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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.