"A Posture ridiculous"; or, Aphra Behn and the Politics of Pratfalls

Abstract

Abstract: This essay argues that the tropology of the Punch and Judy show and the commedia dell'arte found in Behn's play The Emperor of the Moon (1687) provides a key to the strange murders that appear at the end of The History of the Nun (1688), her intermedial translation of narrative technique and the tradition of physical comedy underscoring my reading of these murders as comic instead of tragic. Though we may not laugh at these scenes, Behn's comic treatment of violence functions as a rhetorical means to critique eighteenth-century British conceptions of "gendered" violence. By coding the final events of The History of the Nun in the same way as the farce of her previous drama, Behn is arguing less for the reader to understand Isabella's actions than to understand that a system that produces the shame she feels—and a system that would accept similarly violent behavior from a man as intrepid—is something to be laughed at and ridiculed.