The Rover
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First performed and published in 1677, Aphra Behn’s The Rover; or, The Banish’d Cavaliers is a lively Restoration comedy of disguise, desire and social transgression. Set in Naples during Carnival, the play follows a group of English royalist exiles whose pursuit of pleasure brings them into a tangle of romantic intrigue, mistaken identities and dangerous encounters. At its centre are Hellena, a spirited young woman determined to choose her own future, and Willmore, the charismatic but unreliable rover whose appetite for freedom is matched by his disregard for convention.
Beneath its exuberant wit and theatrical energy, the play examines the unequal freedoms afforded to men and women, the economics of marriage and the tension between sexual independence and social respectability. Behn gives her female characters a sharpness and agency that unsettle the conventions of Restoration comedy, even as the play reflects the period’s troubling assumptions about gender and consent. One of the most enduring works by the first Englishwoman to make a professional living as a playwright, The Rover remains a defining achievement of Restoration theatre and a vivid portrait of a society negotiating pleasure, power and liberty.
From the book
Love ceases to be a pleasure, when it ceases to be a secret.
— Aphra Behn, The Rover
On The Rover
The Rover is the most frequently performed and read of Behn’s plays.
— Helen M. Burke, The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn