“Augustus Reigns, but Poets still are low”: Aphra Behn’s world in The Emperor of the Moon (1687)

Few writers in any age can match Aphra Behn’s excellence across genres: in her twenty-year publishing career she was a highly successful playwright, an innovative fiction-writer, a skilled translator from French, and a respected poet. Across her oeuvre she created many imaginary worlds that grow beyond the conventions and limitations of her age. This chapter focuses on just one of her achievements, the final play completed and performed in her lifetime. The Emperor of the Moon: A Farce (1687) creates a land of Naples-cum-London-cum-Moonworld, in which two female cousins elude the limitations that the patriarchal Baliardo tries to impose on their lives. Drawing on her deep understanding of how to utilise the Dorset Garden theater’s capacity to create stage-flying and magical music and dance, and of how to use to the full the expertise of her all-star cast, Behn created a commedia dell’arte-inspired comedy that held the stage until the 1730s. Signalling her increasing scepticism about the regime of James II despite having long supported his succession to the throne, she also appealed to wealthy individuals to support the arts in the face of government failure to do so.