Background:

Aphra Behn is the first professional writer in England who was also a woman. The Rover, her most successful play (1677), is a romantic comedy set in carnival time in Naples (think Mardi Gras) during the time that Oliver Cromwell (the Puritan) ruled in England. Thus the "prince" referred to on page 17 is Charles II, who is apparently biding his time at sea, while he waits to be restored to the English crown.

At sea with him are a number of loyalist, and therefore dispossessed, nobles, including Willmore, the Rover. On shore is a family that dominates the play’s opening: especially two sisters: Florinda ( in love with Belville, an English Colonel who had saved her during the siege of Pamplona [p. 9], but destined by her father to be married off to the "rich old Don Vincentio," and by her brother to marry his friend, Antonio) and Hellena, expected to become a nun. The plot of the play involves how Florinda and Belville work to elude the plans of both brother and father, and how Willmore and Helena spark each other’s interest.

The play opens with the sisters scheming to join the carnival in disguise and seek a few thrills. Sailors just ashore more than oblige.

The plot is complicated by the courtesan Angellica, whose favors many seek, but who falls hard for Willmore, and the courtesan Luchetta, who dupes Blunt, a comrade to the English nobles.

Questions:

1. Do you think Hellena can trace her ancestry back to the Wyf of Bath?

2. Do you think that the portrait of Willmore owes anything to Shakespeare’s Falstaff?

3. Do you think that the high levels of confusion in The Rover enhance it or weaken it?

4. Does the Naples of The Rover differ from the England I Henry IV? How does setting in each play shape the presentation of civic order and threats to it?

5. Do Behn and Shakespeare use female characters to challenge, or to reassert, patriarchal authority? Where do you see one or the other possibility happening?

6. To whom does Behn seem to owe more of a debt: Shakespeare or Chaucer? Whose sensibility does she seem closer to?

7. Do you consider Behn amoral? Here contemporaries were scandalized by her. Are you offended by her presentation of near-rape?

8. How does Behn’s presentation of women differ from Shakespeare’s? Compare and contrast their presentations of virtue (Cordelia, Hellena) and sin (Goneril and Angellica Bianca).

9. At the end of the play, do you think Hellena and Willmore will have a happy marriage? What do you think will be the basis of their relationship?

10. Is a play like the Rover, with its emphasis on people’s shortcomings, more or less optimistic than a play like Lear that is full of suffering?

11. How do Behn’s "Prologue" and "Epilogue" reflect her self-consciousness as the first professional female dramatist?