Unmapping London: Urbanization and the Performance of Personal Space in Aphra Behn’s The Lucky Chance

This essay asks how women performed the boundaries of their personal space in a rapidly growing London by examining two related artifacts: descriptions of Restoration rape trials and the script, stage directions, and extant performance history of Aphra Behn’s final London city comedy, The Lucky Chance (1686). It argues that the Restoration theater taught Londoners to perform and interpret the boundaries of personal space and advocates examining personal space through performance studies as a way to complicate the dichotomy between public and private space that has long structured eighteenth-century studies.