The Rover E-Book

Aphra Behn

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classics
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 205

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A Drama Classic: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price A classic Restoration comedy by one of the earliest and most celebrated female playwrights. Arriving in Naples at carnival time, a group of exiled cavaliers determine to enjoy themselves. They are repeatedly tempted and tricked by various prostitutes and their pimps, until their leader, the Rover, is finally forced to give up his wild behaviour when he falls in love with a single-minded, wealthy virgin. Aphra Behn's The Rover was first performed at the Dorset Garden Theatre, London, in March 1677. This edition in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series is edited and introduced by Simon Trussler.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

THE ROVER

by Aphra Behn

edited and with an introduction by Simon Trussler

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction to Aphra Behn

For Further Reading

Aphra Behn: Key Dates

Prologue

The Persons of the Play

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Act Four

Act Five

Epilogue

Postscript

Glossary

Copyright Information

Introduction

Aphra Behn (1640–1689)

Aphra Behn is thought to have been born near Canterbury, in Kent, in the summer of 1640. In her early twenties her father was appointed Lieutenant-General of the then British colony of Surinam, in South America, but died on the voyage out to the Guianas. She stayed long enough to absorb the experiences which were later to shape her novel Oronooko but returned home to England in the spring of 1664. Within a year she was married to Mr Behn – an elusive figure, possibly a Dutch merchant with Guianese connections, who died soon afterwards, perhaps during the Great Plague of 1665. One of the managers of London’s two theatre companies, Thomas Killigrew, an intimate of the recently restored King, Charles II, was evidently instrumental in Aphra Behn being briefly employed as a spy during the Dutch wars (which saw Surinam ceded to the Netherlands), but by 1667 she was again in London – and in the following year was imprisoned for debt, despite Killigrew’s intercession on her behalf.

Until she reached the age of thirty, Behn’s life is thus as full of false starts and uncertainties for the would-be biographer as it must have seemed to the woman herself. In that year, however, she not only established her career as a playwright – with a tragi-comedy called The Forced Marriage, which enjoyed a moderate success at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields – but began a relationship with the dissolute lawyer John Hoyle, one of several supposed originals for Willmore in The Rover. For the following twelve years she became a fully professional playwright – an exceptional career for a woman at that time – writing some twenty plays, most of them comedies for the new Dorset Garden Theatre.

By the early 1680s, however, fashionable London was becoming more preoccupied with politics than with theatre. The then emerging Whig and Tory factions were at odds over the right of the King’s Catholic brother, James, to succeed to the throne in the event of Charles remaining without a legitimate heir. In 1682 Aphra Behn contributed an allegedly ‘abusive’ and ‘scandalous’ prologue to an anonymous anti-Whig play, and found herself again under arrest. She was let off with a caution, but thereafter turned increasingly to the safer forms of fiction and poetry – though she enjoyed a final stage triumph in 1687 with a highly original, commedia-style farce, The Emperor of the Moon, before publishing what was for long her best-known work, the novel Oronooko, in 1688. The death of Charles in the same year, and the ‘Bloodless Revolution’ which saw off the hapless James, marked the end of the world Aphra Behn had known, and she died the following April, just before her forty-ninth birthday.

What Happens in the Play

‘The rover’ is the philandering cavalier Willmore, a seafaring adventurer who meets up in Naples with fellow exiles from Cromwell’s rule, the mercenary soldiers Belvile and Frederick, and the rustic ‘gull’, the easily deceived simpleton Ned Blunt. The Neapolitan beauty Florinda is in love with Belvile, despite being intended by her father for an elderly suitor, and by her brother Don Pedro for his own friend, the viceroy’s son Don Antonio. Her younger sister, the sprightly Hellena, is no less reluctantly meant for a nun. The festivities of the pre-Lenten carnival are just getting under way, and with their cousin, the demure but calculating Valeria, the girls plan to disguise themselves as gypsies, join in the celebrations – and look out for men.

Antonio and Pedro fall out over the charms of the courtesan Angellica Bianca, who is demanding an outrageous sum for her favours; but she is eventually seduced into giving them freely to the flamboyant but impoverished Willmore – of whom she becomes wildly jealous when she later catches him paying court to Hellena in her gypsy disguise. Florinda has meanwhile arranged a midnight meeting with Belvile at her garden gate, but before his arrival she is accosted by the drunken Willmore, who disturbs the whole house.

As Belvile reproaches his friend, they observe Antonio about to enter Angellica’s house, and Willmore wounds his rival – but it is Belvile who is arrested. Brought before Don Antonio, Belvile agrees to stand in for him in the duel planned with Don Pedro. Belvile almost gets possession of his mistress as a result, but is yet again thwarted by the untimely arrival of Willmore.

Hellena now fans the flames of jealousy between Angellica and Willmore, while Florinda, fleeing from her brother, finds herself in the hands of Ned Blunt – intent on avenging himself against womanhood for the trick by which the prostitute Lucetta has deprived him of his possessions and his dignity. But his friends arrive in time to prevent a rape, Florinda’s true identity is revealed, and she and Belvile secure a priest to marry them. Valeria and her beau Frederick also take advantage of the priest’s services. Willmore is rescued by Antonio from death at the hands of the vengeful Angellica, but submits to marriage at the hands of Hellena. Don Pedro reluctantly resigns himself to events.

Sources and Stage History

In the postscript to The Rover (page 123), Aphra Behn feels it necessary to defend herself against charges of plagiarism: but she made no secret of her debt to Thomas Killigrew’s earlier play Thomaso; or, The Wanderer. This had been written in 1654, without any expectation of performance – the theatres having been closed since the outbreak of the civil wars – and was published in Killigrew’s Comedies and Tragedies ten years later. Behn claims that she might as well be accused of taking her ideas from Richard Brome’s The Novella, first performed in 1632: but whereas she borrowed from Brome only in minor matters of construction, and perhaps for a faint original of Angellica, The Rover is clearly obliged to Killigrew’s play in its general plot outline, and there are clear stylistic echoes. However, a comparison of her Willmore and Ned Blunt with Killigrew’s counterparts, Thomaso and Edwardo, shows how far her skill in characterization transcends her source, just as she is superior to the prolix Killigrew in sustaining the dramatic pace and in the tightness of her plot construction.

Like so many of Aphra Behn’s plays, The Rover was written for the Dorset Garden Theatre, which had opened with Thomas Betterton as joint manager in 1671. At the first recorded performance, on 24 March 1677, Charles II was present to see Betterton take the role of Belvile, with his wife Mary as Florinda. Betterton’s friend, the versatile actor William Smith, played Willmore, and the brilliant low comedian Cave Underhill took the part of Ned Blunt. Elizabeth Barry, who was to become better known for her tragic roles, played Hellena.

Although the play was revived every few years until the turn of the century, it was in the first half of the eighteenth century that it became firmly established in the repertoire, from which it was absent for only a single season between 1703 and 1743. Following in the footsteps of Will Mountfort’s Willmore – ‘dangerous to see’, according to Queen Mary, because ‘he made vice so alluring’ – Robert Wilks often took the role early in the new century. Mrs Barry had graduated to Angellica by 1707. A revival at Covent Garden in 1757, with Ned Shuter an outstanding Blunt, led to further productions in the following four seasons, but the play then disappeared from the repertoire until 1790, when a bowdlerisation entitled Love in Many Masks was put together by Kemble for Drury Lane. The changing moral climate which necessitated this treatment explains why the stage history of The Rover was then interrupted for the best part of two centuries.

When, at last, the play was restored to the stage, under the direction of John Barton at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new Swan Theatre in 1986, Barton felt it needful to revise the text, incorporating material of his own along with lines from Killigew’s Thomaso, and to reshape the structure (which he described as ‘hazy and loose in places’) to clarify an otherwise ‘confusing’ plot. His adaptation had the great merit – along with a slightly earlier revival of The Lucky Chance at the Royal Court – of reclaiming a rightful place for Aphra Behn among her acknowledged Restoration contemporaries: but subsequent revivals have effortlessly reverted to Behn’s text, suggesting that her plotting is neither more nor less complicated than theirs (or Shakespeare’s, for that matter), just less familiar. And where Barton’s production had, consciously or otherwise, glossed over the play’s darker side in favour of swaggering comedy, later productions have more openly addressed Willmore’s abuse of women and his friends’ casual contemplation of rape, blending comedy with ambiguity in an appropriate and challenging mix.

The Return of the Banished Cavaliers

The events which restored Charles II to the English throne in May 1660 were fast-moving: as late as September 1659, both Charles and his brother James had appeared to be making plans for an indefinite exile. Much had to be done during the new king’s ‘honeymoon’ with his people, and it is a measure of the importance attached by Charles to theatrical matters that he seems to have given as much urgent attention to sorting out the squabbles between the various entrepreneurs vying to form new theatrical companies as to reconciling the old enemies of the civil wars.

After his apparently final defeat at Worcester in 1651, exile for Charles had been a relatively comfortable affair, passed mainly in the civilised if often conspiratorial surroundings of Paris and Brussels: but for many of the followers of the king and his ‘martyred’ father, the interregnum was spent in a constant struggle against hardship. Some laid low at home, their estates confiscated or sold off piecemeal to meet fines for their ‘delinquency’. Others, like Belvile and Willmore in The Rover, became soldiers or sailors of fortune, accumulating mistresses, booty, or battle honours with equally offhand loyalty.

Most of the young Restoration gallants, now returning to England along with their king, would thus in all probability have spent a childhood or adolescence in the turbulent atmosphere of civil war, the early years of their adult life cut off from both family traditions and the sense of service which possession of land could still, on occasion, instil. Nor did the compromise between the old and new interests we call the ‘Restoration settlement’ return the estates sold off by persecuted royalists to puritan land-grabbers. Lacking roots, but often bearing a load of such grudges, these ‘rovers’ saw little reason not to pursue in England the kind of sexual and economic opportunism which had ruled their life-style in exile. Such opportunism was duly reflected in the plays they watched and wrote.

Besides, there was even a sort of moral justification for living out the belief that ‘debauchery was loyalty, gravity rebellion’: for inverting the detested values of puritanism was surely to be commended. And an open delight in sexual dalliance (as in theatricality) happily coincided with the tastes of the restored monarch. No wonder that Charles’s court in Whitehall proved such a magnet, and that its values permeated the life and attitudes of ‘the town’ – the residential and shopping area of the fashionable West End, of which Covent Garden was then the youthful heart and the Strand the main artery.

By contrast, ‘the city’ was the City of London, further east, whose tradesmen and financiers, tainted with puritan sympathies, became the ‘cits’ so often mocked in the prologues, epilogues and cuckoldings of Restoration comedy. That the king, no less than his courtiers, was often dependent on the financial assistance of these worthies made it, of course, all the more necessary to display them as semi-illiterate upstarts in the theatre – which the ‘cits’ none the less attended, sometimes in such numbers as to spoil Samuel Pepys’s enjoyment. In the ‘party’ system now for the first time emerging in British politics, it was from the ‘cits’ and the interests of money that the Whigs drew their main strength, with the ‘Tories’ representing the more traditional and largely rural interests of ‘land’.

The tensions of a nation and a capital which remained so divided were reflected in its theatre. Although the setting of The Rover is one of exile in a faraway country, its values are those of men restored to their country, but not to their own. Thus, the thwarting of an aged father’s wish to marry his daughter to a rich but geriatric suitor is an age-old theme of comedy: but whereas the contemporary commedia made prominent characters of its Pantaloons and their doddering friends, it is significant that Behn keeps Florinda’s stern father and the dyspeptic Don Vincentio permanently off-stage. The traditional struggles between the values of youth and age, poverty and wealth, give way here to just the kind of internecine sexual warfare through which the ‘banished cavaliers’ of real life continued to drown – or to sublimate – their sorrows.

The King, the Court, and the Courtesans

The character of Charles II might very easily have been conceived as the hero of a Wycherley play – dour, cynical, and introverted at heart, yet capable of a pretty wit, and sexually attractive beyond the advantages of force majeure. Whether his personality was shaped by exile, or simply well adapted to it, the fact remains that, before the Restoration, Charles enjoyed the semblance of both power and responsibility without the reality of either: life became, in short, a form of play-acting. Later, when the king strolled, supposedly incognito but recognised by all, into the House of Lords to listen to a debate, he would declare the entertainment as good as a play, and sardonically join in the laughter at veiled references to himself.

In exile, Charles had pursued his women with no less fervour then Willmore in The Rover – choosing his mistresses from among his own camp-followers, the nobility of the French court, or the brothels of Paris with the impartiality of a glutton for sex rather than a connoisseur of beauty. Back home, Charles’s male companions were drawn largely from a promiscuous, hard-drinking, but highly literate set which included, besides the notorious Earl of Rochester, the Duke of Buckingham, Sir George Etherege and Charles Sedley – all playwrights, as much probably from fashion as inclination, just as in other ages courtiers might have been concerned to excel at hunting deer, jousting, or grouse-shooting.

These were men to whom casual violence came readily, and who trod with equanimity that uneasy tightrope between rape and seduction, between brutality and the defence of honour, which is so often reflected in the plays they wrote and watched. A regular attender at the theatres, Charles himself is said to have lent a hand in the writing of plays, and he also interested himself in matters of casting. He both encouraged and emulated the Restoration ‘style’, in dramatic art as in life – and apparently displayed it as freely among women of good breeding as among his male cronies or his concubines. It made for sexual equality, of a sort.

When the dynastic imperative finally cornered the king into marriage, he took to wife the unfortunate princess Catherine of Braganza – in part to safeguard the alliance with her native Portugal, in part to produce for the nation an unquestionably legitimate heir. This she failed to do – so perpetuating the long drawn-out crisis over the ever-likelier succession of Charles’s Catholic brother, James. The king’s treatment of his wife in many ways epitomised the double standards of Restoration comedy. In private, he humiliated her by appointing his own mistresses – successively, Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine, and Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth – as ladies of her bedchamber. Yet in public he allowed a curious sense of honour to guide his political instinct, and when the Whigs backed Titus Oates’s allegations of Catherine’s complicity in a plot to poison her husband, they misjudged their man. Charles refused to put away his wife, the allegations collapsed – and the Whigs, by then espousing the cause of Charles’s illegitimate son, Monmouth, lost all credibility, along with their hopes of excluding James from the succession.

Aphra Behn flayed the Whigs with impunity in The City Heiress in 1682, but when she widened her target to include Monmouth himself, in her prologue to Romulus and Hersilia later that year, she was arrested, and at least severely reprimanded. Charles’s affection for his unruly bastard son, or some perverse sense of his far-flung family’s dignity, never entirely deserted him – nor, of course, did he forget his mistresses, of whom two of the most prominent came from the theatre. Mary Davis he took from the Duke’s company, and the almost legendary Nell Gwyn from the King’s – where her position was due to real talent and wit as well as to her undoubted beauty. When, at the height of the crisis over the succession to the throne, Nell’s coach was mistaken for that of Charles’s Catholic mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, she famously won over a jostling mob by declaring from the window, ‘Pray, good people, be civil. I am the protestant whore!’ The line displays all the wry, self-aware sexuality of one of Aphra Behn’s new women. Aphra and Nell were, in fact, close friends.

Even in death, Charles exhibited something like the last-act repentance of a rake from Restoration comedy: at the prompting of Lady Portsmouth, he was attended by a priest, and made a deathbed conversion to Catholicism – the priest, by a fine irony, taking the covert, backstairs route to his bedchamber well-worn by so many of Charles’s mistresses. And among his last words were those of commendation to his brother James: ‘Let not poor Nelly starve.’ In a room filled with as many illegitimate offspring as could be hastily assembled, neither Nell Gwyn nor any of his other women were permitted to pay their last respects. ‘Poor Nelly’ died of an apoplexy soon after. There is little in Restoration comedy which exceeds Charles’s personal excesses, or typifies better than his own conduct the mixture of calculation and generosity – and, to our sensibility, the sexual double-standards – which cloaked the Restoration ‘wit’.

The Altered Face of the Stage

‘They altered at once the whole face of the stage by introducing scenes and women’ – or so John Dennis claimed nostalgically, writing in 1725 of the events of 1660, when play-acting was once more permitted after being banned by the puritans since 1642. The court masques of the Jacobean and Caroline theatre had employed quite elaborate scenery, and the open-air theatres of the Elizabethans had long been giving way to indoor ‘private’ theatres, with greater potential for technical effects. The difference now was that the proscenium arch formed a ‘picture-frame’ for painted perspective scenery, changed by the wings-and-shutters system, which provided a formalised background to Restoration comedy and tragedy.

But it was only a background: the actors performed on the extensive apron stage in front of the proscenium, in a relationship with their audiences no less intimate and uncluttered than their forebears. Indeed, Restoration theatres, which seated from around five to eight hundred, were actually smaller than Elizabethan public playhouses, and their audiences, although not drawn quite so exclusively from a courtly elite as has sometimes been suggested, certainly felt themselves to be part of a social as much as a theatrical occasion.

So to an extent did the actors – hence that ‘crossing of the boundary’ between actor and character so clearly felt in many Restoration prologues and epilogues, where the player speaks simultaneously in character and in his or her own person. How this affected the acting of the play itself is not certain: but the style would certainly have been presentational rather than realistic – at a time when rituals of ‘presentation’ were, of course, prominent in everyday behaviour as well. So, with directors unthought of, and playwrights far less involved in the practical business of mounting a play than their Elizabethan counterparts, the influence of the dancing-master was probably strong in matters of movement and stage grouping. As Jocelyn Powell aptly summed it up: ‘The atmosphere of the Restoration theatre was that of a sophisticated cabaret.’

Of those managers seeking the ‘patents’ which would permit them to create theatrical companies amidst the political confusion of Charles’s return, the two successful bidders were both men of influence at court, who had had experience of theatre before the civil wars. It was Thomas Killigrew who wrote the play on which Aphra Behn based The Rover – but whereas his Thomaso had been intended for reading only, Sir William Davenant had even succeeded in getting plays with music produced under Cromwell’s guard (opera, like melodrama later, thus originating in England as a means of getting round the law). Davenant was given his royal patent to manage, under the patronage of the Duke of York, a company which first played in a converted ‘real’ tennis court at Lincoln’s Inn Fields – the older theatres having been pulled down or left derelict during the civil wars. They moved in 1671 to a playhouse purpose built by Wren – the Dorset Garden Theatre, beside the Thames, where many of Aphra Behn’s plays were performed. Killigrew’s company, which came under the king’s own patronage, played in another converted tennis court until the first Drury Lane Theatre was completed in 1663 (to be replaced by a new playhouse in 1674 after its destruction by fire).

With just two companies of less than thirty players apiece – reduced to a single ‘united’ company from 1682 to 1695 – acting was thus an exclusive though not prestigious profession, its members as well-known personally to many in the audience as their own acquaintances in the pit or boxes. And, although the patents stressed that the introduction of actresses was a matter of morality – to correct the abuse of men appearing ‘in the habits of women’ – intimacy between these players and their audiences was not confined to closeness in the auditorium. It was probably inevitable that, in the absence of a traditional route for women into the profession, some actresses in a licentious age should have achieved their positions through sexual patronage – though it’s also indisputable that Elizabeth Barry, despite her path being smoothed by the notorious rake Lord Rochester, became a truly great tragic actress, while Nell Gwyn, although she owed her early chances to being the mistress of a leading player, Charles Hart, became no less striking a comic actress before she caught the eye of the king.

Other actresses, such as the great Thomas Betterton’s wife Mary, were none the less able to lead lives of untainted virtue at a time when such behaviour in courtly society was almost eccentric. The fine comic actress Anne Bracegirdle even managed to sustain a reputation for excessive prudishness in private life. This did not, however, prevent her being thought fair game for predatory males: as late as 1692, an assault on her honour was compounded by the murder of the actor William Mountford, who had tried to intervene on her behalf. Those guilty were not severely punished.

This was an age when Rochester might order Dryden to be beaten up in a back alley for an imagined satirical slight; when the king himself could instigate an assault upon a parliamentarian who had dared to criticise his mistresses; and when Rochester and Sedley could attempt the rape of an heiress in broad daylight. The mixture of violence and casual sexuality which Aphra Behn presents even less discreetly than most of her contemporaries – in Willmore, almost with pride – is thus a reflection on the stage of the very brittle veneer of politeness which barely concealed the viciousness of much high-society life.

The Professionalism of Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn was not the first known woman playwright: that distinction goes to a tenth-century Benedictine nun named Hrotsvitha, who wrote six religious dramas while in the German abbey of Gandersheim. That Hrotsvitha’s plays should glorify the virtue of chastity was only to be expected in a period when the typology of women allowed few gradations between the virgin and the whore, other than that of the nagging shrew – but her shadow falls strangely before the women playwrights of the Restoration.

Behn was not quite the earliest of these. Margaret Cavendish, Marchioness of Newcastle, published two collections, including some twenty plays, in 1662 and 1668, but these were never performed. Catherine Phillips, however, achieved the honour of having her Pompey, a version of a play by the contemporary French writer Corneille, performed in the brand new Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin in February 1663 – and so of inaugurating the vogue for ‘heroic dramas’, in the rhymed couplets which were to displace blank verse as the main medium for tragic writing until Buckingham’s The Rehearsal