“The Rareness of the Figures”: Air and Accessibility in Aphra Behn’s Lucky Chance and Emperor of the Moon

While scholars have addressed the influence of commedia dell-arte and Bernard de Fontenelle’s The Discovery of New Worlds, in Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon (1687), they pay less attention to her treatment of the collaboration between women and servants in the play. Behn implies that recent scientific developments across the Continent and in England operate as an extension of medieval beliefs rather than a rebuttal of them. Scientific advances and new instruments—the telescope and microscope, in particular—have disclosed “the vast Region of the Air” (2.1.69–70), planetary bodies, and tiny organisms and objects. What concerns Behn in this play, then, is how every discovery of new lands and bodies seems to trigger ideological and, therefore, physical colonization of these spaces. The play, in particular, observes how the scientific developments exacerbate the hardships women encounter. In her The Lucky Chance (1686), Behn draws on Thomas Creech’s translation of Lucretius’s De Rerun Natura because the English have been displaced by forty years of political and religious strife. She (re) introduces the theatre as the “instrument” to perceive her surroundings and enliven them.