The Rover

Summary

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. Moretta's taunt that Willmore has worn the same breeches since he was beaten at Worcester (the royalist defeat of 1651) fixes the moment. A Restoration audience of 1677, with the king long restored, was watching its own recent past played as carnival. Three couples carry the plot. Florinda, whose brother Don Pedro means to marry her to the rich old Don Vincentio or to the Viceroy's son Antonio, loves the English colonel Belvile, who saved her at the siege of Pamplona. Her younger sister Hellena has been designed for a nunnery and resolves in the first scene to find herself a lover before she is shut up. Their cousin Valeria pairs off, almost in passing, with Belvile's friend Frederick. Into this arrives Willmore, the rover of the title, a sea captain ashore for pleasure, who meets the masked Hellena in the street and spars with her through four acts without knowing her name. Against the courtship plots Behn sets two stories of love for sale. Angelica Bianca, a famous courtesan, hangs out her portrait with a price of a thousand crowns a month; Willmore pulls it down, rails at her for selling herself, wins her love for nothing, and then abandons her for Hellena. Ned Blunt, an Essex squire who boasts that he cannot be cheated, is lured home by the street-walker Lucetta, robbed, and dropped through a trap into a sewer. Out of his humiliation comes the play's darkest stretch, when Blunt, and later Frederick, threaten the fleeing Florinda in his chamber, and Willmore himself has already accosted her drunk in her garden at night. The play is funny, quick and frankly sexual, and Behn does not tidy it into a sermon. Willmore is rewarded with Hellena and her fortune of three hundred thousand crowns; Angelica, who has Willmore at pistol point, is talked out of murder by Antonio and leaves unconsoled. Behn's postscript answers the charge that she had merely altered Thomas Killigrew's closet drama Thomaso, or The Wanderer, admitting she took hints and the sign of Angelica from it while claiming the plot and business as her own. For a Christian reader the play is a study in promises: who makes vows, who keeps them, who prices them, and whether wit is the same thing as wisdom. Its attempted assaults need an honest preview before it is assigned. The library text is Part I only, from Montague Summers's 1915 edition via Project Gutenberg.

Plot or Argument

• Act I: two sisters and a carnival resolve

  In their chamber Florinda admits her love for Belvile and Hellena declares she will never be a nun; Pedro orders Hellena locked up for Carnival. In the street the English cavaliers gather, Willmore comes ashore, and the masked Hellena, gipsy-dressed, begins her duel of wit with him.

• Act II: the portrait and the price

  Angelica's picture hangs outside her lodging at a thousand crowns a month. Willmore takes it down and fights Antonio's men over it; in her chamber he denounces her trade in blank verse, she answers that gentlemen choose wives by their portions, and she gives herself to him without payment.

• Act III: the sewer, the garden and the mistaken Belvile

  Lucetta robs Blunt and he crawls out of a common shore swearing revenge on all women. Drunk in Pedro's garden at night, Willmore seizes Florinda while she waits for Belvile, and his blundering wrecks the elopement. Later in the street Willmore wounds Antonio and reels off to bed, and Belvile, stopping to help the wounded man, is seized as the attacker.

• Act IV: masks, a page and a pistol coming

  Belvile, released by Antonio, must fight Pedro in Antonio's name and wins Florinda's hand only to lose her in the confusion. Hellena, disguised as a boy, carries a tale to Angelica that exposes Willmore's new love; fleeing Willmore again in the street, Florinda takes refuge in Blunt's chamber, where Blunt threatens her.

• Act V: lots, swords and three marriages

  Blunt and Frederick plan to share Florinda until Valeria and Belvile reveal who she is. Angelica holds a pistol to Willmore's breast until Antonio disarms her; Hellena wins Willmore to marriage and her brother's grudging consent, Valeria takes Frederick, and Blunt appears ridiculous in Spanish clothes.

• Prologue, epilogue and postscript

  A prologue by a person of quality mocks critics as quarrelling physicians; the epilogue laments the stage's fashion for heroic plays; Behn's postscript defends her debt to Killigrew's Thomaso and claims the plot as her own.

Characters

• Willmore, the Rover; English sea captain

  A banished cavalier ashore for Carnival, loyal to his king and his friends, generous with his last pistole, brave with a sword, and ruled by appetite. He scorns Angelica's price, swears vows he breaks within a day, and treats marriage as the enemy of love until Hellena out-talks him.

• Hellena, heroine; Pedro's younger sister

  Bred for a nunnery and determined not to enter it, she goes masked as a gipsy and later as a page, matches Willmore line for line, refuses to yield without the priest, and wins him and her uncle's fortune at once.

• Florinda, Pedro's elder sister

  Steadfast in love for Belvile against her father's and brother's plans. Her attempts to reach him through the night streets expose her three times to men who take a woman alone for fair game.

• Belvile, English colonel

  The constant lover of the play, melancholy at the start, honourable throughout, though his loyalty to Willmore repeatedly costs him Florinda.

• Angelica Bianca, courtesan

  Lately the mistress of a dead Spanish general, she prices herself high to guard her heart, falls in love with the one man who cannot pay, and turns from pride to grief to a pistol when he deserts her.

• Ned Blunt, Essex gentleman

  A self-satisfied country squire who is gulled by Lucetta, swears to revenge himself on all womankind, and is checked only by the discovery that his victim is a lady of quality.

• Don Pedro, noble Spaniard; brother to Florinda and Hellena

  Guardian of the family honour and its marriage bargains, who masks himself to bid for Angelica while confining his sisters.

• Don Antonio, the Viceroy's son

  Florinda's intended husband and Angelica's would-be buyer, who in the end takes the pistol from her hand.

• Frederick and Valeria, the third couple

  Belvile's friend and the sisters' cousin, whose quick match completes the comic pattern of three marriages.

• Lucetta and Moretta, street-walker; Angelica's woman

  Two faces of the Neapolitan trade in pleasure: Lucetta robs Blunt with her bully Philippo, while Moretta keeps Angelica's accounts and curses her for falling in love.

Lessons

• The thousand-crown portrait

  Angelica sets her price because she believes all men are inconstant, and Willmore condemns her for selling what is love's due. She answers that gentlemen choose wives by fortune and leave a woman who loves them if her portion is small. Behn lets both charges stand, so the scene puts the marriage market of Spanish nobles and English cavaliers beside the courtesan's shop.

  • Is Angelica's question about the 'mercenary Crime' of fortune-hunting fair, and does Willmore's answer satisfy it?
  • What does Angelica actually want once she refuses Willmore's money?
  • How do Pedro's plans for his sisters resemble the bargain Angelica advertises?

• A vow kept and a vow broken

  Willmore swears love to Angelica in Act II and is courting Hellena by Act IV. Hellena will not yield to him without Hymen and the priest, and he calls marriage a bane to love. The comedy ends in marriage anyway, so students can trace how the woman who insists on a binding promise wins, and how the one who trusted a lover's oath is left with a pistol and no remedy.

  • Why does Hellena insist on marriage when she is otherwise the boldest character in the play?
  • Does Willmore change, or does he simply find a better offer?
  • What does Angelica's last scene suggest about the cost of broken vows?

• Drunk in the garden: excuses for appetite

  In Act III Willmore, drunk, tells Florinda there would be no sin because the encounter was not premeditated. Behn gives the rake a parody of casuistry and lets Florinda call it what it is. Read with care, the scene and the later threats in Blunt's chamber show how carnival licence, drink and a grudge against women turn comic appetite toward violence, and how much depends on rank and identity in deciding who is protected.

  • What reasoning does Willmore offer in the garden, and where exactly does it fail?
  • Why do Blunt and Frederick change their conduct when they learn who Florinda is, and what does that reveal about their standard?
  • Should a comedy that ends happily be judged by its ending or by these scenes?

• Cavaliers without a country

  The subtitle names the men as banished. Their poverty, loyalty to the exiled king, contempt for Spanish formality and readiness to fight frame their pleasure-seeking as the life of men with nothing left to lose. Belvile's defence of Willmore as a rover of fortune but a prince aboard his ship asks Pedro to weigh loyalty and courage against estate.

  • How does the cavaliers' exile shape the way they behave in Naples?
  • Is Belvile's defence of Willmore before Pedro convincing?
  • Why might a London audience in 1677, after the Restoration, enjoy laughing at exiles of the 1650s?

Context

The play looks back from the reign of Charles II to the Interregnum, when royalist officers lived abroad on borrowed money while the king's court wandered between France, the Low Countries and Spain's territories. Naples was then a Spanish viceroyalty, which explains the Spanish household of Pedro and the Viceroy's son. Carnival, the season of masking before Lent, gives the plot its licence: identities are hidden, sisters slip out, and rank can be mistaken for a night.

Composition

Behn drew on Thomas Killigrew's two-part closet drama Thomaso, or The Wanderer, written during his own exile and printed in 1664, compressing it into a stageable comedy and making the women's plots central. The Duke's Company staged it in 1677 at the Dorset Garden theatre, and the quarto of that year first appeared anonymously; the dramatis personae in the Summers text names Mr. Smith as the Rover. Behn's postscript, printed with the play, answers the report that it was only Thomaso altered. She followed it with The Second Part of the Rover in 1681.

Reception

The Rover stayed in the London repertory well into the eighteenth century, when its frankness fell out of favour and it was cut and adapted. Later scholarship and twentieth-century revivals returned it to prominence as Behn's best-known play. Critics have long read Willmore as a portrait of the Restoration rake, and some have connected him with courtiers such as the Earl of Rochester; such identifications are readings, not documented intentions.

Comparisons

• Much Ado About Nothing

  Hellena and Willmore inherit the sparring of Beatrice and Benedick, but where Shakespeare's pair are tricked into admitting love, Hellena engineers her own match and sets the price of marriage herself; both plays also put a slandered or endangered young woman at the centre of a festive plot.

• Measure for Measure

  Both plays set a young woman bound for the convent against a world of sexual bargaining; Isabella clings to the cloister and refuses Angelo's price, while Hellena flees the cloister and refuses Willmore any terms but marriage.

• Twelfth Night

  Hellena's disguise as a page sent to Angelica echoes Viola sent to Olivia: in each, a woman in boy's clothes carries a love-message that serves her own heart, though Behn turns the errand into deliberate sabotage of a rival.

• Oroonoko

  Behn's prose history of 1688 also turns on oaths given and broken, but there the betrayed party is a royal slave in Surinam and the result is tragedy; reading both shows how the same author treats faithlessness as comedy on stage and as atrocity in narrative.

• The Fair Jilt

  In this later novella the woman is the deceiver and the men her victims, a mirror of Willmore's broken vows; Lucetta's jilting of Blunt is the comic seed of Miranda's far more dangerous cozening.

• She Stoops to Conquer

  Goldsmith's 1773 comedy also lets a heroine take on a lower role to win a man, but it was written for an audience that had turned against the bawdy of Behn's age, and its night-time mistakes end in embarrassment rather than threatened assault.

• The Importance of Being Earnest

  Wilde's comedy shares Behn's interest in assumed identities and in marriage as a negotiation over money and family, but his wit plays with names and handbags, while Behn's masks expose real appetites and real danger.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Hellena's first scene with Florinda in Act I, Sc. I. She wants to know what being in love is like and says outright that she will not be a nun; watch how her curiosity becomes a plan by the end of the scene.
• Angelica's portrait and its price in Act II. Count how many men stop to look at it, who can afford it, and who pulls it down.
• The blank verse in Act II, Sc. II. Willmore and Angelica shift from prose into verse when their talk turns serious; mark where the shift happens and where it stops.
• Florinda's three dangers: Willmore in the garden (Act III), Willmore again in the street, and Blunt and Frederick in Blunt's chamber (Acts IV-V). Note what saves her each time.
• Hellena's terms in Act V. Willmore offers love without vows; listen to what she asks for in return and how the company votes for 'a Captain'.

Key terms and names

Restoration comedy

The comedy of the London theatres reopened after Charles II's return in 1660, known for witty dialogue, fashionable rakes and frank treatment of sex and money; actresses played women's parts for the first time on the public English stage.

Cavalier

A royalist supporter of Charles I and Charles II in the Civil Wars. The banished cavaliers of the subtitle are officers living in exile in the 1650s.

Carnival

The festive season before Lent in Catholic Europe, marked by masquerades, music and licence. In the play it allows women to go masked in the streets.

Rake

A stock figure of Restoration comedy: a witty young gentleman devoted to pleasure, drink and seduction, often reformed or married off by the last act.

Portion

The money or property a bride brought to her marriage. Angelica argues that gentlemen who weigh portions are no better than her customers.

Closet drama

A play written to be read rather than performed. Killigrew's long Thomaso was one, and Behn's postscript defends her reworking of it for the stage.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Whom does Pedro intend Florinda to marry, and what has he planned for Hellena?
2. Comprehension What happens to Blunt at Lucetta's house, and what does he vow afterward?
3. Comprehension How does Hellena learn that Willmore has been with Angelica, and what does she do about it?
4. Interpretation Why does Angelica fall in love with the man who mocks her price rather than the men who can pay it?
5. Interpretation Willmore and Belvile are both cavaliers and close friends. What does Behn show by setting their ways of loving side by side?
6. Interpretation Is Angelica's final exit a defeat, a dignity, or both? Use her last speeches to support your answer.
7. Big Question Hellena escapes a convent she did not choose by marrying a man she cannot trust. Has she chosen well, and what would wisdom have required of her?

Faith Connections

• Ecclesiastes 5:4-5 (Scripture)

  Better not to vow than to vow and not pay. Willmore swears devotion to Angelica on his knees and forgets it within a day, while Hellena refuses to give herself without a vow before a priest; the verse names the standard by which the play's oaths can be weighed.

• Proverbs 7 (Scripture)

  Solomon's warning about the young man led to the house of the strange woman fits Blunt's night at Lucetta's almost scene for scene, down to the robbery; Behn plays it for laughter, but the outcome is the one Proverbs predicts.

• 1 Corinthians 7:2-4 (Scripture)

  Paul treats marriage as a mutual binding of husband and wife. Hellena's insistence on Hymen and the priest and Willmore's claim that marriage is a bane to love set up the question the apostle answers.

• Augustine, Confessions II-III (Church Fathers)

  Augustine's account of his youth in Carthage, loving to love and seeking pleasure in company, offers a Christian reading of the rake's restlessness that is sharper than any punishment Behn's comedy gives Willmore.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Behn's comedy sets three ways of handling desire against one another: the market, in which Angelica, Lucetta and the family match-makers all put a price on women; the rover's freedom, in which Willmore takes pleasure and swears vows he does not mean; and the bargain of marriage, which Hellena demands on equal terms. The market leaves Angelica betrayed and Blunt robbed, and the rover's freedom brings Florinda near ruin, so the play's resolution falls to Hellena's wit, which secures a binding promise from a man who mocks promises. Whether that promise will hold is left for the audience to judge.

Rhetorical device: turned accusation (retort). When Willmore condemns Angelica for selling love, she replies, "Pray, tell me, Sir, are not you guilty of the same mercenary Crime?" and describes gentlemen who abandon a woman whose fortune is small. The retort moves the charge from the courtesan to the respectable marriage market.

Debate: Resolved: Hellena, not Willmore, is the true rover of the play.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Angelica and Hellena both love Willmore. Argue which of them understands him better, and why one ends in marriage and the other in exile from the comedy, drawing on Act II, Sc. II, Act IV and Act V.

Comparison with Much Ado About Nothing: Beatrice and Hellena both use wit to hold off a man they are drawn to. Compare their final exchanges with Benedick and Willmore and argue which heroine sets firmer terms for marriage.

Medical Lens

The play is not about medicine, but its language assumes a London audience familiar with physicians' quarrels and patent remedies, and its oaths ('a Pox on't', 'Plague of her Price') turn epidemic and venereal disease into everyday swearing. Drink is treated as an excuse for conduct that would otherwise be judged: Willmore's drunkenness in the garden is offered by him as a reason the act would be no sin. For the history of medicine the prologue is the most direct passage. The frequent pox oaths can be read as evidence of how familiar venereal disease was in Restoration speech, but that is an interpretation of idiom, not a claim about any character's health.

• Prologue, opening lines

  Critics are likened to physicians of different societies who cannot agree, and to the learned doctors of the town who cry down Rabel's Drops, a proprietary remedy, as fiercely as they cry down a new play.

  Physicians Doctors Quackery Charlatans
• Act III, Sc. III (the garden at night)

  Willmore enters drunk, describes himself as a little 'disguis'd', and uses his state to argue that an unpremeditated act carries no sin; Florinda's resistance and the arrival of Belvile end the scene.

  Alcohol
• Act IV, Sc. III (Blunt's chamber)

  Blunt, cheated by Lucetta, lists the physician among proverbial types of faithlessness alongside the churchman and the poet, a glimpse of the physician's popular reputation.

  Physicians Doctors
• Act V, Sc. I (Hellena and Willmore)

  Hellena weighs love without marriage as leading to pregnancy and an abandoned mother, her reason for demanding a vow.

  Childbirth Maternal

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation between Angelica and Moretta after Angelica leaves Willmore's lodging in Act V, in which Angelica decides what she will do with her life now that she has spared him.

• Classroom

  Draft a one-page preview letter to parents for a unit on The Rover that names the garden scene in Act III and the scenes in Blunt's chamber, explains why the class reads the play, and gives two questions families could discuss.

• Adaptation

  Stage Angelica's portrait in Act II for a school production without changing a word of the text: decide where the picture hangs, who takes it down, and how the audience sees the price.

• Essay

  Compare Willmore's blank-verse speech to Angelica in Act II with his prose to Hellena in Act V. What does Behn signal by shifting between verse and prose?

Further Reading

• Thomaso, or The Wanderer, Thomas Killigrew

  The closet drama Behn acknowledged borrowing hints from in her postscript.

• The Second Part of the Rover, Aphra Behn

  Behn's 1681 sequel, with Willmore widowed and still roving.

• The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I, Montague Summers (ed.)

  The 1915 edition from which the library's text is drawn.

• Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare

• Oroonoko, Aphra Behn