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The Rover and Other Plays : The Rover; the Feigned Courtesans; the Lucky Chance; the Emperor of the Moon
Rover and Other Plays by Aphra Behn and Jane Spencer. Oxford University Press,1995
Paperback
First published January 4, 1996
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About the author
Aphra Behn
305 books246 followersAphra Behn, or Ayfara Behn, of the first professional women authors in English on Britain wrote plays, poetry, and her best known work, the prose fiction
Oroonoko
(1688).
Aphra Behn was a prolific dramatist of the Restoration and was one of the female. Her contributed to the amatory genre of literature. People sometimes refer to Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and her as part of "the fair triumvirate of wit."
In reckoning of Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf, more important total career of Behn produced any particular work. Woolf wrote, "All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn … for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds." Victoria Mary Sackville-West called Behn "an inhabitant of Grub Street with the best of them, … a phenomenon never seen and … furiously resented." Felix Shelling called her "a very gifted woman, compelled to write for bread in an age in which literature … catered habitually to the lowest and most depraved of human inclinations. Her success depended upon her ability to write like a man." Edmund Gosse remarked that "the George Sand of the Restoration" lived the bohemian life in London in the 17th century as Paris two centuries later.
Aphra Behn was a prolific dramatist of the Restoration and was one of the female. Her contributed to the amatory genre of literature. People sometimes refer to Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and her as part of "the fair triumvirate of wit."
In reckoning of Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf, more important total career of Behn produced any particular work. Woolf wrote, "All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn … for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds." Victoria Mary Sackville-West called Behn "an inhabitant of Grub Street with the best of them, … a phenomenon never seen and … furiously resented." Felix Shelling called her "a very gifted woman, compelled to write for bread in an age in which literature … catered habitually to the lowest and most depraved of human inclinations. Her success depended upon her ability to write like a man." Edmund Gosse remarked that "the George Sand of the Restoration" lived the bohemian life in London in the 17th century as Paris two centuries later.
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January 19, 2019As a student I saw an amateur production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, reading these plays I felt that those players were channelling or desired to do an Aphra Behn play instead (or alternatively that time-travelling Shakespeare was himself imitating Behn, but cunningly disguised the fact by conveniently dying before she was born). It's lively knockabout stuff, putting me in mind of the later pantomime and the Whitehall farce. A change of clothes renders you unrecognisable to other characters, there are plenty of crossdressing opportunities allowing the women to show off their legs, there are some conniving servants, the women get to marry who they want, the threat of nunneries or worse - older husbands - are averted, controlling brothers and uncles out maneouvred. It's the old Topsy-turvy of comedies, some of these tropes doubtless go back to the first raising of a theatre curtain.
Naturally the four plays in this volume were performed in the particular context of London Restoration theatre to entertain its audiences, and more broadly the European theatre of that period, I am so little versed in it that I dare not comment on how far Behn stands out as an individual or distinctive voice (particularly as a woman playwright).
Despite my wise lack of courage, I will none the less foolishly observe that of these four plays only one plays in London, the rest in deepest darkest Catholic Europe, namely one in Rome and two in Naples. Two of the plays feature marriages between English cavaliers and Italian women which seems at least unusual at a time when Catholics in Britain were thought to be a dangerous minority, hell bent on revolution and terrorism, plotting to overthrow the one true Church of England and the country's established style of government, a hysteria manifested in the Popish plot and fears of the eventual succession of the Catholic James II to the throne. Translating this in to contemporary preoccupations I doubt there are many thigh slapping comedies featuring happy ever after endings of Muslim women plotting to marry adventuring English soldiers...which I imagine is how the plots might have come across to the audiences of the 1680s, then again theatre audiences possibly were more exclusively upper class and these are comedies, unlikeliness may have been perceived as part of the humour rather than an appeal to open minded toleration.
Equally comedies have to be out there in foreign land were people are funny and do silly stuff because poor fellows they are not English afterall, the joke is about them, we are normal so we laugh at them. Or at English people who are not us, like the City of London types in The Lucky Chance.
It's all mildly witty stuff, people chased in and out of bedroom, some use of fancy stage effects, no doubt slightly more impressive to see than to read, but compared with Behn's Oroonoko I found these plays a bit of a disappointment and nowhere near as interesting. But perhaps this was an age in which boundaries were pushed and themes played with in prose rather than on the stage, I read of Margaret Cavendish's story The Blazing World (1668) in which the author imagines travelling to another world populated only by animals, making herself Empress over them, leading an animal army back to Earth, conquering it, and establishing an absolutist government as per Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan - like Behn, Cavendish was a strict Tory .
The Rover (1677)
set in Naples
The Feigned Courtesans (1679)
set in Rome
Dressing up, dressing down, pretending to be a courtesan, pretending to be a man, conventional knockabout fun with Englishmen (some sillier than others) abroad in Rome, vaguely like cosi fan tute. Features Church of England prelate working as an Englishman's tutor who is determined to be intimate with as many prostitutes as possible, purely of course to convert them from Catholicism. A brash over-sexed character is from Essex, pleasing to see how long standing some English regional prejudices are - but then Behn is believed to have been a Maid of Kent by birth, to North country folk we doubtless all look much of muchness.
The Lucky Chance (1686)
set in London
Interesting use of modern media, foreign travel, and legal instruments in the struggle between the rival lovers.
The Emperor of the Moon (1687)
set in Naples drawn from an Italian play via France and the Paris stage reworked by Behn (there being then no dastardly copyright to impede the money making impulses of an ink fingered wordsmith), the obstacle to the triumph of love and marriage is a Father and uncle who explicitly has been driven mad Don Quixote style by reading books, specifically Cyrano de Bergerac's A voyage to the Moon, among other similar things , a cunning plot device from [Don Quixote] is utilised to put the world (or perhaps the Moon)to rights. Features Commedia dell'arte characters Scaramouch and Harlequin whose fast slapping and wise cracking reminded me of everyone's favourite Marxists: The Marx brothers.
Naturally the four plays in this volume were performed in the particular context of London Restoration theatre to entertain its audiences, and more broadly the European theatre of that period, I am so little versed in it that I dare not comment on how far Behn stands out as an individual or distinctive voice (particularly as a woman playwright).
Despite my wise lack of courage, I will none the less foolishly observe that of these four plays only one plays in London, the rest in deepest darkest Catholic Europe, namely one in Rome and two in Naples. Two of the plays feature marriages between English cavaliers and Italian women which seems at least unusual at a time when Catholics in Britain were thought to be a dangerous minority, hell bent on revolution and terrorism, plotting to overthrow the one true Church of England and the country's established style of government, a hysteria manifested in the Popish plot and fears of the eventual succession of the Catholic James II to the throne. Translating this in to contemporary preoccupations I doubt there are many thigh slapping comedies featuring happy ever after endings of Muslim women plotting to marry adventuring English soldiers...which I imagine is how the plots might have come across to the audiences of the 1680s, then again theatre audiences possibly were more exclusively upper class and these are comedies, unlikeliness may have been perceived as part of the humour rather than an appeal to open minded toleration.
Equally comedies have to be out there in foreign land were people are funny and do silly stuff because poor fellows they are not English afterall, the joke is about them, we are normal so we laugh at them. Or at English people who are not us, like the City of London types in The Lucky Chance.
It's all mildly witty stuff, people chased in and out of bedroom, some use of fancy stage effects, no doubt slightly more impressive to see than to read, but compared with Behn's Oroonoko I found these plays a bit of a disappointment and nowhere near as interesting. But perhaps this was an age in which boundaries were pushed and themes played with in prose rather than on the stage, I read of Margaret Cavendish's story The Blazing World (1668) in which the author imagines travelling to another world populated only by animals, making herself Empress over them, leading an animal army back to Earth, conquering it, and establishing an absolutist government as per Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan - like Behn, Cavendish was a strict Tory .
The Rover (1677)
set in Naples
The Feigned Courtesans (1679)
set in Rome
Dressing up, dressing down, pretending to be a courtesan, pretending to be a man, conventional knockabout fun with Englishmen (some sillier than others) abroad in Rome, vaguely like cosi fan tute. Features Church of England prelate working as an Englishman's tutor who is determined to be intimate with as many prostitutes as possible, purely of course to convert them from Catholicism. A brash over-sexed character is from Essex, pleasing to see how long standing some English regional prejudices are - but then Behn is believed to have been a Maid of Kent by birth, to North country folk we doubtless all look much of muchness.
The Lucky Chance (1686)
set in London
Interesting use of modern media, foreign travel, and legal instruments in the struggle between the rival lovers.
The Emperor of the Moon (1687)
set in Naples drawn from an Italian play via France and the Paris stage reworked by Behn (there being then no dastardly copyright to impede the money making impulses of an ink fingered wordsmith), the obstacle to the triumph of love and marriage is a Father and uncle who explicitly has been driven mad Don Quixote style by reading books, specifically Cyrano de Bergerac's A voyage to the Moon, among other similar things , a cunning plot device from [Don Quixote] is utilised to put the world (or perhaps the Moon)to rights. Features Commedia dell'arte characters Scaramouch and Harlequin whose fast slapping and wise cracking reminded me of everyone's favourite Marxists: The Marx brothers.
March 7, 2024
Generally I enjoy reading plays as I do tend to read some every so often but I just wasn't able to enjoy this book at all. And it wasn't just the language but other things in these stories just annoyed me to no end. I guess I often like things to make sense and well some of the things the various characters in here did was just maddening. Maybe it's the time period these stories take place in. I don't know. But surely even back then people had common sense didn't they ?
Plus there is a real problem with a book when I found the glossary at the back of the book way more interesting than the tales themselves! But that is actually the situation I found myself in. And that is pretty bad!
First of all I found these stories very dull and boring. Not much actually seems to happen (even if stuff does happen). Like "The Rover" had a sword fight scene but it was still such a boring story that it puts you to sleep. No suspense at all. No mystery. The characters all seemed so boring that I just couldn't care about any of them at all - and the farther I got into the book the worse this got. I guess I was more invested in reading the first story (perhaps because I had hope that the book would improve but the more stories I read the more I just didn't care).
Did you ever read Shakespeare? You remember that funny language and the odd sentence structure? Well The Rover is just like that. I tried to at first read it like it was - but then when I flipped to the "explanation area" at the back of the book I found out that my idea of what the author was saying was WAY off. So yes, you need to read the stuff way at the back as you go through the story. And while The Rover was hard to read I do think it was the best story. Probably why it's named on the cover.
The second story - The Feigned Courtesans - was too similar to The Rover for me to enjoy. Both had young ladies dressing up as courtesans to get things. And in here Cornelia really had some horrid messed up ideas about love.
Basically I found myself thinking " What in the world am I reading? What is wrong with these characters?"
But in case anyone wants to know, The Rover is about two young ladies from good families who dress up as courtesans including the face masks so they can hopefully have secret meetings with the men they love. Of course these are the "wrong" men and then there are many mishaps, fights, etc.
The third story was even worse. This one truly got on my nerves. Bad. There is this landlady who had fallen on hard times because her renter is not paying her. But after talking to him a bit, somehow, he convinces her to go sell her own stuff and give him the money! Even though he owes her lots of money! And he sure is not going to pay it. This is just a wee tiny scene and the actual story is about other things but this scene alone - it drove me nuts. There is no reason for why the landlady did this. But these sort of things make it impossible for me to actually enjoy the story. I mean the renter was nit being sneaky or anything as far as I can tell. Its not like in a thriller where you have those super devious characters that can smooth talk out of anything. Not like that at all. Just in a few lines the landlady just... Switched! No reason.
Sigh....
I won't even mention the last one...
These are just bad. But the words in here are interesting. But its awful when the old words are more fascinating than the stories they come on. And why do young noble ladies want men to think they are courtesans?? Plus in here you have women marrying guys on their appearance and who they have talked to a few times but they really don't know them at all. They are total strangers. Marrying a man because he is handsome is a very bad way to pick a husband in my opinion.
I guess it was how it was in those days??
Plus there is a real problem with a book when I found the glossary at the back of the book way more interesting than the tales themselves! But that is actually the situation I found myself in. And that is pretty bad!
First of all I found these stories very dull and boring. Not much actually seems to happen (even if stuff does happen). Like "The Rover" had a sword fight scene but it was still such a boring story that it puts you to sleep. No suspense at all. No mystery. The characters all seemed so boring that I just couldn't care about any of them at all - and the farther I got into the book the worse this got. I guess I was more invested in reading the first story (perhaps because I had hope that the book would improve but the more stories I read the more I just didn't care).
Did you ever read Shakespeare? You remember that funny language and the odd sentence structure? Well The Rover is just like that. I tried to at first read it like it was - but then when I flipped to the "explanation area" at the back of the book I found out that my idea of what the author was saying was WAY off. So yes, you need to read the stuff way at the back as you go through the story. And while The Rover was hard to read I do think it was the best story. Probably why it's named on the cover.
The second story - The Feigned Courtesans - was too similar to The Rover for me to enjoy. Both had young ladies dressing up as courtesans to get things. And in here Cornelia really had some horrid messed up ideas about love.
Basically I found myself thinking " What in the world am I reading? What is wrong with these characters?"
But in case anyone wants to know, The Rover is about two young ladies from good families who dress up as courtesans including the face masks so they can hopefully have secret meetings with the men they love. Of course these are the "wrong" men and then there are many mishaps, fights, etc.
The third story was even worse. This one truly got on my nerves. Bad. There is this landlady who had fallen on hard times because her renter is not paying her. But after talking to him a bit, somehow, he convinces her to go sell her own stuff and give him the money! Even though he owes her lots of money! And he sure is not going to pay it. This is just a wee tiny scene and the actual story is about other things but this scene alone - it drove me nuts. There is no reason for why the landlady did this. But these sort of things make it impossible for me to actually enjoy the story. I mean the renter was nit being sneaky or anything as far as I can tell. Its not like in a thriller where you have those super devious characters that can smooth talk out of anything. Not like that at all. Just in a few lines the landlady just... Switched! No reason.
Sigh....
I won't even mention the last one...
These are just bad. But the words in here are interesting. But its awful when the old words are more fascinating than the stories they come on. And why do young noble ladies want men to think they are courtesans?? Plus in here you have women marrying guys on their appearance and who they have talked to a few times but they really don't know them at all. They are total strangers. Marrying a man because he is handsome is a very bad way to pick a husband in my opinion.
I guess it was how it was in those days??
June 25, 2016
Aphra Behn is often lauded as the first professional woman writer but there is already something which we might recognise as a `female tradition' of writing by the time she is born in 1640. That said, writing for a public was still regarded as putting oneself in public circulation (something which many aristocratic male writers like Philip Sidney and, closer to Behn's time, Rochester deemed beneath them) thus making a slippage between female writing and prostitution all too easy. That Behn went ahead anyway is partly due to economic necessity but it also means that her plays are in constant dialogue with those of male Restoration playwrights.
The highlight of this collection which gives us four of Behn's plays is The Rover (1677). Rochester, the most notorious rake of Charles II's court, serves as the model for Willmore (a play on Rochester's surname, Wilmot), but the text takes a revisionary view of what it might mean to be a rake or, indeed, the female object of a rake's desire. Behn's play is witty and bright, but also offers a transgressive view of gender relations (permittable in the theatre - already a subversive space) and puts female desire at the heart of the text.
The highlight of this collection which gives us four of Behn's plays is The Rover (1677). Rochester, the most notorious rake of Charles II's court, serves as the model for Willmore (a play on Rochester's surname, Wilmot), but the text takes a revisionary view of what it might mean to be a rake or, indeed, the female object of a rake's desire. Behn's play is witty and bright, but also offers a transgressive view of gender relations (permittable in the theatre - already a subversive space) and puts female desire at the heart of the text.
September 13, 2008
I believe it was Virginia Woolf who said that women ought to lay flowers on Aphra Behn's grave, 'for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.'
January 31, 2011
I just can't get enough of Aphra Behn. She is definitely one of my favorite playwrights, and her character Witmore (from The Rover) is also one of my favorites to read. I find him very similar to Shakespeare's Benedick (from Much Ado About Nothing).
December 12, 2025
The Rover (1677) is Behn's most popular, best known play, but The Emperor of the Moon (1687) is an amazing farce, in the right hands just as astounding and delightful today as it was over three centuries ago. It would not exist without Italian commedia dell'arte in general and Arlequin, empereur dans la lune in particular. It also reveals a debt to Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Ben Jonson's Alchemist over a half-century earlier. It is marked by visual, aural, and theatrical wonders, filled with song and dance and spectacle, almost operatic in its repeated revelation of dazzling disguises and magnificent set pieces - a 20-foot telescope and a talking head (a la Friar Bacon), a temple, descending chariots, and an entire flying zodiac. If you ever have the chance to see the play performed, or even to attend a staged reading - as I just did thanks to the present MFA class of Mary Baldwin's Shakespeare and Performance program - do not miss it.
January 5, 2024
i really need to learn my lesson when it comes to aphra behn, and be prepared to dislike literally every character she writes. this play was interesting, especially when being read in order to write an essay about it, but the characters are just awful, especially the male characters. admittedly, a lot of them are supposed to be awful, but only one really suffers for his terrible actions. it is a comedy and i didn’t really expect anything different - it is a product of the time, but still not my favourite.
April 28, 2020
I had to read this for class. Didn't get to finish because what was assigned was just Rover. I'm really interested in the author and for writing under a women's name while Shakespeare was also writing his plays. The language was a little tough for me to grasp though.
September 22, 2018
Read The Rover, Part I. Quite shocking to see the attempted rape scenes in this Restoration comedy.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
dnf-for-now
November 12, 2022how can someone be so horny and yet so boring
October 17, 2025
Hellena is my fav female libertine x
October 18, 2025
i am never going to read the other plays so i'm just gonna say its finished.
cry ab it.
love the rover
cry ab it.
love the rover
October 29, 2008
The Rover, for my Plays, Players, Playgoers: London, 1600-1700.
There's a lot to love about Aphra Behn. This ranks as my second favorite play for my PPP class, after of course, The Country Wife. I love the blend of tragedy and comedy, and here exist the most fleshed out, realistic women in Restoration Drama.
There's a lot to love about Aphra Behn. This ranks as my second favorite play for my PPP class, after of course, The Country Wife. I love the blend of tragedy and comedy, and here exist the most fleshed out, realistic women in Restoration Drama.
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July 14, 2012I only read "The Feigned Courtesans." It was good, but I got the impression that she was writing for the crowd. If so, she did so well, but came off as a Shakespeare wannabe. Still worth the read, though :)
June 28, 2007
Well, I wrote a thesis on it!
August 2, 2011
I'm enjoying this more than I thought I would based on how I usually feel about Shakespeare (although what we talk about in class never seems to exactly relate to what we've read...)
February 8, 2011
My four stars are just for The Rover. Which was quite good and full of amusing quotations. But I skimmed some action-y bits and generally fail at reading plays. They're meant to be *performed* dude!
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April 15, 2022The rover pt.I 1677, pt.II 1681
The Feigned Courtesans 1679
The Luckey Chance 1686
The Emperor of the Moon 1687
The Feigned Courtesans 1679
The Luckey Chance 1686
The Emperor of the Moon 1687
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews