During the nineteen years of her play-writing career, Aphra Behn had far more new plays staged than anyone else. This book is the first to examine all her theatrical work. It explains her often dominant place in the complex theatrical culture of Charles II's reign, her divided political sympathies, and her interests as a free-thinking intellectual. It also reveals her as a brilliant theatrical practitioner, who used the seen as richly and significantly as the spoken.

DEREK HUGHES is a Reader at the University of Warwick. He has published extensively on Restoration drama, his most recent book being English Drama, 1660-1700, a study of the entire corpus of late seventeenth-century plays.