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    A Study Guide for Aphra Behn's "The Rover"
    A Study Guide for Aphra Behn's "The Rover"
    A Study Guide for Aphra Behn's "The Rover"
    Ebook46 pages44 minutes

    A Study Guide for Aphra Behn's "The Rover"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Aphra Behn's "The Rover," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 3, 2016
    ISBN9781535839365
    A Study Guide for Aphra Behn's "The Rover"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Aphra Behn's "The Rover" - Gale

      3

      The Rover

      Aphra Behn

      1677

      Introduction

      The Rover, published and first produced in 1677, was Aphra Behn’s most successful play. The original full title, The Rover; or, The Banish ‘d Cavaliers, indicates that the play was a tribute to the formerly exiled cavalier and newly reinstated king, Charles II. The Rover is a dark comedy that mixes themes of prostitution and rape with comic buffoonery. The play expresses its author’s objections to the vulnerability of women in Restoration society. Perhaps ironically, it also appeals to the prurient interests of the audience by putting women in morally compromising situations. Based loosely on her contemporary Thomas Killigrew’s 1564 Thomaso; or, The Wanderer(1664), Behn’s play is leaner, less lewd, and more profound. The plot follows the fortunes of opposing lovers, one a woman of quality masquerading as a courtesan and one a wandering rake whose philandering days end when he falls in love with her. Several near-rapes and the tragic case of a jilted courtesan, another character in the play, balance the comic treatment of sexual politics in the seventeenth century. The rover of the title is either Willmore, an exiled English sea captain on shore leave to enjoy the carnival, or Hellena, a young woman hoping to experience life and love before being committed to a convent by her brother. These two rovers meet and fall in love amid witty debates and sexual maneuvering. Willmore has many parallels to Charles II, whose exploits during his twenty-year banishment from England were well known. Charles II enjoyed the play so much that he commissioned a private viewing of it.

      Author Biography

      Aphra Behn, a favorite of feminist literary critics, is considered to be the first woman to have made a living through her writing. There were other women writers before Behn, but few of them enjoyed financial success. Behn turned to her literary talent after the death of her husband, and she quickly proved her merit as well as her perseverance. Behn suffered from the biases of her time against women writers in general and women dramatists in particular. She was assumed by many of her contemporaries to be a prostitute; because of her connection to the theater and because at the time, women who sold their writing were seen as selling themselves. In her prefaces, Behn sometimes commented on her unique status as a woman writer and asked to be taken seriously as a writer, with equal right to freedom in what she wrote. For example, in her preface to The Lucky Chance; or, An Alderman’s Bargain(1686), she wrote, "All I ask, is for the privilege for my masculine part, the poet in me... to tread in those successful paths my predecessors have long thrived in...

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