Plays 1682-1696: Volume 4, The Plays 1682-1696

Description

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) is renowned as the first professional woman of literature and drama in English. Her career in the Restoration theatre extended over two decades, encompassing remarkable generic range and diversity. Her last five plays, written and performed between 1682 and 1696, include city comedies (The City-Heiress, The Luckey Chance), a farce (The Emperor of the Moon), a tragicomedy (The Widdow Ranter), and a comedy of family inheritance (The Younger Brother). These plays exemplify Behn's skills in writing for individual performers, and exhibit the topical political engagement for which she is renowned. They witness to Behn's popularity with theatre audiences during the politically and financially difficult years of the 1680s and even after her death. Informed by the most up-to-date research in computational attribution, this fully annotated edition draws on recent scholarship to provide a comprehensive guide to Behn's work, and the literary, theatrical and political history of the Restoration.

Rachel Adcock is Lecturer in English at Keele University. Her book, Baptist Women's Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-80 (2015), was nominated for the Richard L. Greaves Prize awarded by the International John Bunyan Society. She has also co-edited an edition of seventeenth-century women's works: Flesh and Spirit: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Writing (2014). Kate Aughterson is Principal Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Brighton, and the author of a number of books on gender and performance in the early modern period, including Aphra Behn: The Comedies (2003). She is general editor of the Intellect Publishing series on Performance and Communities. Claire Bowditch is AHRC Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Loughborough University, where she completed her PhD on Aphra Behn in 2015. Her research for this volume has been supported by Fellowships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Harry Ransom Center, and the Universities of Harvard, Illinois, and Princeton. Elaine Hobby is Professor of Seventeenth-Century Studies at Loughborough University. She first wrote about Aphra Behn in 1980, when working on her PhD thesis. Elaine's research for this volume has been supported by Fellowships at the National Library of Australia, and at libraries across the USA, including the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Harry Ransom Center, Harvard University, Princeton University, the Huntington Library, the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), and the William Andrews Clark Library. Alan James Hogarth is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Leicester. Working with Mel Evans, and using the latest techniques in computational stylometry, he has investigated the authorship of drama, poetry, prose and letters traditionally attributed to Behn. He has also been involved with the computational aspects of the Thomas Nashe project, and contributed to Visualising English Print, building and running experiments on a corpus of early-modern scientific texts. Anita Pacheco is an Honorary Associate in the Department of English at the Open University. She is the author of Coriolanus (Writers and their Work series, 2007) and the editor of A Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing (2002). She has written extensively on Aphra Behn's works, focussing in particular on their political meanings and their connection with freethinking. Margarete Rubik is Emerita Professor of English at the University of Vienna in Austria, where she was Head of the English department and chair of the gender committee. She has also been president of the Austrian Association of University-Teachers of English and Vice President of the German society for Contemporary Theatre. Her publications include Early Women Dramatists (1998); Eighteenth-Century Women Playwrights, vol. I (co-ed, 2001) and a special issue of Women's Writing about Behn (ed, 2012).

'This is an encyclopaedic edition, with a full command of modern historical scholarship and of contemporary plays, pamphlets and polemics ... Behn's is a witty, humorous, indignant, but pessimistic and truly distinctive voice. This fine edition allows it to be heard clearly for our time and, with luck, will lead to more performances of her plays. In the meantime, one thing is sure: that Aphra Behn would have relished the new attention and publicity it brings and, since she complained about the negligence of her printers, the extreme care of the production.' Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, The Times Literary Supplement 'No doubt this richly annotated collection will facilitate a wealth of further inspiring discussion on Behn in the future.' Amelia Mills, Women's Writing 'an impressive production that does full justice to Behn's now canonical status... this first glimpse into the Cambridge Edition offers a refreshing presentation of Behn's oeuvre, setting her texts in light of recent scholarly interests and in a wealth of contextual detail regarding Restoration English culture that has become increasingly available in recent years ... the series promises to become not only the indispensable scholarly resource for all serious research on Behn, but also an indispensable collection for all serious research on Restoration culture.' The Review of English Studies