“But first let’s have a dance”: Music in Aphra Behn’s Plays

Abstract

ABSTRACT This quantitative analysis of Aphra Behn’s musical terms demonstrates that her comedies need to be understood in the context of seventeenth-century music. As a Restoration dramatist, Behn experienced the early phase of the Baroque. Despite the considerable presence of music in her works, scholarship on Behn and music has been neglected. Nodes of her preferred terms—dance, sing, song, and musick—are mapped and analyzed, focusing on four of the most musical plays: The Revenge (1680), The Roundheads (1682), The Luckey Chance (1687), and The Emperor of the Moon (1687). As a collaborator with professional musicians, dancing masters, and actors, Behn demonstrates facility with instrumentation and a range of musical affects, dance forms, and song types. Her comedies exemplify a theatrical phenomenon that had an intelligible, palpable, but ephemeral impact on characters and audience members alike. Her original comic musicals provide keys for understanding how music functioned in art and culture.