Aphra Behn Stages the Social Scene in the Restoration Theatre
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Aphra Behn Stages the Social Scene in the Restoration Theatre By ...

Chapter 1:  ‘The Fulsom Gingle of the Times’
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In this, she extends Fontenelle’s metaphor, which compares the study of nature to an opera performance, to include a direct reference to scenery and its necessary machinery, thus implicitly demonstrating her theatrical knowledge. Moreover, she includes beforehand an essay on comparative philology, which demonstrates a practical knowledge of several languages.10 She appears to have written competently on religious and philosophical subjects; she is credited with the anonymous translation The History of Oracles and Cheats of Pagan Priests, also from Fontenelle, which appeared in February 1688, and she also included a critique of Copernicus in her preface to A Discovery of New Worlds, in which she argues that the Bible should be understood allegorically.11 It is not so surprising, therefore, that Behn alludes to religious books and ideas in the epistle, which continues:

Indeed, had I hung a sign of the Immortality of the Soul, of the Mystery of Godliness, or of Ecclesiastical Policie, and then had treated you with Indiscerpibility and Essential Spissitude (words, which though I am no competent Judge of, for want of Languages, yet I fancy strongly ought to mean just nothing) with a company of Apocryphal midnight tales cull’d out of the choicest Insignificant Authors; If I had only prov’d in Folio that Apollonius was a naughty Knave, or had presented you with two or three of the worst principles transcrib’d out of the peremptory and ill-natur’d (though prettily ingenious) Doctor of Malmsbury undigested, and ill-manag’d by a silly, saucy, ignorant, impertinent, ill educated Chaplain, I were then indeed sufficiently in fault; but having inscrib’d Comedy on the beginning of my Book, you may guess pretty near what peny-worths you are like to have, and ware your money and your time accordingly.

By her mocking reference to ‘Ecclesiastical Policie’, she appears to mean Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a book of particular interest to Royalists for its views on the royal supremacy over the established church.12 Pepys was given a copy in August 1661 and bought the new enlarged edition on 15 April 1667.13