The Rover; or, The Banish'd Cavaliers was first acted by the Duke's Company in 1677 and printed the same year, at first without Behn's name on the title page. It is set in Naples at Carnival time during the 1650s, when royalist Englishmen who had fought for Charles I and his son drifted through Europe without estates, pay or a country they could safely go home to.
Aphra Behn (c. 1640-1689) · CatalogAphra BehnAphra Behn (c. 1640-1689) · CatalogEnglish playwright, poet and novelist; The Rover, Oroonoko.The Rover Oroonoko The Fair Jilt
Author
Aphra Behn
· English playwright, poet and novelist; The Rover, Oroonoko.
Short biography: Aphra Behn in Great Lives
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Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688) is a short prose history, told by an unnamed Englishwoman who says she knew its hero in Surinam, of an African prince who is tricked into slavery, renamed Caesar, leads a slave revolt and is executed by dismemberment. Behn dedicates it to Richard Maitland, a Scottish nobleman, and insists in her opening sentence that she does not offer the adventures of a feigned hero: she was herself an eyewitness to much of it and heard the rest from the prince.
The Fair Jilt; or, The Amours of Prince Tarquin and Miranda (1688) is a short prose history by Aphra Behn, set in Antwerp in the 1660s, when the Spanish Netherlands were governed by the Marquis of Castel Rodrigo. Behn opens with a short treatise on love: the passion "whose Aim is Virtue" ennobles, but in "ungovern'd Hearts" love "reigns more like a Fury from Hell".