Aphra Behn (c. 1640-1689)

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LINKS

The Aphra Behn Society
http://prometheus.cc.emory.edu/behn/index.html

This site provides a directory of links to Web resources related to the playwright and her work.

The Aphra Behn Page
http://www.lit-arts.net/Behn/begin-ab.htm

Hosted by a scholar of Aphra Behn, this page includes a chronology of Behn’s works, critical commentaries, and links to primary sources.

BIOGRAPHY

Although not technically the first English woman playwright or the first woman to earn a living by her pen, Aphra Behn (c. 1640-1689) was the first notably successful woman playwright. She wrote twenty plays and several novels, among them Oronooko: Or, The Royal Slave (c. 1688) and Poems on Several Occasions (1684). She also published translations and edited volumes of poetry. The theme of her first play, loveless and unhappy marriages arranged by families and the fate of women in society, recurs throughout Behn's work. Behn herself was married briefly; she did not remarry despite having long-term relationships.

Very little is known of Behn, and much of that is guesswork based on her writing. For example, Oronooko is a novel set in Surinam, which was a British colony when she visited there with members of her family in 1663 and 1664. Her father, who had been appointed lieutenant-general of Surinam, died, and she returned to London. She married Mr. Behn, possibly a Dutch merchant in England, who died two years later. She seems to have been persuaded by the writer and theater manager Thomas Killigrew to become an English spy in Antwerp. She was residing there when the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed most of London. Her services were so little valued that she was not paid and ended up for a brief time in debtors' prison when she returned to England.

Once out of prison, she took advantage of her friendship with Thomas Betterton, who belonged to a theater company at Lincoln's Inn Fields. He played the lead in her first play, The Forced Marriage (1670), which ran successfully for six nights.

Behn succeeded again with The Amorous Prince following The Forced Marriage in 1671. Those first two plays were wholly original, but she quickly resorted to the Shakespearean device of adapting the work of others. Like Shakespeare, she made considerable changes and constantly improved the material she borrowed. After the success of The Rover (1677), she was accused of plagiarism and answered the charge in the postscript to the play. She did borrow some characters and details from Thomas Killigrew's Thomaso, or The Wanderer, a closet drama, or play intended to be read, not staged (1654; published 1664); but, as she says in her postscript, no one would have taken notice if her play were not so successful—and written by a woman. Playwrights commonly adapted earlier material because they had to produce many plays in a short time to earn a meager living.

Behn's other plays include Abdelazer (1676), The Town Fop (1676), The Lucky Chance (1686), and The Emperor of the Moon (1687). Her last play, The Widow Ranter (1689), produced posthumously, was a failure. But it is an interesting portrait of the settlement of the Virginias, based on her experience in the New World. The prefaces to Behn's plays treat important issues, such as the unequal education of women. She points out, however, that in writing plays the lack of education in Greek and Latin is no handicap. She reminds her readers that Shakespeare and Jonson did very well with limited education, and that "gownmen" (scholars) talked incessantly and to little account. What was needed for the stage was experience and a good ear, and Aphra Behn had both.

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