ABSTRACT This article re-evaluates Aphra Behn’s involvement in the establishment of Ben Jonson’s Restoration heritage. Behn, like many of her contemporaries, used Jonson as a guide for considering the competing merits of comedy in a Horatian or Renaissance humanist mode – which could offer profit as well as delight – alongside more immediately physical varieties of popular comic theatre such as farce. I argue that Behn’s comic practice drew on an intimate knowledge of Jonson’s oeuvre and sought to harness the ludic energy of farce – which thrived through its ability to provoke a laughter freed from moral responsibility – for a comic theatre with clear ethical purpose. That practice was, this article shows, best expressed in The Second Part of the Rover (1681), a play that is profoundly moral in its excoriation of both the patriarchal marriage system and the libertine ideal, but that is also irreducibly farcical in key aspects of its staging. Analysing II Rover alongside Jonson’s Volpone, I offer a reading of a Behn who knew her Ben far better than her contemporaries and later generations of critics have generally recognised.

中文翻译：

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贝恩·琼森

摘要 本文重新评估了 Aphra Behn 参与建立 Ben Jonson 修复遗产的过程。与她同时代的许多人一样，贝恩使用琼森作为指南，以考虑霍拉蒂安或文艺复兴时期人文主义模式中喜剧的竞争优势——这既可以带来利润，也可以带来乐趣——以及更直接的流行喜剧戏剧，如闹剧。我认为，贝恩的喜剧实践借鉴了对琼森全部作品的深入了解，并试图利用闹剧的可笑能量——这种能量通过它能够引起摆脱道德责任的笑声而蓬勃发展——用于具有明确伦理目的的喜剧剧院。这篇文章表明，这种做法在 The Second Part of the Rover (1681) 中得到了最好的表达，这部剧在谴责父权婚姻制度和放荡的理想方面都具有深刻的道德意义，但在其舞台的关键方面也是不可减少的闹剧。分析 II Rover 和 Jonson 的 Volpone，我提供了对 Behn 的解读，她比她的同时代人和后来的评论家普遍认可的更了解她的 Ben。