Plays 1682-1696: Volume 4, The Plays 1682-1696

Rachel Adcock is Lecturer in English at Keele University. Her book, Baptist Women's Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-80 (2015), was nominated for the Richard L. Greaves Prize awarded by the International John Bunyan Society. She has also co-edited an edition of seventeenth-century women's works: Flesh and Spirit: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Writing (2014). Kate Aughterson is Principal Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Brighton, and the author of a number of books on gender and performance in the early modern period, including Aphra Behn: The Comedies (2003). She is general editor of the Intellect Publishing series on Performance and Communities. Claire Bowditch is AHRC Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Loughborough University, where she completed her PhD on Aphra Behn in 2015. Her research for this volume has been supported by Fellowships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Harry Ransom Center, and the Universities of Harvard, Illinois, and Princeton. Elaine Hobby is Professor of Seventeenth-Century Studies at Loughborough University. She first wrote about Aphra Behn in 1980, when working on her PhD thesis. Elaine's research for this volume has been supported by Fellowships at the National Library of Australia, and at libraries across the USA, including the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Harry Ransom Center, Harvard University, Princeton University, the Huntington Library, the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), and the William Andrews Clark Library. Alan James Hogarth is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Leicester. Working with Mel Evans, and using the latest techniques in computational stylometry, he has investigated the authorship of drama, poetry, prose and letters traditionally attributed to Behn. He has also been involved with the computational aspects of the Thomas Nashe project, and contributed to Visualising English Print, building and running experiments on a corpus of early-modern scientific texts. Anita Pacheco is an Honorary Associate in the Department of English at the Open University. She is the author of Coriolanus (Writers and their Work series, 2007) and the editor of A Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing (2002). She has written extensively on Aphra Behn's works, focussing in particular on their political meanings and their connection with freethinking. Margarete Rubik is Emerita Professor of English at the University of Vienna in Austria, where she was Head of the English department and chair of the gender committee. She has also been president of the Austrian Association of University-Teachers of English and Vice President of the German society for Contemporary Theatre. Her publications include Early Women Dramatists (1998); Eighteenth-Century Women Playwrights, vol. I (co-ed, 2001) and a special issue of Women's Writing about Behn (ed, 2012).

'This is an encyclopaedic edition, with a full command of modern historical scholarship and of contemporary plays, pamphlets and polemics … Behn's is a witty, humorous, indignant, but pessimistic and truly distinctive voice. This fine edition allows it to be heard clearly for our time and, with luck, will lead to more performances of her plays. In the meantime, one thing is sure: that Aphra Behn would have relished the new attention and publicity it brings and, since she complained about the negligence of her printers, the extreme care of the production.' Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, The Times Literary Supplement

• Introduction; Editorial Conventions; 1. The City-Heiress; 2. The Luckey Chance; 3. The Emperor of the Moon; 4.The Widdow Ranter; 5. The Younger Brother.