‘Where Lies this Power Divine?’: The Representation of Kingship in Aphra Behn's Early Tragicomedies

Abstract

This article argues that Behn's two early tragicomedies The Young King (probably written in the 1660s but not staged until 1679) and The Forc'd Marriage (1670) provide critiques of divine right kingship as astute and incisive as that found in their immediate successor, The Amorous Prince (1671). It demonstrates that these plays reveal Behn's serious reservations about royalist political theory in the first decade after the Restoration and also, perhaps, given The Young King's belated first performance in 1679, during the early stages of the Exclusion Crisis.

Style and chronology: A stylometric investigation of Aphra Behn’s dramatic style and the dating of The Young King

“…She finds plot features and character types, such as druids, to have equivalents in other 1660s plays. Narrative continuities with Behn’s plays from the early 1670s are also cited as evidence for an earlier (pre-1676) composition date (Owen, 2004; Pacheco, 2015). Attempting to explain the delay between composition and performance/publication, Todd and Hughes (2004: 84) suggest that Behn shelved the play after observing the failure of a similar work, Edward Howard’s The Women’s Conquest in c.1670, in keeping with Behn’s sensitivity to the literary marketplace.…”

“…Likely areas of revision relate to themes and character traits (e.g. anti-religious sentiment), rather than specific scenes or acts (Pacheco, 2015: 322). Owen (1996: 304) finds no ‘signs of immaturity’, and suggests Behn may have edited the play, perhaps quite extensively, in the late 1670s to enhance its ‘topicality’ for current events.…”