Tragedy and tragicomedy

Abstract

As a dramatist, Aphra Behn is now chiefly celebrated for witty, libertine comedies which give the woman's view of the sexually predatory male and the cunning female. When she began her career, however, sex comedy had not evolved, and all three of her first plays - The Young King (probably first performed in 1679), The Forc'd Marriage (1670) and The Amorous Prince (1671) - were tragicomedies. This was the prevailing mode in the 1660s, when she must for the first time have watched plays on the public English stage. An odd segmented form, in which melodrama was followed by romance, tragicomedy perfectly suited the obsession of early Restoration royalist dramatists with representing the recent reverses and triumphs of the British monarchy: the restored Charles II arising from the ashes of his executed father. Despite the obvious moral failings of the new king and the political blunders of his first decade and despite the appearance of restrained criticism of unwise royal love in the mid-1660s, the restoration of the hero-king remained a dominant dramatic subject until 1671, though with increasing attention to its less than heroic consequence. Amorous princes Behn’s three early tragicomedies are united in themes as well as form, depicting the heroic as quintessentially male. The first two plays trace male supremacism to its origins in warrior communities whose values are dictated by strength and soldierly prowess: a simple feudal world of aristocracy, male bonding, oaths, and romance. While portraying the glamour of this world, Behn criticizes it and its warrior cult as fierce and inimical to women, who are reduced to objects of ritual exchange. Later plays develop and refine the vision of her early attempts.

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