The Theatre of Aphra Behn - by D Hughes (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

During the nineteen years of her play-writing career, Aphra Behn had far more new plays staged than anyone else. This book is the first to examine all her theatrical work. It explains her often dominant place in the complex theatrical culture of Charles II's reign, her divided political sympathies, and her interests as a free-thinking intellectual. It also reveals her as a brilliant theatrical practitioner, who used the seen as richly and significantly as the spoken.

Review Quotes

'This is a major contribution to recent scholarship on Aphra Behn from the foremost British authority on the history of Restoration theatre. It will recontextualise approaches to a major dramatist and will provoke lively critical debate.' - Professor Malcolm Kelsall, Cardiff University

'Dr Hughes has written a book which is at once thorough and exciting. It is thorough in that he examines each of Aphra Behn's plays in the full context of Restoration theatre (on which few, if any, scholars are more knowledgeable) and so enables is to see her continuously interacting with political events and with the changing theatrical repertoire. It is exciting because the figure who thus emerges is far more complex than the Aphra Behn now chiefly remembered for feminist contributions to Restoration comedy; a writer of unstoppable creativity, intellectually alert and, above all, supremely aware of the nature and possibilities of theatrical presentation.' - Professor Inga-Stina Ewbank

About the Author

DEREK HUGHES is a Reader at the University of Warwick. He has published extensively on Restoration drama, his most recent book being English Drama, 1660-1700, a study of the entire corpus of late seventeenth-century plays.