ABSTRACT
When Aphra Behn (1640–89) arrived in London in 1667, the precedent for women writing for the public stage had already been set. As Sarah Heller Mendelson notes, Aphra had the ‘impressive example of feminine theatrical success to inspire her’ (1987: 127) in the shape of Katherine Philips’ Horace (see above). However, the circumstance of a longer life, plagued by a constant need to make money from her writing meant that Aphra Behn would become the second most prolific playwright of her age. In her seminal work The First English Actresses, Elizabeth Howe asserts that:
The overall impact of the female playwrights was … necessarily limited by the fact that they created only a fraction of the drama performed between 1660 and 1700 … While the changes wrought by professional women writers were not insignificant, the most powerful female influence on drama in the period came not from them but from the actresses.
(Howe 1992: 17–18) While the point has a certain validity, in making it, Howe overlooks this crucial fact of Behn’s prolificacy and that the scarcity of new plays in the later part of Behn’s career (Hume 1976: 340) increases the relative significance of Behn’s dramatic oeuvre. Rather than evaluating the relative impact of the actress on the one hand, and Behn on the other, this chapter will consider the extent to which Behn’s plays make positive use of the female performer to rehearse feminist and anti-patriarchal arguments.