In periods of history characterized by male dominance, it was easy to overlook the complex role of women. Often given little explicit agency in major avenues of their lives, such as whether or who to marry, women often forewent their own desires...

In The Rover, Aphra Behn illustrates a world in which sex and economic exchange unite under the mandates of the patriarchy. In such a society, sexuality is commodified, and a woman is either sold into the marriage market (by her family, in an...

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and Aphra Behn’s The Rover are two vastly different works of literature that focus on different matters: More’s work is a political document, while Behn’s can be categorized as more of a social one. While the two works in...

It is imperative for drama to require much more consideration regarding the intended audience than other literary forms, since in the end, a play is meant to be a performance. In drama and its theatrical depiction, the spectators experience the...

In Wycherley’s The Country Wife and Aphra Behn’s The Rover, both authors explore masculine ideals through the legendary character of Don Juan, as respectively exemplified by Harry Horner and Willmore. By casting their heroes as embodiments of this...

Sex and sexuality as historical constructs acquired new meanings in the Restoration, with them becoming the essential components of the economy of exchange. Situated amidst the popular libertine culture, the ideals of love, virtue and more...

First performed in 1677, The Rover captures and explores the Libertine philosophy through the words and actions of Cavalier characters. The playwright, Aphra Behn, seems to hold contradicting vindications in this work: a rewarding look at the...

In England, the Baroque was a partly useful concept when discussing about the Restoration Comedy. The English theatres were closed for 18 years, during the English Civil War and English Commonwealth. They were reopened in the Restoration of...

Gender and economics were no less intertwined during the eighteenth century than they are today. In the world of emerging paper currency and capitalism, many issues were coming to light for the first time, and so it comes as little surprise that...

Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1640-1689) set in Naples, Italy during the Restoration Period, loosely based on Thomas Killigrew’s Thomaso centres primarily on two couples – Wilmore, Hellena and Florinda, Belvile, similar to Shakespeare’s Much Ado about...

“His silent Griefs, swell up to Storms, And not one God, his Fury spares, He Curst his Birth, his Fate, his Stars, But more the Shepherdesses Charms ; Whose soft bewitching influence, Had Damn'd him to the Hell of Impotence.”

Within the confines...

Aphra Behn’s “The Disappointment” and Eliza Haywood’s “Fantomina” both imply a strong relationship between sex and power. Yet, the ways in which their characters understand this relationship is dependent on their gender. The male protagonists,...