The Rover E-Book

Aphra Behn

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The NHB Drama Classics series presents the world's greatest plays in affordable, highly readable editions for students, actors and theatregoers. The hallmarks of the series are accessible introductions (focussing on the play's theatrical and historical background, together with an author biography, key dates and suggestions for further reading) and the complete text, uncluttered with footnotes. The translations, by leading experts in the field, are accurate and above all actable. The editions of English-language plays include a glossary of unusual words and phrases to aid understanding. The Rover is a classic Restoration comedy by the first English woman playwright. 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. Edited and introduced by Simon Trussler.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

THEROVER

byAphra Behn

edited and with an introduction bySimon 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, -style farce, , before publishing what was for long her best-known work, the novel , 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.