Studies in Philology

Abstract:

This article contends that the siting of the play's 1670 performance figures in the meaning it had for a contemporary audience, that the place of the stage articulates one aspect of its plot. The first part of the essay argues that as a performance site, the theater in Lincoln's Inn Fields operates as commentary on the vanishing feudal world Behn represents on stage. Although Behn sets the play far from London, its action takes place in the shadow of urbanization that is the obverse of the courtly setting it both idealizes and mocks. The site itself encodes an important meaning about the nature of urban modernity for Behn and her contemporaries. The essay shows how the apparent privileging of martial valor in The Forc'd Marriage is counterpointed by an almost burlesque version of a swaggering aggression all too familiar to Londoners. Behn's critics generally treat the play as the matrix from which her later preoccupations arise, or as a critique of the male power that would compel marriage against the will of youthful protagonists, or they highlight the politics embedded in the tale of absolutist rule. This account emphasizes instead the thinness of the line that separates male heroics from absurd histrionics, or, at one remove, from bawdy-house riots and other forms of urban violence.