Behn's Jonson

This article re-evaluates Aphra Behn’s involvement in the establishment of Ben Jonson’s Restoration heritage. Behn, like many of her contemporaries, used Jonson as a guide for considering the competing merits of comedy in a Horatian or Renaissance humanist mode – which could offer profit as well as delight – alongside more immediately physical varieties of popular comic theatre such as farce. I argue that Behn’s comic practice drew on an intimate knowledge of Jonson’s oeuvre and sought to harness the ludic energy of farce – which thrived through its ability to provoke a laughter freed from moral responsibility – for a comic theatre with clear ethical purpose. That practice was, this article shows, best expressed in The Second Part of the Rover (1681), a play that is profoundly moral in its excoriation of both the patriarchal marriage system and the libertine ideal, but that is also irreducibly farcical in key aspects of its staging. Analysing II Rover alongside Jonson’s Volpone, I offer a reading of a Behn who knew her Ben far better than her contemporaries and later generations of critics have generally recognised.