Aphra Behn and the Roundheads

Abstract

The unacknowledged fact is that Aphra Behn frequently identified herself s a prophet. In the dedicatory pistle to The Roundheads (1682), for example, she begged the priv ileges of the Prophets ... of old, to predict the future and admonish the populace. To the newly ascended James II she boasted, Long with Prophetick Fire, Resolved and Bold,/ Your Glorious FATE and FORTUNE I foretold.^ When the Whigs drove James from power and installed William of Orange in his place, she represented herself standing mournfully, like the Excluded Prophet on the Forsaken Barren Shore.3 In these and other instances, Behn clearly and consciously drew upon a long-standing tradition in English letters of associating poets with prophets. But the figure of the prophet cannot be isolated to that literary tra dition at this time in England, particularly when are talking about a woman struggling to assert her own literary authority. We often remember Behn as the first profession al woman writer, but more frequently forget that she wrote in the wake of several hundred religious women writ ers, self-styled prophetesses, and visionaries who had been publishing in the burgeoning capitalist marketplace for many years before her. Although the poet herself remarked of religion, we have scare other Theme; 'tis grown so gener al a Mode, that even the Sword-men are now fiercer dis putants than heretofore the lazier Gown-men were, most