THE RESTORATION STAGE

Behn's career as a dramatist runs through the 1670s and 1680s. What kind of stage did she write for? What conditions and expectations faced a woman writer working in one of the most public and commercial areas of literary production? What social and cultural place did the theatre inhabit? As these questions suggest, before we look closely at Behn's comedies it is essential to have some understanding of the specific conditions of the Restoration stage.

The theatre in which Behn worked was an institution reconstituted and transformed after the closure of the theatres during the period of the Civil War and Protectorate between 1642 and 1660. The Restoration theatres had been set up by Charles II in 1660, when he decreed that the London theatres should be organized by two patent companies run by Sir Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant. They were located at two theatres, the King's and the Duke's, and the repertoire of plays from before the Civil War was divided between them. The fact that the King himself went regularly to the theatre, instead of having plays brought to court, set the fashion for theatre-going as a social activity of some importance. However, the politicization of theatre during the Civil War and Protectorate also had a crucial effect on the early Restoration stage: plays regularly recapitulated and reworked the events of the Civil War and Protectorate, though habitually in response to the political events of their own time.

Restoration modes of staging facilitated a close and complex relationship between audience and play. One of its novelties was the employment of actresses, who were used to provide the audience with the twin pleasures of the role actually played and the erotic spectacle of the actress herself. The theatres also utilized a wide range of staging devices which permitted movement between illusionistic theatre and the breaking of the frame by actors and audience, giving an enhanced illusionistic sense of a spectator entering a world with a range of different scenes and interiors, and using sliding scenery to reveal scenes and to make 'discoveries'; this is explored in the next section (see pp. 46-7).