ABSTRACT
It would be tempting to make this final chapter an affirmation of the ways in which women writers made an unequivocal response to the legacy of Aphra Behn. It would also be wrong. From the premiere of The Forc’d Marriage to the posthumous premiere of The Widdow Ranter in 1689, Behn was the only woman known to be writing for the public stage. Marta Straznicky describes the period as an age ‘when women established themselves permanently in the professional theater’ (1997: 703). Yet this view benefits from hindsight, whereby we see Behn standing at the beginning of a long tradition, about which no woman dramatist in the 1680s could possibly have known. Throughout her career, Behn was obliged to defend her drama against the prejudices of those who condemned her writing on the grounds of her gender, epitomised in the frustrated observation ‘a Devel on’t the Woman damns the Poet’ (Behn 1996c: 217) made in her Preface to The Luckey Chance. Straznicky also argues that the playwright was both exposed and invisible upon the public stage, managing only ‘to wrest a kind of marginal presence’ (Straznicky 1997: 708). Yet women playwrights were both more present and further marginalised by virtue of their gender. This chapter will examine the strategies employed to circumvent the double bind of exposure and marginalisation.
