The Widow Ranter

Book excerpt: In her final play, Aphra Behn looks across the Atlantic and reimagines Bacon’s Rebellion, the notorious revolt whose participants took up arms against the government of colonial Virginia with the aim of driving the Indigenous population from the region. Heavily fictionalized and featuring a memorable cast of both heroic and comic characters, Behn’s long-neglected tragicomedy is an important and entertaining contribution to the catalogue of transatlantic and Restoration literature. This edition supplements the play with an informative introduction and a robust selection of historical documents that situate it in the context of the historical rebellion and of late-seventeenth-century discourses around empire and colonization.