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Derek Hughes, The Theatre of Aphra Behn. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. viii + 230. $65.00.
Serious re-evaluation of the works ofAphra Behn has virtually exploded in the past decade. Approximately two-thirds of all Behn criticism listed in the MLA database has appeared in the last ten years, a period that has also seen the completion of Janet Todd's seven-volume edition of Behn's Works, the appearance of Todd's lengthy and authoritative biography, and the formation of the Aphra Behn Society in the United States. Given the persistent interest in studies in the history of the novel, it is perhaps no surprise that the majority of this scholarship has focused on her prose fiction, especially Oroonoko. In fact, a cursory tally of this recent scholarship suggests that, excepting essays on The Rover, treatments of her prose fiction are double those of her plays, with the latter more than tripling the amount of criticism explicitly devoted to her poetry. Even taking into consideration the current state of affairs, it is still rather surprising to note, as the dust jacket for the present volume announces, that there has been no previous book-length study of Behn's theatrical output, despite the fact that her involvement in the Restoration theater dominated her professional writing life as well as the age in which she wrote.
For this reason alone, The Theatre ofAphra Behn is a welcome and long overdue contribution to Behn studies. It is also the work of an expert in the history of the theater and of Restoration history and culture more broadly. Indeed, Hughes goes to great pains to place Behn's work within the theatrical culture in which it belongs and consistently returns not only to essential historical considerations-the militarism of the Civil War period, seventeenthcentury philosophical debates, the uncertainty of the political and theatrical landscape during the Exclusion crisis and the Protestant succession-but also to the specific considerations of the theater itself-everything from casting decisions to reception history, from the use of space onstage to the influence of playwright predecessors and competitors. This rich contextual mix provides a compelling backdrop to a series of sustained close readings of each of the plays in Behn's established corpus, fourteen in all. (A fifteenth play, Like Father, Like Son, is lost,...