The Ten Pleasures of Marriage 1 – Behn · Verses Across
Literature · Humor
The Ten Pleasures of Marriage 1London: Mcmxxii
18
Literature · Humor
The Ten Pleasures of Marriage 1
London: Mcmxxii
BehnEnglish
PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR THE NAVARRE SOCIETY LIMITED
Printed in Great Britain
INTRODUCTION
The Restoration brought back to England something more than a king and the theatre. It renewed in English life the robust vitality of humour which had been repressed under the Commonwealth--though, in spite of repression, there were, even among the Puritan divines, men like the author of Joanereidos, whose self-expression ran the whole gamut from freedom to licentiousness.
It is a curious thing, that fundamental English humour. It can be vividly concentrated into a single word, as when, for instance, the chronicler of The Ten Pleasures of Marriage revives the opprobrious term for a tailor--"pricklouse": the whole history of the English woollen industry and of the stuffy Tudor and Stuart domestic architecture is in the nickname. Or a single phrase can light up an idea, as when, a few days before marriage, "the Bridegroom is running up and down like a dog." But, on the other hand, the spirit manifests itself sometimes in exuberance, as when Urquhart and Motteux metagrobolized Rabelais into something almost more tumescent and overwhelming than the original. In that vein of humour the present work frequently runs. The author is as ready to pile up his epithets as Urquhart himself. Let the Nurse go, he says, "for then you'll have an Eater, a Stroy-good, a Stufgut, a Spoil-all, and Prittle-pratler, less than you had before."
It is, in fact, as an example of English humour--exaggerated, no doubt, by the reaction from Puritanism--that The Ten Pleasures of Marriage should be viewed, in the main. It is true, however, that it is of uncertain parentage and must own to foreign kin. A well-known but (by a strange coincidence) almost equally rare book is Antoine de la Salle's Quinze Joies de Mariage. It seems possible that this was translated into English. At any rate, in the year in which The Ten Pleasures was published--1682-1683--the following work was registered at Stationers' Hall: The Woman's Advocate, or fifteen real comforts of matrimony, being in requital of the late fifteen sham comforts. Moreover, The Ten Pleasures was in all probability printed abroad--Hazlitt thinks at The Hague or Amsterdam. The very first page in the original edition contains one of several hints of Batavian production--"younger" is printed "jounger." The curious allusion to the great French poet, Clément Marot, may also suggest a temporary foreign sojourn for the author for though Marot was doubtless known to English readers in the seventeenth century, the exact reference of the allusion is not at all obvious. It very possibly reflects on the fact that in 1526 the Sorbonne condemned both Marot and his poem Colloque de l'abbé et de la femme sçavante; and Marot certainly wrote about women and marriage. He is not, however, a "stock" figure in English literary allusion, either learned or popular, and the fact suggests at least familiarity with the literature of other countries.
But there can be no doubt of the English character of the text both in general and in detail. It is redolent of English middle-class life as it was in the days before our grandfathers decided that the human body was an obscene thing and its functions deplorable. It has the middle-class love of good food--Colchester oysters (famous then as now), asparagus, peaches, apricots, candied ginger, China oranges, comfits, pancakes--enough to make the mouth water. It has the solid English furniture, with all its ritual of solemnity; "vallians" (valences), "daslles" (tassels), big bedsteads, Chiny-ware, plush chairs, linen cupboards. It has all the fuss of preparation for childbirth--the accumulations of wrappings, the obstetric furniture, the nods and winks of the midwife and the gossips, authentic ancestors of Mrs Sarah Gamp and Mrs Elizabeth Prig--why, the haste to fetch the midwife at the crisis might almost be the foundation upon which Dickens built the visit of Seth Pecksniff, Esq., to Kingsgate Street, High Holborn.
It has likewise many touches which show knowledge of the average fairly prosperous English life--the merchant's, the shopkeeper's, the sea-captain's. The author clearly knew the routine of trade. He knew that at New Year's Day the "day-book" had to be fully written up for scrutiny and stock-taking and sending out of accounts. (But the pleasures or torments of love are such that "the squire is so full of business that he can't spare half-an-hour to write it out." The brief description of his feelings which follows, conventional, perhaps, to some extent, has a certain life in it, as if the writer, embittered, was recalling his own youthful experience.) He knew, too, what to-day we only know in the mass through the newspapers, that a merchant's business depends not only upon watching the markets, but upon the actual supply of material--"what commodities are arrived or expected," and whether tea is up ½d. or tin ¾d. down, or if hogs closed firm. The commercial world changes only its methods of communication and expression.
The first chapter, indeed, is of genuine historical and literary interest. From the literary point of view, it is a near descendant--collateral, if not direct, and anyhow based on the same English empirical humour of life--of Thomas Overbury's A Wife (1614--only one unique copy of this is known to exist), John Earle's Microcosmographie (1628), in prose, and Thomas Bastard's Chrestoleros* (1598), in verse. It is an early instance of the stringing together, in a connected narrative, of the material previously used only in short sketches or "characters"; and so it is directly in the succession which in the end produced what is perhaps the most enduring and individual phenomenon in our literature--the English novel.
* A copy of the very rare first edition fetched £155 at the Britwell sale in February 1922.
Of course the book says things we do not say now openly--though the traditional corpus scriptorum nondum scriptorum which almost all men and even some women know is handed on, a rather noisome torch, from generation to generation, solely by word of mouth, and flickers now and again in The Ten Pleasures. But they were said openly then, and by great writers. There is nothing here so nauseatingly indecent as the viler poems of the Rev. Robert Herrick and the Very Rev. the Dean of Dublin, Jonathan Swift, D.D. There are salacious hints, there are bawdy words, but no more than Falstaff or the wife of Bath or the Summoner or Tom Jones might have used--less, on the whole. There is no need, to borrow a phrase from the book's sequel, to "make use of the gesture of casting up the whites of the eyes." "True-hearted souls will solace their spirits with a little laughter, and never busy their brains with the subversion of Church and State government."
Certainly the writer favoured the jovial life. Food and wine flow in his pages like milk and honey in Canaan. There is no room in his house for the Puritans, not even, apparently, in the bringing up of his child. "Those that frequent Mr Baxter's Puritanical Holding-forth" must be merry when they come to his feast. He will have no Catechizing of Families--a discourse published by Richard Baxter in this very year 1683; and the only Compassionate Counsel--a Baxter pamphlet of 1681--he is likely to offer to young men is to take life lightly, as his hero does, and above all, not to marry.
For that is the true point of this lively piece of irony (the irony is less well sustained in the sequel, The Confession of the New Married Couple, and dropped altogether in the bitter Letter at the end of The Ten Pleasures). It is a savage attack upon women--upon (to quote a Rabelaisian sentence) "the quarrelsome, crabbed, lavish, proud, opinionated, domineering and unbridled nature of the female sex." Women, he says, "are in effect of less value than old Iron, Boots and Shoes, etc., for we find both Merchants and money ready always to buy those commodities." The analogy is an unfortunate one, for one of his implications is that women can easily be bought. But he--if it is a "he"--is in deadly earnest. Love, marriage, he asks scornfully--what are they? A romance, are they? The true happiness of life? Very well: here are the pleasures of them. You will be in love and make a match--and look at all the worry of the settlement, in which, by the way, you may often be defrauded. You will get married--a fine ceremony, with a fine feast; and all the nasty old women of the neighbourhood will come and tell bawdy stories to enliven the occasion. You get married, and thereafter you are at the mercy of your wife, who will indulge your wishes or not as suits her mood. Your house will be all awry if she has but a slight headache. When the baby comes, the place will be filled with old women and baby-linen and medical apparatus, and you will have all the anxieties of a father added to the discomforts of a neglected husband. For the rest, your wife will know how "to cuckold, jilt, and sham" as well as any gay lady of Covent Garden. And so on.
Much of the satire is acute and well-turned, often novel in expression if not in thought. But it is, as has been suggested, in the picture of English middle-class life under James II. that the importance of the book lies. Here is the domestic side of what the great diarists and the great poets hint at, and the excess of which municipal records, those treasuries of private appearances in public, chronicle with the severity of judgment. You have the young couple going (alas that the river for this purpose has, so to speak, been moved farther up its own course!) for a row on the Thames, with Lambeth, Bankside and Southwark echoing to their laughter. They might visit the New Spring Gardens at Vauxhall; but they would probably avoid the old (second) Globe Theatre on Bankside, for it was a meeting-house at which the formidable Baxter preached. Or they might go into Kent and pick fruit, even as "beanfeasters" do to this day; or to Hereford for its cider and perry, the drinking of which is a custom not yet extinct. Or maybe only for an outing to the pleasant village of Hackney. They would see the streets gay with signs which (outside Lombard Street) few houses but taverns wear to-day--the sign of the Silkworm or the Sheep, or that fantastic schoolmaster's emblem, the Troubled Pate with a crown upon it. And when they stopped for rest at the sign of a bush upon a pole, how they would fall to upon the Martinmas beef, the neats-tongues, the cheesecakes! It is true they might find prices high and crops poor; but such things must be.... "This is the use, custom, and fruits of war. If the impositions and taxes run high, the country farmer can't help that; you know that the war costs money, and it must be given, or else we should lose all." Had they learnt that as long ago as 1682?
As a genre work the book is not unique; rather is it typical. The gradual social settlement after the Civil War, destined to develop into stagnation under the first Georges, caused didactic works, guides to manners, housewifery and sport, society handbooks, to proliferate. The Ten Pleasures mentions some standard works, which every good housewife would probably possess--Nicholas Culpepper's medical handbooks, for instance, and The Complete Cook, which indeed, as part of The Queen's Closet Opened, had reappeared in its natal year 1682-1683. The same year saw the birth of such works as The Complete Courtier, The Complete Compting House, The Gentleman Jockey, The Accomplished Ladies' Delight. Life was being scheduled, tabulated, in readiness for the complacent century about to open. It was also being explored, not only in such works as The Ten Pleasures and The Woman's Advocate, but in others (entered as published, but in many cases not known to be now extant) like The Wonders of the Female World, The Swaggering Damsel, or Several New Curtain Lectures, and Venus in ye smoake, or, the nunn in her smock, in curious dialogues addressed to the lady abbesse of love's parradice--all produced in that same annus mirabilis of outspoken domesticity.
The Ten Pleasures, apart from its intrinsic interest, is exceptionally important from a book-collector's point of view. It is of the utmost rarity. There is no copy in the British Museum and none in the Cambridge University Library. In fact, there are only two copies known of the whole work--one in the Bodleian (wanting one plate), and that from which the present text is taken. The Huth Collection had a copy of the first part only. Both the fuller copies contain the second part--The Confession--and evidently the two parts, though they have separate title pages, and were published at different times, were intended to form a complete work.
Who wrote the book? "A. Marsh, Typogr. [apher]," says the title page. A. Marsh cannot be traced, nor is the work included in the Stationers' Registers for the period. It may be that Marsh thought it too licentious for registration (an improbable supposition), and so, as Hazlitt suggests, printed it abroad.
But the initials A.B. at the end of the Letter in the first part may be a clue, though a perplexing one. It is a plausible guess that they are those of Aphra or Aphara Behn, the dramatist and poet, the first woman to earn her living by her pen. It is true that she was, so to speak, a feminist: the preface and epilogue to her Sir Patient Fancy speak bitterly of those who would not go to her plays because they were by a woman. On the other hand, she had a free pen, to say the least of it, and often a witty one. And she had Dutch associations. Her husband was a Dutch merchant living in London. She had herself been on secret service in the Netherlands. She translated a Dutch book on oracles. If the book was printed in Holland, she of all people could get the work done. And she knew the city of London intimately.
There are, too, some odd details in her plays, especially in Sir Patient Fancy, which recall touches in The Ten Pleasures. She introduces a Padua doctor on the stage. She shows, in several of her plays, a curious interest in medicine, especially quack medicine. Sir Patient, a hypochondriac, thinks he is swelling up like the "pipsy" husband. Isabella, in the same play, says "keeping begins to be as ridiculous as matrimony.... The insolence and expense of their mistresses has almost tired out all but the old and doting part of mankind." It is not inconceivable that in a freakish or embittered moment this singular woman threw herself with malicious joy into an attack on her own sex.
"Love in fantastic triumph sat...." Aphra Behn's great lyric deservedly lives. If she wrote The Ten Pleasures, the sort of love she describes in it still lives, but hardly in fantastic triumph. Yet if we want to know our fellow-men, we must know something of it. Apart from the curious interest of its rarity, The Ten Pleasures is a sturdy piece of human nature.
