ABSTRACT
The Amorous Prince, Or, The Curious Husband. A Comedy was Aphra Behn’s second staged play. It was performed by the Duke’s Company on 24 February 1671 at Lincoln’s Inn Fields; this may have been its premiere. From the stage directions it is clear that Behn was beginning to make greater use of the new scenic stage than she had in her first play, although many of her locations still remain unspecified. In Momus Triumphans of 1688 Gerard Langbaine gave no obvious source for Behn’s The Amorous Prince, but in An Account of the English Dramatic Poets he claimed that the Antonio-Clarina plot was founded on a Novel in the Romance of Don Quixot, call’d The Curious Impertinence. In his 1915 edition of Behn’s plays Montague Summers associates the device of the secondary plot with Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, but the difference in tone and outcome make the connection very slight.
