Aphra Behn is known to have complained about the lack of educational opportunities for women. After being married to, and separated from, a merchant of German or Dutch extraction, Behn became a spy for England against Holland in the 1660s.
There seems to have been little notice taken of her coded warnings, however. On her return home without receiving any expenses, she spent some time in prison for debt. It was after this period that Behn entered the very competitive area of writing plays for a living. She flouted the prevailing ideology of the time that said women were inferior to men in all respects.
Following the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II, professional theatres reopened for the first time since being closed in the early 1640s. One of the most striking differences between the plays in Shakespeare’s time and the restoration drama was the fact that women were now allowed to be professional actresses and their roles were no longer taken by boys.
Aphra Behn as an English Restoration Writer
Behn produced two successful plays within six months of each other: The Forced Marriage and The Amorous Prince, both romantic tragicomedies. But her third, The Dutch Lover, was criticised. It was still a patriarchal world and her work was often accused of being full of immorality.
Society was scandalised because Behn was a woman, and it was therefore ‘unnatural’ to write in this way. This led to her publishing a defiant feminist manifesto, objecting to the criticism of her plays on the basis of gender. Three years later she was again producing successful plays beginning with the heroic tragedy Abdelazar, followed by a comedy, The Town Fop, in 1676.
The Rover as a Play
It was another six months before The Rover, one of Behn’s most enduring plays, was performed in 1677. But her success led to even more criticism and attacks on her personal life, and she complained again of being victimised simply because she was a woman. Added to that was the charge of using someone else’s work. Behn never denied that the play was loosely adapted from Thomas Killigrew’s Thomaso, or The Wanderer, written in 1654, but claimed she had his permission to rewrite it.
Partly dealing with near rape, prostitution and the restrictions imposed on women, the play is set in Naples, which was then part of the Spanish Empire. The Rover focuses on love and marriage from a woman’s point of view. The main female characters, sisters Florinda and Helena, are determined not to be ruled by men. Florinda’s father and brother regard her as an object for sale in marriage. Helena vows to choose her own husband before being sent to a nunnery by her brother, as he has threatened.
The Rover and 17th Century Society
The action of the play takes place during Carnival, when the masks allow the women to escape from patriarchal control and their own lives for a while. When they meet two men, Belvile and Wilmore, the stage is set for romance. While Belvile epitomizes idealized, romantic love, Wilmore is a rake who exchanges well-matched wit with Helena. She refuses to have sex before marriage, and the roving Wilmore begins to fall in love with her.
Beautiful courtesan Angellica Bianca, who hires herself out to men, is the object of male desire and mistress of Wilmore. Although Wilmore exchanges an intellectual debate with Angellica about the rights and wrongs of her profession, it is clear that Behn is highlighting the sexual double standard prevalent at the time. She portrays the woman with compassion, but in Wilmore she shows that society allows only men to be sexually promiscuous.
The Rover increasingly now receives the attention it deserves in the canon of English literature, four centuries after it was first performed. Aphra Behn was buried in Westminster Abbey in 1689. Her epitaph reads:
‘Here lies a proof that wit can never be
Defence enough against mortality.’
References:
- W.R. Owens & Lizbeth Goodman (Eds.), Approaching Literature: Shakespeare, Aphra Behn and the Canon, The Open University: 1996
Andrew Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Oxford University Press: 1996
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