HUMOUR IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Writing with great success outside the gender conventions of her day (1640-1689), Aphra Behn incorporated much wit into her plays as well as a clear understanding of sex relations and politics of the time. She was the Restoration’s blend of Dorothy Parker and Mae West, and Bernard Lamb’s (recent) talk on humour in the English language ... reminded me of Behn’s bawdy, funny plays. These were never free of controversy due to her political views and the language she used. Her work for the theatre is structured on the well-known scenes of Restoration comedy: a discovery in a bedchamber, masks, concealing garments, cross-dressed courtship; the language is full of hyperbole, puns, wordplay, double-entendres and humour.

The excerpt below is from The Rover, a play in two parts featuring multiple plot lines, dealing with the romantic adventures of a group of Englishmen and women in Naples at Carnival time:

Willmore: But why thus disguis’d and muzzl’d?

Belvile: Because whatever Extravagances we commit in these Faces, our own may not be oblig’d to answer ‘em.

Willmore: I should have changed my Eternal Buff too: but no matter, my little Gypsy wou’d not have found me out then: for if she should change hers, it is impossible should know her, unless I should hear her prattle - A Pox on’t, I cannot get her out of my Head: Pray Heaven, if ever I do see her again, she prove damnably ugly, that I may fortify my self against her Tongue.

In her work Behn shows how generically adaptable and adroit with language she was, making full use of English as she engages with issues of interest to her public. As her work emerges at a critical moment in Modernity, it poses difficulties that were all-important at the time: the authority of the State, marriage, money and the place of women, but it also shows the full force of language in cultural trnasmission and in shaping social dynamics.

Contribution by Patricia Hodges, KES member