Drama by Aphra Behn

This entry identifies a number of key and consistent trends and enduring interests evident in the plays written by Aphra Behn over the course of her nineteen-year career as a professional dramatist, and highlights areas in which her published views on plays and playwriting appear to have shifted over the course of nearly two decades of writing for the public stage in the 1670s and 1680s. In addition to recognizing Behn’s place in English literary and theatrical history, this entry situates her in a variety of contemporary contexts and dramatic lineages by drawing attention to her wider networks of publishers, patrons, and collaborators, as well as her immediate influences and the generations of dramatists whose plays she reimagined and remade. The entry also considers Behn specifically as a writer who attracted criticism on the grounds of her sex, and outlines pertinent aspects of her public rebuttals to her detractors. Finally, it addresses the impossibility of knowing the full extent of Behn’s popularity in her own time before gesturing to the interest in some of her most spectacular and challenging plays that followed in the decades after her death in April 1689.