These assumed that women preferred sentimentalized pictures of their sex and objected to anything that seemed to degrade the female character. Prologues and epilogues often spoke of women’s liking for romantic love-scenes and associated a female presence in the audience with the move from masculine heroics and bawdry to feminine pathos and sentiment. This view may, however, be playwrights’ convention, and the increase in scenes of pathos and romance in the late Restoration may have had more to do with the skills of particular actresses in this star-dominated theatre than with the demands of a female audience. None the less, in her address to the reader before Sir Patient Fancy (1678) Behn noted the shifting taste and grumbled at the hypocritical complaints of women that her plays were bawdy; she insisted that she wrote conventionally as men did because she wrote ‘for bread’. In her prologue and epilogue she also railed against men who abused her for being a woman writer and she declared that wit was ungendered.

Constantly Behn would raise the matter of her sex in her justifications of her practice and it was certainly surprising for a woman to be writing for the Restoration theatre. It was, however, not unknown: already the poet Katherine Philips (‘Orinda’), the chaste wife and mother with whom the shady Behn would often be coupled and contrasted, had had her tragedies produced on the stage, as had Frances Boothby the year before Behn arrived, and Elizabeth Polwhele was writing in the early 1670s. But none of these women produced more than one or two plays and the advent of Aphra Behn, probably author of almost twenty plays, was something new. Despite (or perhaps because of) the earlier professional connection with Killigrew, she produced her first drama with the Duke’s Company under his rival Davenant, a good choice since it had the best comediennes at the time. Davenant had died in 1668 and in 1670 the company was controlled by his widow Henrietta Maria, the only woman involved in theatre management in these early years. It is not certain that she encouraged women’s plays or had much to do with the choosing of plays at all, but Behn might have been attracted to a company run by a woman and Lady Davenant did preside over the production of many works with spirited cross-dressing heroines who exposed the female predicament as well as the female legs.

Behn entered a conventional theatre with a patriarchal and aristocratic Court ethos, although the small playhouses were attended by all ranks, from servants, merchants, town misses and ‘strumpets’ to ‘persons of quality’. Her early plays used the popular ballad motif of cross-dressing; although often returning the heroine to petticoats for marriage, they did allow discussion of gender roles and issues such as forced and arranged marriages. Only in her posthumous play The Widow Ranter, with its portrait of the drinking, smoking widow, did she present a fighting cross-dresser who took her man with her ‘breeches on’.

Her first play, The Forced Marriage, a romantic tragicomedy, supported the central heroine by a lighter, more spirited one, the ancestor of her later frank and witty female lover. The supporting character resembled the one Nell Gwyn had made famous, but, by the time Behn perfected it, Nell had become the King’s mistress and had left the stage. This first play came with a prologue that was at once audacious and anxious, declaring its author a ‘poetess’ able to play the sexual war-games and yet enter the theatre not as a conqueror but as a ‘scout’ for women of wit: ‘Discourage but this first attempt, and then/They’ll hardly dare to sally out again.’ The play’s theatrical success must have reassured the author because she published it in the following year with the traditional literary farewell, ‘Va mon enfant, prends ta fortune.’

Over the next years Behn wrote prolifically, with sometimes only months between plays. Occasionally she was discouraged, as she was after the shoddy staging and consequent poor reception of The Dutch Lover in 1673. In her vigorous preface to the printed version she accuses her critics of abusing her because of her sex; women were as capable as men at making plays since their composition was no great business, she argued, drama having nothing to do with morality or ‘learning’. No acknowledged works immediately followed this outburst, although she may have written and published several anonymously. In time, she must have decided to follow the advice she had given a fellow dramatist in 1671 on the failure of his play on the stage:

Write on! and let not after ages say,

The whistle or rude hiss could lay

Thy mighty spright of poetry…

Silence will like submission show:

And give advantage to the foe!7

By 1676 she was back in good form with Abdelazar, a powerful tragedy of a woman’s sexual obsession and its cruel results; it began with the song ‘Love Armed’, a popular work which she later included in her collected poems. A group of comic plays quickly followed, conforming to the increased taste for the farcical, bawdy and fast-paced. Many of these, like The Roundheads (1681), were overtly political, attacking the mercantile city party of the Whigs and what she saw as debased commercial values; all ridiculed Puritans and their assumed hypocrisy and dullness. Meanwhile prologues and epilogues commented on the political upheavals of the various real and invented plots and counter-plots such as the Popish Plot, the Rye-House Plot and the Meal-Tub Plot, as well as the twists and turns of the Exclusion Crisis concerning the barring of the Catholic James from the throne; invariably they declared for peace and loyalty to the Stuart brothers, her much-admired Charles and James.

Often the prologues and epilogues (a distinctive Restoration form relating author and specific audience) were spoken by a particular actor, or more usually actress, who would draw attention to her own private life as well as to political events. The actress with whom Behn was most associated, one whose private life was extremely public, was Elizabeth Barry, who joined the Duke’s Company in the mid 1670s. She was the most famous actress of her day, said to have been coached in the stylized drama of the Restoration by the Earl of Rochester for a wager. She is probably the ‘Mris B’ described in Behn’s poem about her friends, ‘Our Cabal’, and, after first appearing in Abdelazar, she took part in most of Behn’s plays thereafter. Although she later played the passionate roles, initially she was cast as the pert heroines of the sort Nell Gwyn had made famous. These included Hellena in Behn’s greatest hit of this period, The Rover (1677), a character considerably altered from the heroine of Killigrew’s play Thomaso on which her work was based. The Rover proved extremely popular and was watched and approved by both the King and his brother James, to whom Behn dedicated a sequel in 1681.8

The later history of this play is amusing. It was frequently staged in the early eighteenth century but, on the evidence of a prompt book probably marked up during this period, some of its sentiments were already too baldly expressed for the times and many of the franker utterances of Willmore on his sexual needs, of Hellena on physically unappetizing men and of Blunt on castrating femininity were excised. By the late eighteenth century John Philip Kemble had rewritten the play as Love in Many Masks, thoroughly refining the earthy relationship of Hellena and Willmore and improving the demeanour of the drunken rake. Recently, however, John Barton’s Royal Shakespeare Company revival pulled the play in the opposite direction of bawdiness, making a more liberated heroine than Behn’s world would easily have accommodated.

In The Rover two spirited women battle for the cavalier hero, Willmore, follower of the ‘Rover of Fortune’, the exiled Charles II (the play is set in the Interregnum).