses the 1683 second edition of T. Lucretius Carus as her copy-text in Works, prints the variants from the version of the poem published in Behn's Poems on Several Occasions (1684) immediately following.

³⁷ Stapleton, Admired and Understood, 92–3.

³⁸ Poems on Several Occasions, 50. In the following discussion, quotations from ‘To the Unknown Daphnis’ derive from Todd's edition of Behn's Works, and are cited by line number in the text. Quotations from ‘To Mr. Creech’ derive from Behn's Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1684) and are referenced by page number. Quotations from Creech's translation of De rerum natura derive from T. Lucretius Carus, The Epicurean Philosopher (Oxford, 1683), hereafter ‘Creech’, and are cited by page number. I use the following abbreviations: PSO (Poems on Several Occasions, 1684) and CGD (Covent Garden Drolery, 1672).

³⁹ See above, n. 21.

⁴⁰ S. Revard discusses Behn's use of the Pindaric in her ode to Creech, but does not comment on the poem's tripartite form. See S.P. Revard, ‘Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and the Female Pindaric’, in Representing Women in Renaissance England, edited by C.J. Summers and T. Pebworth (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 227–41 (236–41). The poem is discussed in detail by Todd, Secret Life, 290–94; Chernaik, Sexual Freedom, 166–9; and Snider, ‘Atoms and Seeds’, 3–4, 13–24.

⁴¹ Chernaik, Sexual Freedom, 168. Todd reads the lines as comic, whereas Stapleton reads them as drolly disingenuous. See Todd, Secret Life, 293, and Stapleton, Admired and Understood, 114–15.

⁴² A. Bradstreet, ‘The Author to her Book’, The Works of Anne Bradstreet, edited by J. Hensley (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 221; M. Cavendish, ‘The Preface to the Reader’, in The World's Olio (1655), sigs. A4r–v. My thanks to Claudia Marquis and Liam Semler for these references.

⁴³ For a different approach to these lines, see Snider, ‘Atoms and Seeds’, 19–21, and C. Barash, English Women's Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 104–5.

⁴⁴ See Clucas, ‘The Atomism of the Cavendish Circle’, and P. Anstey, ‘Boyle on Seminal Principles’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 33 (2002), 597–630.

⁴⁵ A theological framework buttressed the mechanical philosophy of Descartes and his successors. For Robert Boyle, seeds and their behaviour ‘can only be satisfactorily explained by appeal to God’ (Anstey, ‘Boyle’, 606).

⁴⁶ See above, note 3.

⁴⁷ For the idea of certain seventeenth-century female authors as forming a ‘counter-public’, see the Introduction to C. Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate in Seventeenth-Century Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

⁴⁸ Todd, Secret Life, 293.

⁴⁹ Ferguson interprets the last four lines of this stanza as alluding to Milton's portrayal of Eve in Paradise Lost, in “With All Due Reverence and Respect to the Word of God”, 203. Barash reads the lines as containing a ‘deft echo of both Paradise Lost and Dryden's State of Innocence’, in English Women's Poetry, 105. To the onlooking Satan, Milton's Adam and Eve appear ‘lords of all … though both/ Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed;/ For contemplation he and valour formed,/ For softness she and sweet attractive grace’: J. Milton, Paradise Lost, edited by A. Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), Book IV, ll. 290–98.

⁵⁰ I am grateful to Jane Spencer for suggesting the analogy with Keats's poem.

⁵¹ An unrecorded variant in a copy of the third edition of T. Lucretius Carus, The Epicurean Philosopher, held in the Auckland City Library, New Zealand, reads, ‘Wanton and disturb'd as Summers Breeze’ (sig. C2r, line 53).

⁵³ The Works of John Wilmot, 389. Compare ‘And so it was that the lively force of his mind won its way, and he passed on far beyond the fiery walls of the world, and in mind and spirit traversed the boundless whole’, Lucretius on the Nature of Things, translated by C. Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), 29.

⁵² The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, edited by H. Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), lines 46, 66–9. My emphasis.

⁵⁴ Todd, Secret Life, 291–2.

⁵⁵ R. Kroll, Restoration Drama and “The Circle of Commerce”: Tragicomedy, Politics and Trade in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 2.

⁵⁶ Works, vol. 1, 383.

⁵⁷ ‘Letter of Mrs. Aphra Behn’, 48.

⁵⁸ Greer, Uncollected Verse, 171; Chernaik, Sexual Freedom, 167; Barash, English Women's Poetry, 104 n13. When discussing the poem in Secret Life, Todd quotes from the version of 1684.

⁵⁹ For a general background to the debate and more particularly Robert Boyle's engagement in the theological debate about the limits of reason in texts such as The Reconcileableness of Reason and Religion (1675) and Advices in Judging of Things said to Transcend Reason (1681), see for example J. Wojick, Robert Boyle and the Limits of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also T. Holden, ‘Robert Boyle On Things Above Reason’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 15:2 (2007), 283–312. For the Restoration debate on ‘rational religion,’ see J. Spurr, ‘“Rational Religion” in Restoration England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 49 (1988), 563–85.

⁶⁰ P. Salzman, ‘Aphra Behn: Poetry and Masquerade’, in Aphra Behn Studies, 109–29 (121).

⁶¹ Todd, Secret Life, 292.

⁶² M.A. O'Donnell, Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2004), BA1.1a.

⁶³ This argument was first made in Covent Garden Drollery: A Miscellany of 1672, edited by G. Thorn-Drury (London: PJ and AE Dobell, 1928), xvii–xviii. The case for Behn's editorship of the collection is accepted by S. Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), 126–7; Todd, Secret Life, 156–8; and M.A. O'Donnell, ‘Aphra Behn: The Documentary Record’, in Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, 1–11 (5).

⁶⁴ O'Donnell, ‘Aphra Behn: The Documentary Record’, 5.

⁶⁵ P. Hammond, The Making of Restoration Poetry (Cambridge: DS Brewer, 2006), 66. See also Hammond's essay, ‘The Prologue and Epilogue to Dryden's Marriage A-la Mode and the Problem of Covent Garden Drolery’, PBSA, 81 (1987), 155–72 (159 n8).

⁶⁶ O'Donnell, Aphra Behn Bibliography, BB21.

⁶⁷ Cited in O'Donnell, Aphra Behn Bibliography, 253.

⁶⁸ Spencer, Aphra Behn's Afterlife, 32–43.

⁶⁹ Behn, Works, vol.1, no. 5, ll. 1–6. Further line references are cited in the body of the text. Todd prints line 5 as it appears in the first issue of CGD, where it reads erroneously ‘His cause I love’. The second issue attributed to ‘A.B.’ corrects the line to ‘’Tis cause I love’. Yet Todd states in her Textual Introduction and Notes that she takes the second issue of CGD as her copy-text (xli, 376).

⁷⁰ For ease of reference I quote the modernized version of Behn's poem in Aphra Behn: Selected Poems, edited by M. Hicks, Fyfield Books (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1993), 79–80, lines 1–6. Further references are given in the text.

⁷¹ See above, note 1.

⁷³ Salzman, ‘Aphra Behn’, 115.

⁷² Salzman, ‘Aphra Behn’, 115; Behn, Works, vol. 1, 462.

⁷⁴ Behn, Works, vol.1, xliii–xliv.

⁷⁵ Cited in O'Donnell, Aphra Behn Bibliography, 254.

⁷⁶ Salzman, ‘Aphra Behn’, 119.

⁷⁷ M. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by M. Butler and J. Todd (London: Pickering, 1989), vol. 5, 146 n. See Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue, 1–2.

⁷⁸ Ellenzweig, Fringes of Belief, 54; Behn, Works, vol. 4 (1993), 78.

⁷⁹ See Chernaik, Sexual Freedom, Chapter 5, ‘My Masculine Part: Aphra Behn and the Androgynous Imagination’.

⁸⁰ Cf. Snider, ‘Atoms and Seeds’, 14 n12 and Stapleton: ‘Most current studies of Behn do not discuss her libertinism in a sustained fashion. None to my knowledge analyze her Lucretian influence’ (Admired and Understood, 216 n10). Snider's article and Stapleton's monograph are significant steps in this direction, although Stapleton focuses chiefly on Behn's Poems on Several Occasions (1684) rather than on her drama, fiction or translations.

For their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay, I am grateful to Rose Lovell-Smith, Mary Paul, Mark Houlahan and Tiffany Stern. The comments and criticisms made by two readers for Intellectual History Review were invaluable. Above all, I thank Peter Anstey and Jocelyn Harris for their constructive editorial suggestions.