Aphra Behn

Abstract

Drama is a matter of seeing and being seen. Like painting, theatre posits a subject viewer and an object seen. Like painting, it gives the artist the power to organize his perceptions into ‘sights’ and to impose them on the second viewer, the audience. It is this power which our culture traditionally reserves for men. Our drama contains few enough roles that could be called female equivalents to Hamlet or Lear; but it is as hard to cite a female Prospero, a theatrical image of woman as artist, as it is to find representations of a female God.