‘This Play will be mine A[rse]’: Aphra Behn’s Jonsonian Negotiations

Aphra Behn (?1640–89), née Johnson, was auspiciously named. Thomas Colepeper (1626–97) pronounced her ‘a most beautifull woman, & a most Excellent Poet’, adding that ‘she might be called Ben Jonson. Behn’s theoretical resentments and rebellions, however, appear better suited to Shakespeare’s Sister. She engages with Jonson and his admirers in her prologues, prefaces and postscripts, where she expresses her views on theatre in general, and on her own unprecedented case: there had been woman dramatists in England before, but none had earned her living by the pen. Most early modern critics expressed deep concern with theatre’s effect on society. Jonson’s convictions on drama’s ethical influence harmonise with the Ars Poetica of Horace (65–8 bc), whose admonition that poetry should mix ‘utile dulci’ (instruction with delight) became a staple of neoclassical criticism (Fairclough, 1955: 478). The patronising simile sets Shakespeare, nature, inspiration, and femininity on one side of the creative divide, with Ben Jonson, art, reason, and masculinity on the other.