The Theatre of Aphra Behn. By Derek Hughes. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. vii + 230. $65.00.

Derek Hughes has written the first booklength study solely devoted to Aphra Behn's plays. This alone makes it a valuable contribution to Behn scholarship, since it gives serious consideration to all her drama, including her minor works. Hughes's close textual analysis both provides detailed and illuminating readings of Behn's well-known plays and produces impressive interpretations of such important but neglected works as Abdelazer, Sir Patient Fancy, and The City Heiress, which he terms "one of the masterpieces of Restoration comedy" (p. 147). His stated aim is to "return" these plays "to the theatre" by placing them in the context of the contemporary repertoire, and by taking into consideration how Behn "wrote for spaces, bodies, objects and actors" (p. 3). As one might expect from the author of English Drama 1660-1700 (1996), Hughes is exceptionally well equipped to link Behn's plays to trends in the period's drama, but he is less successful in reading them as theatre rather than literature.

Nancy Copeland
University of Toronto at Mississauga