Playwrights Over Time

The personal history of Aphra Behn, one of the first Englishwomen credited to earn their livelihood by authorship, is difficult to unravel and relate. She was born Aphra Johnson, possibly in Canterbury, in December, 1640. Of her education, nothing is known conclusively. She probably lived in Surinam 1663-1664, returned to London, and perhaps married a "Mr. Behn" in 1664, though no records survive. The same supposed Mr. Behn probably died in 1665, though some have suggested Aphra may never have been married at all. From 1666-1667 Aphra Behn served King Charles II as a spy in Antwerp, Netherlands, incurring debts in her work, which remained unpaid and resulted in a stint in debtors' prison.

After this experience, Aphra Behn apparently left the world of espionage behind for the theatre. Her first performed play was The Forc'd Marriage, 1670, by The Duke's Company. The play was a popular and financial success вЂ" an encouraging start. 1671 saw the performance of The Amorous Prince, and by 1672 Behn even edited Covent Garden Drollery, a poetic miscellany. Many plays followed including The Dutch Lover (1673), Abdelazar, (1676), The Town Fop, (1676), The Debauchee, (1677), and The Counterfeit Bridegroom, (1677).

In March, 1677, Aphra Behn's play The Rover was produced. It was probably her most successful play, and to this day her best known. Nell Gwyn, the famed actress and mistress to King Charles II, came out of retirement to play the role of the whore, Angelica Bianca ('white angel'). The Duke of York (later James II) was also said to have admired the play.

The success of The Rover was succeeded by Sir Patient Fancy (1678), with Nell Gwyn again in the lead, as Lady Knowell, and The Feigned Courtesans (1679), which Behn dedicated to Nell Gwyn. The plays were becoming increasingly risquÐ"© sexually, and Behn herself was accused of being a libertine. This perception was doubtless reinforced by her friendship with the Earl of Rochester, infamous for his sexual escapades and explicit poetry.

Women in the theatre, in general, had always been accused of practising the oldest profession in the world вЂ" growing success was accompanied by envy, and a woman in a traditionally male profession was subject to attack. In 1683, playwright Robert Gould wrote of Behn and her fellow woman writers, notably Mary Villiers (Ephelia): "Punk and Poetess agree so Pat,/ You cannot well be This, and not be That.” And yet nothing would deter Aphra Behn from writing.

The tragicomedy The Young King was produced in the autumn of 1679, The Revenge in 1680, followed by The Second Part of The Rover in early 1681, The False Count in November and The Roundheads in December, 1681. The City Heiress was produced in the spring of 1682. While Behn's plays were generally popular with their audiences, she encountered criticism from contemporaries and later readers alike for the rampant sexual content.

As her career continued, her piece Like Father, Like Son of 1682 was a flop of such magnitude it did not warrant publication and the manuscript no longer survives. Behn was arrested for a libellous prologue, but was soon released. At this point, the Duke's Company merged with the King's Company to form the United Company, and playwriting no longer offered a profitable avenue of employ for Aphra Behn, who turned to other forms of writing.

Soon after, Aphra Behn finished her first book of poetry, which appeared as Poems Upon Several Occasions in 1684. 1684 also saw the publication of Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, loosely based on a contemporary affair, and a pioneer on the field of the epistolary novel. Both works were enormously popular and went through several contemporary printings. Love Letters even had two sequels: Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, Second Part (1685), and The Amours of Philander and Silvia, (1687).

Charles II died in 1685 and was succeeded to the throne by his brother, the Duke of York, as James II. Behn, like other writers of the day, wrote verses on both occasions, and published another poetic miscellany. Additionally, Behn returned to writing for the stage. In 1688, Behn published the work for which she is chiefly known today: Oroonoko, a short novel about a noble slave and his tragic love. The novel, which may have been based partly on first-hand experiences or stories the author heard in Surinam, was the first English work in print to express sympathy for slaves. It was an instant success, going through many reprints, and was even adapted for the stage by Thomas Southerne in 1695.

Aphra Behn died on April 16, 1689, and was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, where her stone still rests today at Poets' Corner вЂ" not an inconsiderable honor for a woman playwright in the late seventeeth-century. Two of her plays, The Widdow Ranter and The Younger Brother, were produced and published after her death.

Although Aphra Behn's contemporaries, and the prudish eras after, vilified and belittled her accomplishments as a writer due to her rampant and unapologetic use of sexual subjects, current critics can judge her on her merits alone. While she was preceded by numerous female writers, notably Katharine Philips and Margaret Cavendish, Behn was the first to consider herself a writer by profession, one "forced to write for Bread and not ashamed to owne it."Her career did break ground for the women who came after, which prompted Virginia Woolf's now-famous lines: “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, ...for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”

LORRIANE HANSBERRY

Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago as the daughter of a prominent real-estate broker, Carl Hansberry, and the niece of William Leo Hansberry (1894-1965), a Howard University professor of African history in D.C. William Leo Hansberry taught at Howard University ultil 1959 after rejecting employment offers from Atlanta University and the Honorable Marcus Garvey. Hansberry's parents were intellectuals and activists. Her father was an active member of the Republican Party. He won an antisegregation case before the Illinois Supreme Court, upon which the events in A Raisin in the Sun was loosely based. When Lorraine was eight, her parents bought a house in a white neighborhood, where they were welcomed one night by a racist mob. Their experience of discrimination there led to a civil rights case.

Hansberry's interest in Africa began at an early age. In an unfinished, partly autobiographical novel Hansberry wrote: "In her emotions she was sprung from the Southern Zulu and the Central Pygmy, the Eastern Watusi and the