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A P H R A P L AY S Aphra Behn is not wearing all her clothes in a part of South America nobody knows. Everyone is polite, and not. Maybe she left off her petticoats, her skirts look limp. She coughs. Of course her bosom is bare. He’s bats about her, also noble and misunderstood—that’s too much culture for you. His black skin is just skin, what with his wealth, frisson, and all those bearers and banners. The play is predominant, their manorhouse -reach. What she makes of it—not of husbands, not even of the rights of humans richer-thanthou , the local gentry who scheme more than they breed—is insolence, not to bore us. What is real is real, she says, wearing what he wants with Damn the insects biting. His type tends to the florid. Strange how everyone speaks well of him, then how chains become him—who says that?—and someone dies, someone like her father who fuelled a nice plantation with witty wives and loneliness and slaves enough to drive the horses into pantaloons and full sleeves, or play. Aphra grins at us, in disrepute as always, sailing to England on a petticoat. 37 ...

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