Some of them examine representations of female bonding in dramas by Shakespeare, Jonson, Dekker and Webster, and the anonymous author of Swetnam the Woman-hater; some of them examine groupings of actual women such as London maidservants, the kinship circle of Elizabeth Ralegh, named and unnamed needlewomen, and the members of the religious community founded by Mary Ward; and some of them look at female authors such as
Aphra Behn, Aemilia Lanyer, Diana Primrose, and Bathsua Makin.
In contrast, Cartelli's analysis of Jane Addams' enlisting of King Lear to identify the conflicts of management and labor in the Pullman Strike of 1894, as well as his discussion of
Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, focus rather on how the writer's personal history and context informs her deployment of Shakespeare.
The extensive examination of sources and of connections to predecessors such as Lahontan and
Aphra Behn and to contemporaries such as Rousseau, Diderot and Raynal is essential for this purpose and constitutes the principal merit of this lively study.
He is not only strong on such canonical authors as Dryden, Otway, and
Aphra Behn, but also brings to life the much-maligned Elkanah Settle and Thomas D'Urfey or the still more obscure Henry Neville Payne.
flowers fall upon the tomb of
Aphra Behn," wrote Virginia Woolf in 1929,
Just because Women's History Month is over, don't stop reading about women you know too little about, like Hypatia,
Aphra Behn, or Mary Two-Axe Early.
Robert Markley's piece on
Aphra Behn, which brings Lacanian psychoanalysis to royalist politics, refutes Canfield's assertion that 'tropical transformation' should replace 'topical allusion' in historicist criticism - he shows that they co-habit productively - while deftly representing the royal exile as the century's foremost obscure object of desire.
From the 15th to the 19th centuries, the noble savage figured prominently in popular travel accounts and appeared occasionally in English plays such as John Dryden's The Conquest of Granada (1672), in which the term noble savage was first used, and in Oroonoko (1695) by Thomas Southerne, based on
Aphra Behn's novel of the same title.
But
Aphra Behn was famous for her life style as well as for her literary works.
Bacon also appears in
Aphra Behn's play The Widow Ranter (produced in 1690) and in Ebenezer Cooke's burlesque poem The History of Colonel Nathaniel Bacon's Rebellion (in The Maryland Muse, 1731).
The company is committed to reviving neglected plays of the Tudor, Jacobean and Restoration periods, and it has already performed works by John Marston and
Aphra Behn. New Yorkers with a taste for such esoterica, well prepared at bargain prices, should write to be put on the mailing list: Red Heel Theatre, 200 East 33rd Street, #6G, New York, NY 10016.