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The study considers the ways in which Behn has constructed her plays and used their staging to ensure the perceptions and apprehensions she wants from that audience. It considers the ways in which her use of the scenic stage developed from contemporary staging, acting styles, and changing stage conventions, and how she used these to contribute to the reception and understanding of her plays by the audience. That is, the study considers the theatrical impact on the audience in the use of painted settings, discoveries and disclosure, disguises, and dark scenes. The audience’s reactions to events on stage are as much part of the theatrical experience as the dialogue and actions of the players, and are based on their implicit understanding of the relationship of their own life experiences to those shown on stage. And in almost all her plays, Aphra Behn was showing the Restoration audience their own lives and behaviour writ large.
This study therefore first considers her direct addresses to her readers in the prefaces and epistles to the published editions of her plays, especially the epistle to the reader quoted previously to gather not only a sense of her own preoccupations and ways of thought but also those of her contemporaries, which is often confirmed by their own writing. The first chapter argues that she may have been less educated in the classics than were the men, but was, nevertheless, someone who read and understood a great deal of contemporary commentary and philosophical writing, allusions to which appear in her epistle to the reader and in other writings by her, as well as in her plays. The diaries by Samuel Pepys and Jeffrey Boys are examined to consider how the thinking and responses, tastes and attitudes towards the theatre, of the society which made up the audience for her plays, had been formed by the intellectual, social, and cultural environment. It finds that the influence of the king was of paramount importance in setting the ways in which people behaved and hence how the theatre was used. It attempts to let her speak for herself without the interpretation of a twentieth- or twenty-first-century gloss on her words.