Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter: Theatrical Heroics in a Strange New World

Abstract

Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter (written 1687 or 1688) reacts to the crisis surrounding James II and the demise of the Stuart dynasty which Behn had supported during her entire writing career. In her last play, however, Behn develops a political vision that appears to depart from her earlier royalism, and to this purpose makes special, genre-bending use of the conventions of the heroic play that had been en vogue during the early years of the Restoration. The Widow Ranter is an unusual tragicomedy that accords both its comic and its tragic plot a heroic inflection. It is therefore proposed that a reading of The Widow Ranter through the lens of heroism, and more specifically through the conventions of heroic drama, can shed a fresh light on the vision of political authority that Behn projected at the end of her play, her career and the Stuart era. That her inspection of political authority is set in the colony of Virginia enables Behn to adopt a distancing perspective on the turmoils of late-Stuart England, and also establishes a strong generic link with the heroic drama and its preference for exotic settings.