Coppola / Retraining the Virtuoso’s Gaze 481 Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 41, no. 4 (2008) Pp. 481–506. RETRAINING THE VIRTUOSO’S GAZE: BEHN’S EMPEROR OF THE MOON, THE ROYAL SOCIETY, AND THE SPECTACLES OF SCIENCE AND POLITICS Al Coppola Modern critics often seem stymied when confronted with The Emperor of the Moon, the last play produced in Aphra Behn’s lifetime, and the most popular of all her plays after The Rover. Derek Hughes’s The Theater of Aphra Behn, for example, devotes less than three pages to Emperor, and his insights are unchar- acteristically clipped: “The play must not be overinterpreted,” he cautions. 1 Jane Spencer, in her introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition, voices the con- sensus: this comparatively lightweight offering succeeded because of “its reliance on visual rather than verbal effects” and because it served as a handy “showcase for presenting new singing and dancing talent.” 2 However, this line of analysis turns the play into little more than a melange of crowd-pleasing tidbits: take a thin plot poking fun at a foolish virtuoso, interlard it with some familiar commedia dell’arte lazzi, a few songs, a couple of dances, a handful of machine entries, and voilà! the work is done. Behn, the consummate professional, is surely giving the audience what they want, but her all-in-good-fun farce is really a highly sophisticated satire in masquerade. Not just an attack on misguided natural philosophy, nor merely an excuse to capitalize on the fads for opera and harlequinade, the play offers a careful interrogation of spectacle itself. As a committed Tory and a canny profes- sional author, Behn is attempting to identify, stimulate, and ultimately retrain a troubling appetite for uncritical wonder in her audience, one which traverses all domains of culture: aesthetic, scientific, and, especially, political. Scholars have already begun serious study of Behn’s highly fluid politics during the Tory Reaction. Behn’s Toryism has long served as a touchstone for inter- Al Coppola joins the English faculty of John Jay College, CUNY, as an assistant professor this fall, after earning his doctorate in February 2008 from Fordham University’s Department of English. This article is drawn from the second chapter of his dissertation, which concerns satires of the new science on the Restoration and early eighteenth-century stage.