Shakespearean Failure in Behn's "Emperor of the Moon"

At the denouement of Aphra Behn’s farce, The Emperor of the Moon (1687), the Neapolitan virtuoso Doctor Baliardo, “cur’d” of his obsessive belief in extra-terrestrial life, declares his intention to “Burn all” of his “Books” about the moon.[i] This desire for destruction reflects the importance of the collapse of illusion for Behn’s comedy, since Baliardo relinquishes his lunar obsessions when his daughter and niece’s lovers stage the descent of the “Emperor of the Moon” to the Doctor’s home in a masque-like spectacle that breaks off mid-performance, jolting Baliardo into the realization that there is “no Moon World” (III. iii. 222). While these examples indicate that Emperor derives meaning from performance’s capacity to fail, scholars have approached Baliardo’s collapsed fantasies as part of Behn’s satirical warning against “debased spectacle,” rather than an exploration of the theatrical potential of its implosion.[ii] And yet this potential may especially preoccupy Behn in Emperor, the “second” most popular play of her career, the “last … to be premièred in her lifetime,” and one of the several “successful” late-career works that she produced amid theatrical and political decline, as playgoers began to favor prose over plays, and as the turbulence of James II’s reign raised urgent questions about the performance of “sovereign” power.[iii]

I would like to thank Andrew Hadfield and Matthew Dimmock, and the anonymous readers at SEL.
[i] Aphra Behn, The Emperor of the Moon, ed. Elaine Hobby and Alan James Hogarth, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn, Vol IV: Plays 1682-1696, ed. Rachel Adcock et al, 8 Vols (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2021), III. iii. 199, 227. Subsequent references to Emperor are from this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number.

[ii] Al Coppola, “Retraining the Virtuoso’s Gaze: Behn’s Emperor of the Moon, the Royal Society, and the Spectacles of Science and Politics,” ECS 41, 4 (Summer 2008): 481-506, 498; see also Catherine Ingrassia, Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660-1750 (Charlottesville: Virginia Univ. Press, 2022), pp. 74-5. Exceptions to this critical picture are Erin Webster’s discussion of “disruption” and experimentalist cultures in Emperor in The Curious Eye: Optics and Imaginative Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2020), pp.175-9, and Paula R. Backscheider’s allusion to disruptive processional drama as a context for Emperor in “From The Emperor of the Moon to the Sultan’s Prison,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 43, 1 (2014): 1–26, 1.

[iii] Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (London: André Deutsch, 1996) p. 367; Hobby and Hogarth (eds.), Emperor, p. 373; Paula R. Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 105-6 and “From The Emperor,” 12. On the “move from stage to page” and Emperor see Katherine Mannheimer, “Celestial Bodies: Readerly Rapture as Theatrical Spectacle in Aphra Behn’s Emperor of the Moon,” Restoration 35, 1 (Spring 2011): 39-60, 39.