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The fifth chapter suggests that the dramatists at the time exploited varying styles of dialogue with other signifiers of meaning, particularly social connotations, and thus deliberately changed the aural and spatial dynamics of the total theatrical experience, making the audience as much a part of the performance as the action on stage. It argues that Behn was especially adept and manipulates the audience in these ways, by making them in turn confidant, spectator, or voyeur, in order to obtain the particular response she wants in a given scene.
The sixth chapter concludes that Behn, although not an outstanding literary writer, is more important theatrically to the period than has yet been allowed. She wrote more plays than anyone other than Dryden: her texts have more explicit, implicit, and specific stage directions than most and appear to allow for what was technically and mechanically possible for both the actors and the staging. She exemplifies the change from dramatist to playwright through the growing consciousness of theatricality. However, she also clearly shows the social as well as the spatial relationships between the stage, the actors, and the audience in plays which were written in, about, and for a particular social context. She illuminates many of the cultural attitudes and behaviours of the time in which she lived as no other writer does. The study concludes that Behn’s plays demonstrate a writer with an instinctive feeling for the ways in which an audience will respond to what they see on the stage, and who deliberately manipulates both certain social and cultural beliefs and attitudes in her texts with the practical staging of those texts to ensure the response she expects—she is a dramatist who is more important to the history of Restoration theatrical practice than has been acknowledged.