United States or Djibouti ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Gosse's excellent and classic essay on Otway: 'The choice of the part showed the kindly tact of the shrewd Mrs. Behn. The king had to speak the few first words, to which the audience never listens, to make some brief replies in the first scene, and then not to speak again until the end of the fourth act. It was quite a crucial test, and Otway proved his entire inability to face the public.
Is it not strange that I, an old woman, sitting in my own room, am positively ashamed and disgusted at the scenes and conversations which were read aloud to me in mixed companies, without a blush or shudder, when I was eighteen?" Now, in Shakspeare's time, there was no female in the land that would have stumbled at the grossest passages in Assa Behn.
Behn protested against the evils of the slave trade through the medium of a story which may be considered a forerunner of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." To interest the public in a distant country or an abstract principle, the novel is the most effective literary means. A treatise on the slave trade by Mrs.
His tragedies Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage and Oroonoko , both founded on tales by Mrs. Aphra Behn, are powerful presentations of human suffering. His comedies are amusing, but gross. Southerne had business ability enough to make play-writing pay, and the amounts he received for his productions fairly staggered his friend Dryden.
Behn, however strong and truthful, would have met with the little attention which is accorded to the sufferings of a distant and unknown people. But the novel has the advantage over the treatise, that it deals with the particular and not the general, with the individual and not the nation.
The story, simple in itself, becomes striking in the hands of Mrs. Behn. The hut of the old negro king is given the brilliancy of an Eastern court, and his harem is copied after that of a Turkish potentate.
Many books, written for temporary effect, had run through six or seven editions, and had then been gathered to the novels of Afra Behn, and the epic poems of Sir Richard Blackmore.
Her warnings were disregarded, and giving up her patriotic occupation, she returned to London, and devoted herself to literature. She died in 1689, and was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey: "Covered only with a marble stone, with two wretched verses on it." Although Mrs. Behn is now almost forgotten, her position in her own time was not inconsiderable.
"Here is invincible patience recommended under the worst of misery; indefatigable application and undaunted resolution under the greatest and most discouraging circumstances." And such is the moral of Defoe's own life. Mrs. Heywood had written a number of stories resembling, in the licentiousness of their character and the flimsiness of their construction, the novels of Mrs. Behn.
Ravenscroft, and some other poets, taking compassion on him, sent the author recommendatory verses, which are printed before that play, and in return he writ a Pindarique to Mrs. Behn, which she printed in a Collection of Poems 1685.
Word Of The Day