As a dramatist, Aphra Behn is now chiefly celebrated for witty, libertine comedies which give the woman's view of the sexually predatory male and the cunning female. When she began her career, however, sex comedy had not evolved, and all three of her first plays - The Young King (probably first performed in 1679), The Forc'd Marriage (1670) and The Amorous Prince (1671) - were tragicomedies. This was the prevailing mode in the 1660s, when she must for the first time have watched plays on the public English stage. An odd segmented form, in which melodrama was followed by romance, tragicomedy perfectly suited the obsession of early Restoration royalist dramatists with representing the recent reverses and triumphs of the British monarchy: the restored Charles II arising from the ashes of his executed father. Despite the obvious moral failings of the new king and the political blunders of his first decade and despite the appearance of restrained criticism of unwise royal love in the mid-1660s, the restoration of the hero-king remained a dominant dramatic subject until 1671, though with increasing attention to its less than heroic consequence.

Amorous princes

Behn’s three early tragicomedies are united in themes as well as form, depicting the heroic as quintessentially male. The first two plays trace male supremacism to its origins in warrior communities whose values are dictated by strength and soldierly prowess: a simple feudal world of aristocracy, male bonding, oaths, and romance. While portraying the glamour of this world, Behn criticizes it and its warrior cult as fierce and inimical to women, who are reduced to objects of ritual exchange. Later plays develop and refine the vision of her early attempts.

The Restoration theatre gave women an unprecedented public presence and identity. Actresses for the first time appeared on the public stage. Although they were the objects of lust, gossip, seduction, and (occasionally) assault, they also excited admiration through their talent, and some - such as Mary Betterton - enjoyed long and distinguished careers without any hint of scandal. The theatre also gave women other forms of prominence. In February 1663, Katherine Philips' translation of Corneille's La Mort de Pompée was performed in Dublin; her translation of Corneille's Horace, completed after her death by Sir John Denham, was performed at court in 1668 and at the King's Company's Bridges Street theatre in 1669. In 1668 Sir William Davenant's widow Mary assumed temporary managership of the Duke's Company, during the minority of her sons. In 1669 the King's Company staged Frances Boothby's Marcelia: the first original play by a woman to reach the public stage. And, in 1670, Aphra Behn emerged as the first British woman to make a living as a creative writer, with her tragicomedy The Forc'd Marriage, performed in September 1670 by the Duke's Company, the more successful and adventurous of the two companies. Two plays by Elizabeth Polwhele, The Faithful Virgins and The Frolicks, may also have been performed in 1670–1. Behn thus made her d´ebut at a time when the stage was evidently quite open to women writers; yet only she went on to make a career as a dramatist.

With the exception of Oroonoko, Behn's short fiction has had relatively little critical attention. There are fourteen attributed tales, of which five, including Oroonoko, were published separately, under Behn's name and presumably by her: The Fair Jilt: or, the History of Prince Tarquin and Miranda, and (probably) Agnes de Castro: or, the Force of Generous Love in 1688, The Lucky Mistake, and The History of the Nun: or, the Fair Vow-Breaker in 1689. The others, 'Love-Letters', 'Memoirs of the Court of the King of Bantam', 'The Nun: or, the Perjur'd Beauty', 'The Adventure of the Black Lady', 'The Unfortunate Bride: or, the Blind Lady a Beauty', 'The Dumb Virgin: or, the Force of Imagination', 'The Unfortunate Happy Lady', 'The Wandring Beauty' and 'The Unhappy Mistake: or, the Impious Vow Punish'd', were published posthumously, between 1698 and 1700.

Criticism has been relatively sparse, especially of the posthumous texts, because they raise difficult issues about generic terminology, and their shortness may make them seem like a dead end in the rise of the novel: Ian Watt’s classic The Rise of the Novel (1957), for instance, relegates Behn to a couple of footnotes, seeing the ‘rise’ of the novel as a wholly male-dominated phenomenon identified with new concepts of realism and the individual, and the associated rise of the middle-classes. This is surely not the case, however, since Behn’s short fiction seems to meet all the criteria for the status of novel adduced by J. Paul Hunter: contemporaneity; credibility and probability; familiarity; rejection of traditional plots; tradition-free language; individualism, subjectivity; empathy and vicariousness; coherence and unity of design; inclusivity, digressiveness, fragmentation; self-consciousness about innovation and novelty.

When Aphra Behn first attracted public literary notice, it was in September 1670 with her first play, The Forc'd Marriage, which she published in 1671 with the epigraph, 'Va mon enfant! Prend ta fortune.' Since the Duke's Company presented this as the opening play of their new season and Thomas Otway acted in it, we can assume that Behn's literary connections were formed before the staging of her first play. But tracing the convoluted path of Aphra Behn to this theatrical première is not simple.

Behn is a particularly hard person to pin down. Germaine Greer calls her 'a palimpsest; she has scratched herself out', somehow avoiding notice in church or tax records, perhaps deliberately. Janet Todd underpins this when she notes that Behn 'has a lethal combination of obscurity, secrecy and staginess, which makes her an uneasy fit for any narrative, speculative or factual. She is not so much a woman to be unmasked as an unending combination of masks.'

The closest we come to establishing a time and place for Behn’s birth is in Harbledown, Kent, 14 December 1640, as Eaffrey Johnson, daughter of Elizabeth Denham and Bartholomew Johnson. The name Johnson and the Kentish birthplace were noted in 1696 in the brief biographies published first in The Younger Brother and shortly thereafter in Histories and Novels. In these two documents, we have the skeleton of the biography: the voyage to Surinam, the marriage to Mr Behn, and the ‘several Negotiations in Flanders’ for Charles II.

As the first professional woman dramatist in England, Aphra Behn offers radically different perspectives from her male counterparts on the love intrigues, wit battles and property-mongering satire that are the stock-in-trade of Restoration social comedy. While most critics of the period now acknowledge that Behn was one of the most artistically and commercially successful playwrights of the 1670s and 1680s, the reasons for her success and, to some extent, the nature and significance of her achievement remain matters of debate. Some commentators argue that Behn champions women's right to choose their marriage partners, and consequently identify her as a seventeenth-century feminist; other scholars maintain that she offers a much darker condemnation of the antifeminism and male libertinism of her time; and still others emphasize the ambiguities of her position as a woman writer in a misogynistic society. There is, paradoxically, much to be said for all of these views: comedies such as The Rover (part one, 1677; part two 1681), Sir Patient Fancy (1678), The Feign'd Curtizans (1679), The City-Heiress (1682) and The Luckey Chance (1686) dramatize the allure (and difficulties) of women exercising their choices in love. Even as Behn criticizes the antifeminism endemic to a patrilineal society, she reminds her audiences that women have limited options and limited room to manoeuvre.

Oroonoko continues to strike new readers with its sheer historical surprise: the first English woman author to have had a full professional career, nearing the end of her life, set down an unexampled tale of a black African prince betrayed into slavery in a New World English colony. Though writing in evident haste - 'I never rested my Pen a Moment for Thought' (iii, p. 56) - Behn produced a story so original and so powerful that it started a procession of Oroonoko-like figures in stories, plays, poems, and popular news reports. When her name and writings sank into disrepute, Oroonoko remained the work for which she was most steadily remembered. After interest in her writing revived, beginning around 1900, it gradually gained notice as a literary novelty, even a small classic in its own right. Current attention to women's writing and to matters of race have now combined to make it, for all its pell-mell sentences, perhaps the most widely reprinted and studied prose tale to come from early modern England. Yet for a comparatively short tale, Oroonoko has had a distracting variety of readings. Over three centuries, the exceptional woman author and her singular black hero seem to have stood on radically shifting grounds.

These shifts reflect, of course, what readers of different periods have looked for in literary works and have singled out in writings by women; but they also reflect a broadening comprehension of the vast global changes that lie behind Behn’s tale, enriching some peoples, dispossessing or destroying others, and transforming beyond recognition the world of the Atlantic basin. Early readers spoke of Oroonoko as the ‘True History’ announced in its subtitle, about an exotic prince Behn had known on her travels and was moved to memorialize.

Oroonoko and its critical reception

Recent criticism of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko has attempted to untangle its complex web of political and ideological investments, an approach encouraged by the novel's representation of the seventeenth-century English colonial project that in many significant ways has shaped the modern world. Set in Coramantien on the coast of Africa and in an English colony in Surinam, Oroonoko tells the story of an African prince captured into slavery by an unscrupulous English slave-ship captain. Prince Oroonoko had befriended the captain when selling slaves to him; the prince thought he was a guest on the ship, but the captain saw him as a potential commodity. When they arrive in the Caribbean, Oroonoko becomes a paradoxical 'royal slave': the other slaves bow down before him as their king (even though he may have traded some of them into their current slavery); the English, who also recognize his nobility, keep him in an elegant plantation house, guarded and entertained by the novel's narrator. The English promise, but never deliver, freedom for Oroonoko and his wife Imoinda. Oroonoko's royalty means that he does not suffer the usual hardships of slavery; still, he longs for release. Imoinda's pregnancy brings the narrative to a crisis over the fate of their child: Oroonoko leads a rebellion to secure their liberty, but it fails due to the lack of resolve among the other slaves. The wives beg their husbands to stop fighting; as in Oroonoko’s story, domestic interests compete with the defence of honour.)

In the mid 1680s, Aphra Behn started translating from French into English at speed. She had been to France early in 1683 on a trip which, although undocumented, appears to have allowed her to perfect her knowledge of French. In the seventeenth century, the translation of the classics was recognized as a prestigious activity, but this was not the case with the translation of contemporary authors. Almost all theoretical texts about translation were specifically concerned with Latin and Greek, as for instance Cowley's short preface to his Pindarique Odes (1656), where he gave a particularly felicitous expression to the seventeenth-century paradigm contrasting literal, or 'servile', translation, and free (or 'libertine' as he has it) translation. In his influential preface to Ovid's Epistles (1680), Dryden replaced this dichotomy with a ternary model, famously setting forth the three ways open to a translator as 'metaphrase' or word-for-word translation, 'paraphrase', or translation 'with a latitude', and finally 'imitation', in which the translator 'assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion'. It is most likely Behn was familiar with this text, as she herself, while claiming she could not read Latin, contributed an Ovidian translation to the collective volume. However, as Elizabeth Spearing writes, 'consideration of late seventeenth-century theories of translation in relation to the works of Aphra Behn is of limited usefulness', as she dealt with mostly unchartered territory by translating very contemporary authors from the vernacular. This allowed her to make the original texts her own in a variety of ways, and, as will be apparent, she utilizes the whole range of strategies Dryden had outlined - which calls into question his neat categories and forces us to revise the status of translation in the seventeenth century.

Aphra Behn was a staunch Tory at the time when Toryism first developed. In the late 1670s and early 1680s, the country was in the grip of the Exclusion Crisis, as Whigs tried to exclude the Catholic James from succeeding to his brother Charles II's throne, and Tories defended the Stuarts. To put it crudely, Whigs (while mostly monarchists not republicans) saw Catholicism and arbitrary government as the main threats, and prioritized patriotism and parliamentary 'liberties'. Tories placed a premium on kingly authority and class hierarchy, seeing the Whig challenge as raising the spectre of renewed civil war. As the political balance shifted to and fro, many dramatists shifted their allegiance with it; but Behn was a more fervent Tory than the rest. So staunch was she, indeed, that in August 1682 a warrant was issued for her arrest for effectively being too vehement in the King's support. She had written an epilogue to the anonymous play Romulus and Hersilia in which she criticized Charles's bastard son, the Duke of Monmouth, for being in league with the Whigs. Charles was not ready for such assiduity. Even at the end of her life, when she was ill and poor and the Stuarts had been deposed by William of Orange in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, Behn refused an invitation to write verse glorifying William's accession and instead wrote an ambiguous poem in which the refusal to praise William at all was the most remarkable feature.

Advocates for dramatically different ideologies about women's nature and women's appropriate function in society clashed with one another in Aphra Behn's lifetime. Although some of these ideologies claimed to be traditional, none of them was simply so. Behn's plays, fiction, and poems raise acute questions about these ideologies and make it clear that she found none of them entirely satisfactory. Here I will consider three of these clashing ideologies: first, the Church of England religious ideology, at once the dominant ideology of Behn's society and the one with which she had the least sympathy; second, an economic and legal ideology; and third, the libertine ideology, the one that Behn in many ways found attractive, but one that seemed to work better for men than for women. Each of these ideologies had very different understandings of what the value of women was and I will conclude with a discussion of Behn's inventive exploration of the problem of women's value. Although the majority of women in Behn's society belonged to the labouring and yeoman classes - toiling in agriculture, in work like the spinning of wool, in domestic service, or as the daughters or wives of small farmers - these sorts of women are not important characters in Behn's works, so I will focus here mainly on women from the higher social classes who are her principal concern.

The Church

It would be difficult to discern from Behn’s writings that the dominant ideology during the period when she wrote was that of the Church of England. Churches in Behn’s plays and fiction, usually Roman Catholic churches on the continent, typically appear as places where men and women discover their lovers and make assignations, not places of devotion. Her wits display their cleverness in blasphemy. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Behn’s English contemporaries belonged to the Church of England and respected its religion.

There is probably no literary genre more elusive of reconstruction, more fugitive of interpretation, yet more significant as a cultural symptom than the court masque. In its fully developed form it lasted only from 1604 to 1640; the scripts that survive (and by no means all of them do) give a very partial sense of the mix of words, music, scene, dance and audience participation that characterised the entertainments. Dismissed by Francis Bacon (in his essay ‘Of masques and triumphs’) as ‘but toys’, and regarded by many outside the court with horror both for their inordinate expense and their supposed encouragement of wantonness, they yet set out to display the magnificence of the court, especially to the foreign ambassadors who competed for invitations, and reported back, with varying degrees of accuracy and enthusiasm, on what they saw. At the same time the techniques of staging and the developments of musical style engendered by these evanescent entertainments were to be of profound significance for theatrical practice in succeeding centuries.

The Stuart masque most often formed a central part of the court's extended Christmas festivities, alongside plays and other entertainments, though they were also performed at other times of the year, and frequently celebrated significant political events – the investiture of Prince Henry as Prince of Wales in 1610, or the marriage of Princess Elizabeth in 1613, for example. The genre was dominated by two figures – Ben Jonson, who provided the words for the majority of Jacobean masques, and Inigo Jones, the designer (appointed Surveyor of the King's Works in 1615).

Faded, often damaged and disrupted by prejudice, war and the accidents of time, manuscript witnesses to early Scottish play are only too eloquent about the transience of the pleasures they record. The mainly fifteenth- and sixteenth-century historians, scribes and notaries whose hands left traces of recreation rarely, if ever, did so for the reasons which prompt the modern scholar to read them. Consequently, their silences cannot be easily interpreted either. Although conscious of history, they were not writing for the distant future, and would have been dismayed that education had so declined from its proper subjects and language that scholars would find value in an account of a fool's fee written in Latin or pageant expenses written in Scots. Nevertheless, they have left evidence of variety and continuity in play. From the priest of Inverkeithing who, in 1282, led the young women of the parish in a semimimetic phallic dance (with stage prop) to the French tightrope walker whom James VI (1566–1625) astutely employed to divert his court, Scotland enjoyed a heterogeneous and habitual life of play, often showing features which we associate with theatre, but best understood in its hybridity rather than under any strict consideration of genre. Poem, debate and dialogue merged with image, pageant and ritual; procession blended into masque, and all with the frequent inflection of song, music and dance.

On 21 January 1560, Queen Elizabeth's treasurer of the chamber recorded a payment to

There were at this time no permanent playhouses in London. The Children referred to – scholars and choristers – performed only occasionally and in private. The small groups of adult actors – around six men in each company – were attached to the households of some nobles but were, for most of the year, itinerant performers, performing where they could find a venue and, in London especially, constantly oppressed by civic authorities.

The first step in the adults' attempts to secure a foothold in London came in 1567, when John Brayne, a grocer from Bucklersbury, paid for a permanent playhouse to be erected in the suburbs of London – the Red Lion. Our knowledge of this project is derived entirely from the records of a dispute between Brayne and his carpenters. According to the details of the ensuing court case, the Red Lion was a ‘messuage or farme house’, and not, as was previously thought, an inn used, like other inns, as an occasional venue for plays. There, in the adjoining garden, Brayne erected what is so far as we know the first purpose-built playhouse in England, essentially combining a platform stage of the kind erected by travelling players with galleries for spectators such as those found in bearbaiting arenas and innyards.

England in 1599

It was not a good year for facing the future with confidence. Seven successive bad harvests with their effect on prices and human well-being, a long war against Spain fought across the North Sea in the Netherlands, threatening more Armadas and draining the government's treasury, the major distraction of a new and costly rebellion in Ireland, a virgin queen now long past the hope of bearing any heir and so prompting fears of a disputed succession, all these troubles, along with the recurrent epidemics of bubonic plague, made the Bible's four horsemen of the apocalypse into an ominous symbol of life's realities as the new century loomed. Famine, war, pestilence and death were on show throughout the country.

Probably the largest fear was over the succession. With Catholics oppressed more and more by the church establishment, and getting active support from the Spanish enemy, the danger that civil war would return whenever the sixty three-year-old Elizabeth died was a constant concern. The Catholics had a case, and a candidate. Elizabeth's elder half-sister Mary, whom she succeeded, had married Philip of Spain. Mary died without bearing any heirs, but her marriage gave her husband an interest in the English throne that he tried to enforce in 1588 with his Armada. English Catholics who kept the old faith had reason to assert Elizabeth's bastardy and her dubious claim to the throne. The pope had given them even more dangerous arguments.

The outbreak of civil war in 1642 and the subsequent establishment of a commonwealth or republic in 1649 are often assumed to have resulted in a virtual hiatus in dramatic activity. On 2 September 1642, just nine days after Charles I had raised his standard at Nottingham, it was decreed that public sports and playgoing should be for the moment suspended. In its attempt to eradicate ungodly leisure pursuits, the Act could be interpreted as the triumph of the puritan anti-theatrical view which through the decades since the establishment of professional theatre had been articulated in the writings of Stephen Gosson, Philip Stubbes, William Rackin, William Prynne and others. Indeed, the wording of the Act, as do later ordinances against the theatre, recalls briefly the familiar negative associations of theatricality. Nevertheless, the ordinance is not as absolute as it may appear. It contains no reference to actual closure of theatres and the qualification ‘while these sad causes and set times of humiliation do continue” implies that the measures are temporary. The injunction is less an expression of anti-theatrical polemic than a pragmatic expedient, impelled by the exigencies of a country at war. As with Elizabethan regulation of the theatre, it betrays the familiar apprehension of the potential in mass gatherings for riotous behaviour. Given the nature of the political crisis in 1642, the decision to prohibit public theatre performance would seem unremarkable.

The use of the term,case study , in the sciences yields some interesting ambivalences. In the physical sciences it tends to be applied to a study which determines therepresentative qualities of a system, process or type; and similarly in the natural sciences the intention is generally to define through a close observation of the individual example the nature of the species orgenus (genre) to which the sample belongs. The impetus here is to generalise from the particular. In the psychological sciences and psychoanalysis, a different intention is usually to be observed in operation: the case history investigates that which subtly distinguishes the particular individual undergoing study from the norm, defines his/her exceptional or unique qualities of being that determine selfhood. What is presented to our understanding is aspecific psyche and sensibility; and the focus of study is directed towards those qualities that make for originality.

But why begin this essay by determining different applications of the term, case study? Jonson'sEvery Man in His Humour is unusual amongst extant texts of Renaissance plays in that it exists in two distinct versions. So, of course, doHamlet andKing Lear and several other major works of the period; but the revised texts in these instances were effected relatively close in time to the original compositions, even if one of the versions chanced not to be printed until some two decades later.Every Man in His Humour was first printed as a quarto in 1601, three years after it was successfully staged by the Lord Chamberlain's Men.