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The country-house poem displays the high moral character of the owner through the beauty and productivity of his estate. To examine the theme of women’s tributes to other women in this difficult context (for few women could own property and therefore are marginalized or occluded in the genre), Jordan chooses two such attempts, by Anne Finch and by Jane Barker.In the opening section of her poem “To the Honourable the Lady Worsley at Long-Leate,” Finch is able to celebrate her friend as a paragon and an inspiration for her poetry. When she turns to place her subject in the estate setting at Longleat, however, its owner, Viscount Weymouth, comes to dominate the remaining, larger part of the poem, thereby overshadowing his earlier-luminous daughter, and consequently frustrating its aspect as a tribute to her.Jordan finds Jane Barker more successful in celebrating the Countess of Exeter in book dedications, the first version pirated in print, the later a more discreet and conventional revision for authorized publication. Details in the first allow Jordan to speculate that the countess is reflected in Barker’s prose narratives and on this basis can be complimented for her “stewardship”—a term often repeated in the argument—of the estate at Burghley House. As Jordan observes, almost no documentation survives about Lady Exeter, so whether supervisory and decision-making activities at Burghley extended beyond the usual household management is unknown.While Abdelazer (1676; pub. 1677) is arguably one of Behn’s best and most neglected plays, and The False Count (1681; pub. 1682) shows Behn’s fine hand with outrageous farce, Birchwood’s article does little to enhance their positions in Behn’s canon or to assist the reader in understanding some of the Muslim undertones or “contexts” in these two plays. Birchwood’s thesis suggests that the two plays are deeply infused with such, but the reader comes away with scraps of new information and little with which to make connections.Setting the two Behn plays between the beginning of the Exclusion Crisis and the slow ending of Titus Oates’s perjury spree (and the executions of over thirty innocent men), Birchwood tries to tie too much together. He provides a large dollop of information about contemporary tracts on Anglo-Muslim interrelations, some plot summary of the two plays, and some information about England’s relations with Northern Africa. Also highlighted in terms of the two plays is the politico-sexualized affect of the seraglio. As each paragraph generalizes on one of these topics, the expectation that the following paragraph will provide specific support is denied. For example, the second paragraph introduces the opening song for Abdelazer, and notes its “gory” metaphor, presumably the “Bleeding hearts” of line two. From this, Birchwood asserts that this “governing metaphor” provides a “standard correlation between the politic and the erotic, that is, between affairs of the heart and those of the state.” This is certainly an excellent encapsulation of the drama that is to unfold, and the reader expects this insight to be developed further. However, the next paragraph nods to the Siege of Rhodes and Behn’s reversal of the lustful pairing, as she re-creates the insatiably predatory Spanish queen. Yet even these ideas are not developed, neither here nor later. Instead, the fourth paragraph spends its time considering how Behn’s revision of Lust’s Dominion speaks “to contemporary anxieties of state and religion,” a generalization, like many others, that remains unsupported. The treatment of The False Count is equally as generalized.Chaskin takes on the vexing problem of Silvia’s gender-bending and shape-shifting through Behn’s three-volume exploration of the real-life scandal of Ford, Lord Grey of Werke’s elopement with his wife’s sister, Lady Henrietta Berkeley. Henrietta came from a staunch Tory family, while Grey was involved with Monmouth, Charles II’s bastard son, whose ill-fated rebellion against his uncle, James II, ended in Monmouth’s execution. Behn was writing almost to the moment as Monmouth’s activities became known. In the third volume, Behn’s narrator turns from Silvia’s plight to attend more to the rebellion, and develops a third-person narration, a change from the epistolary format of the first volume and the mixed epistolary/narrated format of the second. Chaskin relates these narrative shifts to Silvia’s gender slippage, relying heavily on the analyses of earlier critics. The argument suggests that the narrator must become more forceful as Silvia appears more masculine, and that this emerging masculinity and the narrator’s strong voice give Silvia agency. Up to a point, this works, especially if Behn’s switch of pronouns for Silvia from the feminine to the masculine was deliberate, and not a typographical error.Chaskin studies the scene wherein Silvia and Alonzo share a bed in an inn, Alonzo having mistaken Silvia for a charming youth. The narrator presents Silvia trying to conceal her sex as she slowly disrobes. Although the narrator leaves the reader uncertain as to Alonzo’s level of awareness, Silvia’s undressing is assisted by a trembling young page as the narrator gives a foreshortened blazon, the joys that Alonzo probably is sleeping through. Silvia is, however, pregnant, and the reference to her round white breasts reminds the reader of the absurdity of Silvia’s cross-dressing game, a game that reveals more her moral slippage than her gender slippage. Chaskin reads this scene as “the female body . . . disrupt[ting] the ‘consistence’ of Silvia’s characterization, not rakish masculinity.” Instead, Behn undercuts her “wannabe” female libertine by making her the object of the reader’s and the narrator’s ridicule.Griffin starts with Cynthia Richards’s 2013 essay on the extrajudicial execution of Oroonoko and invokes Richards’s question of why Behn risked reproducing such violence by representing it. In lieu of response, Griffin raises the kinds of public executions that Behn likely witnessed and suggests that she had in mind the decapitations of Charles I and Monmouth. She might well also have had in mind the beheading in 1680 of the Catholic Viscount Stafford, Henry Howard, whom Behn mourned in several of her writings and whom even the King himself could not keep from the swords of the Popish Plot. This represents a double shock: not only was Howard executed unjustly, but the King himself, in a collapse of sovereign rule, was powerless to stop it.Griffin also marshals literary, sociological, and philosophical thinking to investigate the merger and subsequent interrelated collapse of sovereign rule and enslavement: Catherine Gallagher on Oroonoko’s death, Ernst Kantorowicz on the King’s two bodies (“body politic” and “body natural”), Michel Foucault on “the spectacle of the scaffold,” and finally Giorgio Agamben on the “bare life” and the “civil life.” The civil life of the Surinam plantation is disrupted by the absence of the governor, a clear collapse of sovereign power in the story, and the loss of the king’s body politic in the form of his appointed governor allows Banister and Byam to violate the norms of civil life as they assume the sovereign power to destroy the Royal Prince’s body natural.That there is much to argue with in this essay is its virtue. However, while this article may help explain our twenty-first-century reactions to Oroonoko, it fails to explain Behn’s thinking when she wrote her story as prose narrative and chose not to stage it, raising the question of why she risked reproducing Richards’s haunting question if she didn’t intend on answering it.This article requires a good bit of patience. For the innumerate, it might be worth simply reading the introduction and the conclusion although even the innumerate will find the charts fascinating. The central issue is authorship of The Younger Brother, which was staged in 1695, six years after Behn’s death. Three key questions frame Hogarth and Evans’s study of how much Charles Gildon revised Behn’s The Younger Brother in production and in print: is the writing typical of Behn’s? is the writing consistent with Gildon’s dramatic writing? and can any of Gildon’s characteristics line up with what Gildon claims he altered?Gildon was open about his work on Behn’s play. In the dedication to Colonel Christopher Codrington, he discusses the failure of the play to capture the audiences (and revenues) he had hoped for, deflecting from himself responsibility and insisting that he made changes in the first act, revised “that old bustle about Whigg and Tory,” and added some “Rake-hell.” Hogarth and Evans find Gildon’s markers in the first act, as expected, and in the third act. Although Gildon claimed in another part of his revision of Langbaine that he altered part of the second act, this study does not support Gildon’s claim.Despite the alarming title, no sharp objects loom over this study of gender roles in Behn’s 1679 comedy. Instead, Menge argues that the primary romantic couples in The Feigned Courtesans—Marcella and Fillamour, Cornelia and Galliard—reflect contrasting models of masculinity. Fillamour embodies the conservative masculine ideal of the Stuart cavalier, vested in self-discipline, propriety, and the institutional authority of church and crown. Galliard is a classic libertine: lusty, inconstant, fiercely autonomous, and relying on his “pure sexual energy” for social dominance. When the play’s women challenge these men’s social and sexual authority by disguising themselves as courtesans, the shortcomings of Galliard’s libertine identity become all too clear. Outplaying Galliard at his own game, the female libertine Cornelia expertly manipulates his desires, disempowers him, and “in effect castrates him” by exposing his failure to control her sexuality or his own. By contrast, Fillamour’s masculinity derives from his public performance of patriarchal authority rather than raw libido, and his eventual marriage to Marcella reinforces the traditional gender hierarchy. In the age of Charles II, Menge observes, “masculine potency alone cannot maintain the sexual power dynamic.”Menge’s crisp, effective argument loses some coherence when she links these forms of masculinity more directly to English court politics in the 1670s. At first, Menge suggests that the play’s gender instability conveys “a longing for a stable government within an unstable country.” Fillamour evokes an early Stuart ideal of cavalier identity, bound up with “traditional English masculinity and thus traditional monarchy”—an ideal shattered by the English Civil War. The failed masculinity of Galliard, in turn, evokes Charles II and his libertine courtly culture, which has betrayed “the Royalist idea of a masculine sovereign” and brought about “the symbolic castration of the monarchy from its people and . . . from Protestantism.” Written in the wake of the Popish Plot, Behn’s play would seem to convey disappointment with Charles II, whose sexual energy failed to foster political renewal. Elsewhere, though, Menge intriguingly argues that both Fillamour and Galliard reflect aspects of Charles II. And the essay’s final pages bring a new twist. Behn’s Englishmen woo and marry Italian Catholic women in Rome; hence, “as Galliard cedes to Cornelia’s authority, so, too, should the monarchy and England cede to Catholicism.” The play’s clear Catholic sympathies might sustain such a reading, but does Behn both deplore and applaud Galliard’s crumpled masculinity? Perhaps so. As Menge points out, the playwright well knew that a reinvigorated Stuart patriarchalism could leave little scope for a Cornelia—or an Aphra Behn.Anthony WelchUniversity of TennesseeThis odd essay seems out of place for Shakespeare Studies and is not much more than a short review of the prefatory poems attached to Behn’s translation of La Montre. Five poems, probably by four different men, overexuberantly praise Behn’s spinning gold from dross. Two names are easily identified: Charles Cotton, whose translation of Montaigne’s essays Behn clearly used in Oroonoko, and Nahum Tate, poet and playwright who “translated” Girolamo Friscatoro’s poem on syphilis, happily revised King Lear, and with Nicholas Brady “Englished” the Psalms. Two unknowns, Rich Færrar, and “G. J.” and his likely alter ego “George Jenkins,” sign the third, fourth, and fifth poems respectively, all of which gush about Behn’s skills. These prefatory poems are quoted to show the emerging concept of originality even in translation and to underpin translation as an art. To study Behn and translation, one is better advised to re-read Dryden’s “Preface to Ovid’s Epistles.”A reader skimming this article could be forgiven for viewing it as a dry account of how feminist bibliography has changed for the better since the 1990s through the “the studies of the book trades” and the disciplined application of emerging knowledge of how book markets operated in the long eighteenth century, using Aphra Behn as a case study. Ozment argues that “consideration of Aphra Behn’s engagement in commercial writing demonstrates how feminist bibliography can dramatically shift narratives of women writers and alter the questions scholars are prepared to ask of these writers.” Such questions relate to modes of book production and the effect of commercial pressures on the market. A major concern is whether these pressures affected male and female writers similarly. Attentiveness to these questions can help clarify the conditions for publication for female writers and aid in attribution studies. Restoring the literary production of women writers to the material conditions of the marketplace assures that they remain part of the material record of that world.Such a reading, however, does not fully account for Ozment’s essay, which is ultimately about loss—the repeated “obscuring of women’s lives and works”; the loss of print editions of female-authored texts reissued in the 1990s; the loss of confidence among feminist scholars that this initial recovery would ensure the continued print availability of important female writers; and the “haphazard or woefully spare documentation” of women’s lives that makes it harder to pin down authorial attribution. Ozment spends the bulk of her article discussing issues of Behn’s canon and Leah Orr’s suggestion that several titles long associated with Behn, especially Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, might not be Behn’s. Ozment also addresses Germaine Greer’s suggestion that Behn suffered from predatory booksellers, especially Samuel Briscoe, in a form Greer called “literary pimping,” and brings to our attention Maureen Bell’s normative response to Greer, a response that should be better known by Behn scholars.Finally, Ozment seeks to stop a cycle of forgetting by making women’s role in the commercial book trade more apparent. Unfortunately, this refocusing also represents a loss, downplaying the role sexism played in that commercial trade as well as the significance of the work done by pioneering feminist bibliographers. Ozment risks forgetting the role gender plays in framing the work of women writers.With a nod to Venus and Adonis and Hero and Leander as models of female agency in the period preceding Behn’s, Rahman uses The Rover as the work in which Behn most clearly shows women supporting other women—and women attempting to exercise choice. This study relies heavily on the work of others, with so many quotations that the thesis gets lost in the support. The bibliography is also odd. For example, although it deserves more attention than it gets these days, Woodcock’s biography is relied on whereas Todd’s works, both the edition and the biography, are ignored. Thirteen of the seventeen sources listed date from the 1980s and 1990s—all respected sources, but good material on The Rover from the past two decades goes unnoticed.In establishing a series of triangulations, Rahman offers a conflicted trio of Hellena, the Church, and Don Pedro, with Don Pedro and the Church exercising male authority over Hellena. Don Pedro certainly is the overarching patriarchal authority, even as a brother—but the “Church” (the convent, the clergy, the Pope?) never gets to exercise any authority over Hellena, and remains simply a threat. Rahman contends that Hellena makes Willmore “finally succumb to her wishes.” Yet he rightly asserts that “Willmore also turns the tables on Hellena’s subjectivity” when he learns of her worth, and that his pledge to be constant “becomes dubious and Hellena’s success in making him agree to marriage is undermined.” Rahman sees Hellena’s fortune as the source of her agency to choose a husband “without the threat of being disowned without a penny.” Alas, all Hellena does with her fortune-driven agency is transfer control of her fortune from her father and brother to Willmore, only to lose both her fortune and her life as a plot device for Willmore’s adventures in the sequel, The Second Part of the Rover.Read’s argument is sound: “by making its seventeenth-century medical context an integral part of any analysis of [Aphra Behn’s] body of work, a modern reader can more deeply understand the main thematic concerns and characterizations that a seventeenth-century reader would take for granted.” What perplexes is this argument being represented as new or newly necessary, particularly in a special issue of Women’s Writing celebrating “the 350th anniversary of the staging of [Behn’s] first play” and promising “radical re-imaginings.” Behn criticism has long made historical context central to the significance of her work, and recently, some critics have turned their attention specifically to its medical context. Roberta Martin reads both Behn’s poetry and Oroonoko in the context of humoralism; Alvin Snider reads “On a Juniper Tree” as complicating mechanistic theories of the body. More broadly, the role of the new science in creating essentialized racial categories has shaped some of the most important work on Oroonoko. Disability studies has fueled a reappraisal of Behn’s The Dumb Virgin (1698/1700) and The Unfortunate Bride; or, A Blind Lady (1698/1700). Read fails not only to refer to Martin’s and Snider’s work but also to acknowledge the significance of disability studies, body studies, and even trauma studies in denaturalizing the body and helping us understand how its functions are culturally “map[ped],” to use a term from the Roy Porter passage cited at the beginning of Read’s article.Without that context, the “fresh insights” promised in the article provide largely a list of annotations, with some proving more interesting than others. Read’s discussion of the “non-naturals” and the way that “optimal health” requires the moderation of air, food, drink, motion, sleep, excretion, and passion leads to a useful framing of Behn’s adaptation of La Montre (1686) and “the Behn-attributed The Unfortunate Bride.” In both, a seventeenth-century cultural suspicion of bodily excess can help the twenty-first-century reader understand otherwise puzzling elements of the plot, including Iris’s interest in her lover Damon’s schedule or how blindness can miraculously disappear. Still, the value of these connections is limited by Read’s choice not to engage with questions of attribution, particularly as they pertain to The Unfortunate Bride and The Dumb Virgin. As a result, we understand a little better the medical context for these works but can only speculate about how they help us understand Behn’s contribution to a literary history 350 years in the making, much less “radically re-imagine” it.What distinguishes Rubik’s work on Behn’s representation of emotion is how dispassionately Rubik makes her case, and how effective this proves. Even among such exacting readers as Virginia Woolf, Behn typically inspires broad-reaching and impassioned pronouncements. Behn clears the way for other women writers, according to Woolf, and in the history of emotions, according to Stephen Ahern and G. A. Starr, “her narratives are, in fact, forerunners anticipating the Augustan cult of sensibility.” Yet Rubik argues that “a re-evaluation of the function and power of the emotions need not be linked to an eighteenth-century ethos but is firmly grounded in late seventeenth-century tenets.” This context makes Behn’s “equivocation” about whether passion is to be distrusted or embraced a predictable consequence of writing at a “time of transition between a libertine and more moderate Epicurean ethos.” “Self-knowledge” becomes the best corrective for balancing these extremes, especially for heroines who can expect little to no grace when their passion proves uncontrollable. Heroes, by contrast, are more likely to suffer from enacting the early eighteenth-century ideal of “generosity.” When the woman proves unworthy, it emasculates these men; when she proves worthy, they are exalted. Context matters in Behn, and as Rubik argues, it is the seventeenth-century philosophical context that best explains the complexities of her representation of emotion.Hence, the self-knowledge of Behn’s heroines should be read as extending to Behn herself. Behn’s style is at once distinctive for how immersive it proves and how performative its effect. As Rubik sees it, we get more intensity and excess than in other practitioners of amatory fiction, but we are also reminded that there is “nothing naively spontaneous” in either the verbal or physical representations of these emotions. Moreover, as Rubik has argued elsewhere, gender does not create a distinguishing difference. Consistent with the philosophy of the time, neither men nor women have complete control over their emotions.These observations make Behn’s work different from other late seventeenth-century writers of amatory fiction—not because she was ahead of her time, but rather because she is consistently a self-aware and sensitive purveyor of the contradictions of her period. This essay appears in a special issue of Women’s Writing celebrating 350 years of Behn’s work and promising “radical re-imaginings”; what makes this essay “radical” is that it stays so true to the historical context that renders Behn’s amatory fiction anything but radical.Although Saxton takes a bit to get to her key points, these are worth the wait. After identifying most of the scholarship on Behn’s History of the Nun, or, the Fair Vow-Breaker, presumably to buttress her non-heteronormative-genderqueer reading of the novella, once Saxton drops the hyphenated language, she presents a solid study of masculinity that should be read with Chaskin’s essay (reviewed above), a study that Saxton herself recommends. Saxton takes the time to develop the close but non-sexual relationship between Katteriena and Isabella. Although Katteriena cannot be an “identical twin” of Henault as Saxton would have it, she acts as a body-double for much of Isabella’s emotional struggles.Saxton grants “a fluid vision of gender expression” that infiltrated many Restoration plays and poems, a concept important to understanding much of Behn’s work, and probably one of the more important ways of approaching Behn’s escaped nun-turned-murderer. Saxton reads the plot as a series of “queer doublings,” but attends mainly to the Katteriena/Isabella and the Henault/Isabella pairings. Saxton’s reading of Henault and Villenoys as an additional non-binary pairing is ingenious: Henault and Villenoys bond in the army when they discover they are from the same locale and have both loved Isabella. They share a bond in death as Isabella sews the sack holding the body of Henault to the collar of Villenoys, sending both to a watery grave. Comparing Villenoys and Henault, Saxton shows the underdeveloped masculinity of Henault when he first encounters Isabella, a quality that feminizes Henault and increases the gender-queer doubling set up by Isabella’s relationship with Katteriena. Is it that Isabella remains unthreatened by Henault even after their marriage because he is a feminized body-double for Katteriena? Does this make Henault a threat when he returns, a more hardened warrior than is Villenoys? Why does an allegedly virtuous woman murder the two men she is said to have loved? Was she ever “virtuous”? Is the first murder triggered by the fears of the loss of her jewels and the wealthy lifestyle if she returns to Henault? Does she see now a super-masculinized Henault as a “toxic” male that she must destroy? Has Isabella been abandoned once too often by a male? Saxton settles on Isabella’s revenge being directed toward the “systems that . . . have denied her and all women access to any self-determination,” systems related to male dominance, the Church, and masculine economic and social superiority. In this reversal of power, Saxton sees the reader’s pleasure.First, a point of clarification: The use of Behn’s original texts is laudable, and they are generally found in Early English Books Online. However, when citing by signature and page number, one must understand that works like Oroonoko are octavos, a reference to how many pages are printed on each side of a sheet. In standard printing practice, for example, signature numbers for octavos generally end at “4,” so that although there are eight leaves, sixteen pages, only leaves B1-4 are signed on the recto but are followed by B5, B6, B7, B8, all unsigned. Thus, a reference to a quotation in Oroonoko as printed on “C4, 32” is inappropriate: C4 (implying recto) refers only to page 23, while page 32 is printed on C8v. A basic rule of research should be “when in doubt, throw it out.”The article purports to discuss the relationships between the otan and the convent, on taking the veil and receiving the veil, but there are too many misapprehensions. Imoinda is seen as passive throughout; however, she tells the old king of her prior de futuro marriage contract, and she lies about Oroonoko’s actions in the otan. Although pregnant, she fights beside Oroonoko and she authorizes her own death at his hands. Imoinda has agency. Nevertheless, Villegas López claims that her “only instance of agency consists in preserving her vows till the end,” with the fallacious suggestion that her behavior must be interpreted in an either/or fashion: “either as the logical corollary of her noble nature, or as the result of consuming transgressing stories of nuns.” Add to this the implication that Hortense Mancini, to whom Behn dedicated The History of the Nun, broke her vows as a nun. This is inaccurate since Mancini never “entered” a convent. Rather, her husband sequestered her in the convent of Chelles where his aunt was abbess, but had her removed under guard to a stricter convent before returning her to Chelles. Unfortunately for the nuns at the second convent, Mancini encountered an equally abused and sequestered wife also in her early twenties, and the stories of how they tormented the nuns, included in Mancini’s memoirs, make great reading.The article itself does not. It is a rehash of much good and some less than accurate articles on gendered spaces in Oroonoko and The History of the Nun, with excessive quotation to make an unsurprising connection between the ideas of the otan and the convent.Lee, while rehearsing the history of Idler 41, focuses on its Latin motto where the discussion on authorship and appreciation has long been a topic of interest. Clearly demonstrating where Johnson could have read the four lines of the motto, and identifying these as part of a longer elegy, Lee tracks down the writer, a sixteenth-century humanist and Neo-Latin poet, Théodore de Bèze. Confusion on authorship of the motto occurred when various Idler editions suppressed the author’s name in an attempt “to denigrate” or react to varying tastes. Johnson was acquainted with Bèze’s religious writings and referenced his devotional ideas and verse, especially for Idler 41 when his own emotions at the loss of his wife, Sarah Johnson, were “too raw.” Lee suggests Johnson needed an acceptable approach to grief, and finds a congenial temperament, “a comparable grasp” (W. J. Bate) in the early moralist’s lines.Paul deGategnoPenn State University–BrandywineAlthough a scholarly edition of James Boswell’s uncollected journalism was published in 2014, editor Paul Tankard left some notes incomplete. Walker has rectified some of these omissions. For example, he traces a reference to an obscure broadside on a Highland regiment’s mutiny (The Public Advertiser, 29 September 1778). He completes Tanker’s note in another Public Advertiser article (18 August 1785) mentioning the reprieve of a fourteen-year-old boy condemned for arson based on circumstantial evidence. He identifies Edmund Thurloe as the object of Boswell’s first Rampager article (14 April 1770), a satire on the parliamentary disputes between John Wilkes’s supporters and opponents. He advances the effort to elucidate a reference in Rampager 7 (25 November 1777) to a controversy between Drs. William Cadogan and John Cook. He identifies the founder of the Horn Order, mentioned in An Essay on Masquerade (February 1774) as Charles Douglas, second Earl of Selkirk. He supplies the death date (16 February 1782) of Walter Hamilton, an Edinburgh official mentioned in The Public Advertiser for 8 April 1779. And he confirms that a society noted in The Caledonian Mercury (January 1780) as refusing approval or contributions to the British government for the American War: it was the Glasgow Merchants and Manufacturers. One must hope that all this valuable information, which helps pin down the sources of Boswell’s freewheeling associations, will be incorporated into a future edition of Boswell’s journalism.Claudia KairoffWake Forest UniversityWalker clarifies an obscure statement in Boswell’s Rampager 19 (1780). Boswell referred to a recent duel fought over the accusation that inexperienced government appointees were rec