OROONOKO, THE ROVER AND OTHER WORKS

CHRONOLOGY

1640? Aphra Johnson probably born in Canterbury, Kent, the daughter of a barber or inn-keeper, Bartholomew Johnson, and his wife Elizabeth.

1642 Outbreak of the Civil War and closing of the theatres.

1649 Charles I beheaded.

1651 Charles II with mainly Scottish troops defeated by Cromwell at the Battle of Worcester; Charles escaped and en route to the Continent hid in oak tree. Lord Willoughby established a colony in Surinam; encouraged settlers, imported slaves.

1653 Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector (died 1658).

1660 Charles II restored to the throne. He founded two theatre companies.

1663/4 She probably visited Willoughby’s colony and encountered William Scot, son of a regicide.

Probably began her play The Young King.

c. 1664 Probably married a London merchant of German extraction; he died or disappeared soon after. By 1666 is signing her name ‘A. Behn.’

December: outbreak of the Great Plague in London.

1665 John Dryden and Sir Robert Howard’s The Indian Emperor produced.

1666 Second Dutch War between England and Holland. July: sent to Antwerp to obtain information about the Dutch from Scot. In debt by late 1666; Scot in a Dutch prison.

2 September: start of the Great Fire of London.

1667 Returned to England, heavily in debt, and may briefly have been imprisoned.

John Milton published Paradise Lost.

1670 First play, The Forc’d Marriage, staged by the Duke’s Company; published the following year.

1671 The Amorous Prince performed and published; published poem to a fellow-playwright Edward Howard.

1672 Published Covent Garden Drolery, a collection of theatrical material, including several poems.

Royal African Company established. Over the next years it shipped thousands of slaves to Barbados in particular.

1673 The Dutch Lover, third performed play, published with an angry preface complaining she had been attacked because she was a woman.

1674–5 May have been kept by a lover John Hoyle, a bisexual lawyer, who seems to have been important to her over several years.

1676 Only tragedy, Abdelazer, performed, based on an earlier play; published the following year. The Town-Fopp, also based on an earlier play, performed.

1677 Another adaptation, The Debauchee, performed. Then The Rover, her most successful play, based on Thomas Killigrew’s Thomaso, or the Wanderer (1664); published anonymously at first, later under her name.

1678 Sir Patient Fancy, one of her bawdiest plays, performed; published with a preface answering charges of plagiarism and bawdiness.

Popish Plot, a largely imaginary plot by which Roman Catholics were to oust Charles II.

1679 The Feign’d Curtizans performed with a prologue making clear her court sympathies; dedicated to Nell Gwyn, Charles II’s mistress. The Young King possibly produced.

1680 Dryden published her poem ‘A Paraphrase on Oenone to Paris’ in his Ovid’s Epistles.

The Revenge, another adaptation, performed. The Second Part of the Rover performed with politically committed prologue; published the following year. Death of the poet the Earl of Rochester, for whom she wrote an elegy.

1681 Song. To a New Scotch Tune published, part of the government’s propaganda against the Whigs. The False Count performed; published the following year. She was described as disputing for ‘the Royal Cause’. Adaptation The Roundheads, her most extreme Tory play, performed; published the following year.

1681–2 Exclusion Crisis: Parliament Whigs tried to exclude Roman Catholic James from the throne. Charles II opposed them. The crisis brought about the creation of the first political parties, Whigs and Tories.

1682 The City-Heiress performed, again including a satire of Whigs. Wrote poem to the aristocratic poet Anne Wharton who had praised her Rochester elegy. Published prologue to Like Father, Like Son, a lost play, and prologue and epilogue to Romulus and Hersilia; the epilogue to the latter referred ungraciously to Charles II’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, and notices for the arrest of Behn and the actress speaking the lines were issued. If they were incarcerated, they seem to have been speedily freed.

Merging of the two dramatic companies, renamed the United Company; fewer new plays now required.

1683 The Young King published. ‘To the Unknown Daphnis’ published: a poem in praise of Thomas Creech’s translation of Lucretius which, in a later printed version, declared her religious scepticism.

Discovered June: Rye-House Plot to assassinate Charles II and his brother James.

1684 Prologue written to Rochester’s Valentinian. First part of Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister published anonymously. Poems upon Several Occasions published: her only single-authored collection of poems, it included her long adaptation from the French, Voyage to the Island of Love.

1685 6 February: Death of Charles II and accession of James II. Failed rebellion of Monmouth, whom many Protestants wished to see as king in place of the Catholic James.

Wrote Pindarick on the Death of Charles II, Poem to Catharine Queen Dowager and A Pindarick on the Happy Coronation of… James II. Anonymously published second part of Love-Letters. Under own name published a poem in praise of Thomas Tryon’s The Way to Health, Long Life, and Happiness; a collection of poems by several hands including her own, called Miscellany, together with a translation of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims entitled Seneca Unmasqued.

Appealed to the United Company treasurer for an advance on her next play.

1686 Play The Luckey Chance performed.

Possibly helped compile the manuscript ‘Astrea’s Book for Songs and Satyrs’, a collection of satires now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; published another French adaptation, La Montre: or the Lover’s Watch.

1687 The pantomimic The Emperor of the Moon performed.