Name :- Riddhi H. Rathod
Roll No.: 19
Enrollment No.: 4069206420220025
Paper no: 101
Paper name: Renaissance Literature
Sem: 1 (Batch 2022- 2024)
Submitted to: Smt S.B. Gardi Department
Aphra Behn (14 December 1640 – 16 April 1689) was an English playwright, poet, prose writer and translator from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors. Rising from obscurity, she came to the notice of Charles II, who employed her as a spy in Antwerp. Upon her return to London and a probable brief stay in debtors' prison, she began writing for the stage. She belonged to a coterie of poets and famous libertines such as John Wilmot, Lord Rochester. Behn wrote under the pastoral pseudonym Astrea. During the turbulent political times of the Exclusion Crisis, she wrote an epilogue and prologue that brought her into legal trouble; she thereafter devoted most of her writing to prose genres and translations. A staunch supporter of the Stuart line, she declined an invitation from Bishop Burnet to write a welcoming poem to the new king William III. She died shortly after.
She is remembered in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own: "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds." Her grave is not included in the Poets' Corner but lies in the East Cloister near the steps to the church.
Her best-known works are Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave, sometimes described as an early novel, and the play The Rover.
The Rover or The Banish'd Cavaliers is a play in two parts that is written by the English author Aphra Behn. It is a revision of Thomas Killigrew's play Thomaso, or The Wanderer (1664), and features multiple plot lines, dealing with the amorous adventures of a group of Englishmen and women in Naples at Carnival time. According to Restoration poet John Dryden, it "lacks the manly vitality of Killigrew's play, but shows greater refinement of expression." The play stood for three centuries as
"Behn's most popular and most respecteKinswomanANGELLICAtions of Characters:-
Women:-
1) FLORINDA:- Sister to Don Pedro, and Hellena. A very determined woman, Florinda refuses suitors due to her devoted love to Colonel Belville.
2) HELLENA:- a young Woman design’d for a Nun, and Sister to Florinda. A confident, and brave woman like her sister, she questions religion and convinces Willmore to marry her.
3) VALERIA:- a Kinswoman to Florinda who helps Florinda scheme and hide from Pedro.
4) ANGELLICA BIANCA:- a famous Courtesan in Spain who returns to Naples to put herself up for sale. Don Pedro and Don Antonio attempt to pay the fee for Angellica, but she falls in love with Willmore, whom she attempts to kill later on in the play.
5) MORETTA:- the "lady in waiting," or personal assistant, of Angellica Bianca.
6) CALLIS:- Governess to Florinda and Hellena in charge of overseeing the girls and making sure they stay out of trouble. However, she is easily convinced and is later trapped in a chest so that she can't interrupt the marriage of Florinda.
7) LUCETTA:- a "jilting wench" who steals the clothes and belongings from Blunt.
¤ In the original 1677 production, Anne Marshall played Angellica Bianca and Elizabeth Barry was Hellena.
Men
1)DON ANTONIO:- the King's Son, The Viceroy's Son, who is good friends with Don Pedro.
2) DON PEDRO:- Florinda and Hellena's brother, a Noble Spaniard, Antonio's Friend.
3) BELVILLE:- an English Colonel deeply in love with Florinda despite the disapproval of her brother, Pedro.
4) WILLMORE:- the "rover" to whom the title refers; a naval captain who spends most of his days roaming around.
5) FREDERICK:- English Gentleman, Friend to Belville and Blunt.
6)STEPHANO:- a foolish English Country Gentleman who gets duped out of all his possessions by Lucetta.
7) STEPHANO:- Servant to Don Pedro
8) PHILLIPO:- Lucetta's Gallant
9) SANCHO:- Pimp to Lucetta
10) BISKEY and SEBASTIAN:- two Bravoes to Angelica
11) DIEGO:- Page to Don AVOICES
12) PAGE to Hellena
OFFICERS and SOLDIERS
SERVANTS, MASQUERADERS, Off-stage
Voices
What is The Rover by Aphra Behn about?
One of Aphra Behn's most successful and celebrated plays, The Rover is a classic Restoration comedy, dealing with the romantic intrigues of a group of English gentlemen on holiday in Naples over carnival weekend.
What is the significance of the title The Rover?
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 Rover": Evaluating Women's Social and Sexual Options
Following the collapse of the Puritan Protectorate in 1660, the halls of court seemed to buzz with a festive attitude: “Out with the old and in with the… older.” Cavalier revelries under Charles II regained the notoriety of their pre-Cromwellian counterparts. Britain’s king led his noblemen by example with a hedonistic lifestyle of parties, sex, and extravagant spending. The social and sexual freedom of this “libertinism,” however, did not extend to ladies. Although women might crave higher degrees of autonomy and sexual expression, their lives still fit within the boundaries of three roles: nun, prostitute, or wife. Between the categories of “virgin” and “whore” lay a void, not a spectrum; one could give “the whole cargo or nothing” (Behn 164).
Performed in 1677, Aphra Behn’s play, The Rover, speaks to this double standard, which limited her female peers’ sexual desires to the realm of convent, brothel, or home. Set loose in the topsy-turvy world of Carnival, her characters demonstrate the active, complicated game required of women seeking to secure personal happiness. The dangers of the chase and the play’s tidy conclusion, on the other hand, suggest at how ladies neither could nor should stray too far into the masculine roles of wooer and possessor. Late Stuart society, Behn seems to lament, offered no place to the sexually free, libertine woman.
The fall of the Puritan Commonwealth did little to dispel the political and religious tensions that affected the early Modern British conception of womanhood. Even after the Protectorate’s end, Roundhead beliefs dictated “the necessity for female subordination and obedience” to her husband, as ordained by several Bible verses (Hughes 295). Eve’s role in the division of mankind from God “fuelled…[a cultural] conviction of the weakness and sinfulness of women” (295).
Thus female sexuality was perceived as a spiritual flaw to manage. Male governance of the female body, once responsible for Adam’s downfall, led to a Puritan “masculinization of desire the creation of woman as other and as object that was crucial to a sexual ideology that insists on the indivisibility of feminine chastity from feminine identity” (Hutner 104).
By appropriating sexuality, Roundhead men narrowed the confines of women’s acceptable roles in society to one alone: the wife, family-oriented and sexually pure. Neither Catholic nun nor transgressive prostitute met Puritan expectations for women.
Written seventeen years after Richard Cromwell left England, The Rover responds to these vestiges of Puritan belief in English society. In her epilogue, Behn mocks the strait-laced prudishness that would turn humor into a form of sinful self-pleasure: “The devil’s in’t if this will please the nation / in these our blessed times of reformation” (Behn 242).
She disparages judgmental leaders, who “damn everything that maggot disapproves,” want to censor theatre, “and to dull method all our sense confine” (242). Her derision places under public scrutiny the validity of Puritan disapproval. If an audience member doubts the sect’s condemnation of one aspect of society, other frowned-upon practices might be thrown into question. Accusing the Puritan voice of restricting the audience’s sense encourages the public’s examination of normative understandings of the English culture, specifically in regards to gender.
their prescribed positions with disguises to “be mad as the rest, and take all innocent freedoms,” including to “outwit twenty brothers” (Behn 138-139). The masquerade serves multiple purposes. First, disguise equalizes the class distinctions, “[blurring, criticizing] and…even [satirizing] the difference between the categories available to women” (Kreis-Schinck 160). When lost in the festivities, the ladies join all that “are, or would have you think they’re courtesans,” the most sexually liberated women (Behn 142).
Their initial costumes as gypsies allow them to approach men in a feminized, desirous way. Gypsies already occupy the role of outcast on the liminal edge of society; by taking on their looks, Florinda and Hellena put themselves and their sexuality outside the confines of cultural expectation. Their decision implies Behn’s opinion that her peers should seek to escape the restrictions that define them.
Hellena and Angellica also take on the appearances of men during the play. Such costumes permit them to alter their lovers’ choices and lives. “Dressed in man’s clothes,” Hellena can punish Willmore for his infidelity with “something [she’ll do to vex him” (Behn 202). She interferes in a meeting of Willmore and Angellica by informing the courtesan of “a young English gentleman” who wooed another woman and then “paid his broken vows to you” (Behn 204).
Seeking revenge an act later, Angellica Bianca dons “a masking habit and vizard” and threatens Willmore with a pistol (Behn 228). Her choice of weapon guns were used almost exclusively by men during Behn’s time is “symbolic of her attempt to usurp phallic control” of her own sexual desires (Hutner 108).
Instead of feminizing her lust, Angellica masculinizes herself. By masquerading as men, both women demonstrate how ladies may take ownership of rights associated only male Cavaliers, romance, justice, and sexuality.
The “obligatory happy ending” of The Rover reveals the unfairness of the libertine system and the demand indeed, the unquestioned assumption that women would fit into the socially set role of prostitute or wife. Florinda and Hellena’s attempts to challenge their brother’s arrangements are successful; the former marries her lover and the latter escapes a future as “handmaid to lazars and cripples” in the nunnery (Behn 137).
However, their enterprising boldness in chasing men leads them into the same wifely duties of most women. Their challenge to “the repression of their autonomy and …desires” still leads to the hierarchical man-woman relationship of Puritan wedlock (Hutner 111).
Angellica’s attempt to unite her sexuality with true love fails. She is initially immune to “the general disease of [the female] sex…that of being in love” (Behn 157).
She can sleep with whomever she wants and has found a way around Behn’s observation that women need reliable male support. However, her life lacks the romantic passion of the hedonistic lifestyle. Moreover, Angellica’s sexual liberation, for which lovers must pay to experience, contributes to her inability to snag Willmore’s long-term affection. His lust could have been satiated with her portrait since someone else would “have the thousand crowns to give for the original” (Behn 160). Her relegation back to courtesan shows how transgressive, premarital sex and proper marriage cannot mix. As a sexual female, Angellica has no place in world when in the throes of libertine love: she can be neither indifferent courtesan nor devoted wife.
The actions and treatment of women in Aphra Behn’s play expose the narrow social limitations within which early Modern British women found themselves. Hellena and Florinda have the potential to explore their sexual freedom at Carnival, but they focus instead on securing financial futures with men they like. Sex may be used, as Hellena shows, as a bartering chip to obtain a promise of marriage; when loosed for a young woman’s pleasure, however, sexuality keeps her from happiness. Through Angellica, Hellena, and Florinda, Behn reveals that the libertine female has no place in late Stuart society. The playwright’s observation comes as a wistful warning at a time when women seemed to push the limits of tradition.
Actresses appearing on stage might feel they had found a career of bodily expression, but from Behn’s experience as a woman with male colleagues, the freedom is a façade. Women on stage faced fetishization and loss of status. Behn’s commentary on women’s position in the late Stuart period serves to point out the double standard of libertinism in court life and the public sphere. By exposing and mocking the Puritanical and Cavalier restraints imposed on ladies, she encourages viewers to reevaluate women’s limited roles in the new age.
Theme:-
1)Gender Roles:-
In many ways, the characters of The Rover conform to the traditional gender roles found in comedies of the Restoration period: the dishonorable men, like Willmore, seek pleasure; the honorable men, like Belvile, seek to protect women; the honorable women, like Florinda, seek matrimony; and the dishonorable women, like Angelica and Lucetta, seek to ensnare men. Men bear swords and seek out violence; women are peaceful and are threatened by violence.
2) Class and money
Although not a particularly romantic topic, the issue of money runs throughout The Rover. The cavaliers constantly bemoan the fact that they do not have sufficient funds, while Don Pedro picks a husband for his sister based almost solely upon fortune. Angelica, too, is obsessed with money, and must crucially decide whether she will give her heart to Willmore for free, or hold out for the highest bidder. In fact, the themes of money and love often become intertwined in the play, as characters speak about purchasing love, or giving each other credit. The world in which they live is a capitalistic one, and money pervades even the most emotional of issues.
Class, meanwhile, creates even deeper issues, since it is the main barometer by which men decide whether or not a woman is worthy of respect. When Willmore attempts to rape Florinda, he does so because he does not know that she is a woman of “quality,” and the same pattern occurs later in the play with Florinda, Blunt, and Frederick. Hellena, meanwhile, is able to attract Willmore because, although she is dressed in a low class costume, she displays noble manners (and because she has a large fortune). For the same reason, Angelica will never be truly valued; for all her riches and beauty, she is still a prostitute, and therefore at a lower rung on the social ladder.
In this way class and money subtly shape many of the interactions within the play, exerting their influence even when the characters do not explicitly mention them.
3) Love vs. Lust
The characters within The Rover constantly try to distinguish whether they are feeling love or lust. The line between the two is a blurry one, but an incredibly vital question within the play. In fact, each character can be defined by their attitude towards these two emotions. In general, men prefer lust while women seek out love, but the play complicates matters. The rakish Willmore uses the ambiguity between love and lust to his advantage… read analysis of Love vs. Lust
Love vs. Lust Theme Icon
Deceit and Disguise
The Rover takes place at Carnival time, and brims with masks and disguises, from the gypsy costumes that Hellena, Florinda, and Valeria wear to Don Antonio’s and Don Pedro’s comedy of mistaken identities to Lucetta’s robbery of Blunt. Fascinatingly, however, the play does not take a moral stance on disguise, since it is used by moral and immoral characters alike.
4) Wit and Language
In the largely immoral world of The Rover, wit and facility with language are the most highly prized virtues that a person can possess. The characters constantly reference wit, and the audience is invited to judge the inhabitants of the play based on how clever they are. Blunt, for instance, is instantly a figure of fun as soon as the audience hears his dull, plodding speech; he becomes even more so when he meets Hellena, the two are attracted not to each other’s looks, but to their perfectly matched wits. Despite the problems with their union, their meeting of
two like minds is presented in an incredibly positive and romantic light. There is an implication that because the two have matching wits, they are also fundamentally compatible.
This obsession with wit and language reflects the atmosphere of seventeenth-century England. Plays were judged based solely by their facility with language rather than the inventiveness of their plots or the morality of their lessons. Aristocrats, too, assessed each other based on wit, each striving to be the quickest and the cleverest. The importance of wit within The Rover may be exaggerated compared to the real social world of that time, but it is undoubtedly true to the values of the time period.
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