Thinking Activity: The Rover

This Blog-Post is a response of Thinking Activity on 'The Rover' which is given by our professor Ma'am Yesha Bhatt. To know more about this task, visit this blog.

• About the Author in Brief:

Aphra Behn, who was English dramatist, translator fiction writer, and poet also the first Englishwoman known to earn her living by writing from Restoration Era. She was born on 1640, Harbledown, Kent, England and died April, 1689, London.As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors. 

• About the Play:

The Rover or The Banish'd Cavaliers is a play in two parts, included Five Acts. It is a revision of Thomas Killigrew's play Thomaso, or The Wanderer (1664), and features multiple plot lines, dealing with the amorous adventures of a group of Englishmen and women in Naples at Carnival time. According to the Article of Elaine Hobby, 

"It was often revived and many times reprinted in the first half of the 18th century. Set at carnival time in Naples in 1656, the play presents its 1677 audience with the imagined exploits of a group of ‘banished Cavaliers’. Taking its audience back to the world of Royalist continental exile, the play would have sparked ever-ready memories of the civil wars of the 1640s, which had resulted in the execution of Charles I in 1649. At that time, many of the king’s supporters – the Cavaliers – had fled to continental Europe. Interwoven with this, the play explores the attempts of its heroines to exert some control over their destinies."

• Major Character's in Brief Introduction:
• Willmore: An upper-class soldier called a cavalier, Willmore is loyal to the English monarchy, and has therefore been exiled from his homeland.
• Hellena: The strong, witty, brave heroine, and sister to Florinda and Don Pedro, Hellena starts the play determined to venture out into the Carnival and fall in love.
• Angelica: A beautiful and wealthy courtesan, Angelica is desired by all men in Naples, including Don Antonio, Don Pedro, and Willmore, all of whom duel over her at various points throughout the play.
• Florinda: The sister of Hellena and Don Pedro, Florinda is ladylike and modest, in contrast to her sister’s nontraditional forwardness. She is in love with the cavalier Belvile.
• Belvile: A dashing cavalier, and the epitome of a gentleman, Belvile is in love with Florinda, a noblewoman whom he met during the Spanish civil wars. 
• Don Pedro: The main antagonist of the play, the rigid and controlling Don Pedro wishes for his sister Florinda to marry his friend Don Antonio, and for his sister Hellena.
• Frederick: An English gentleman who is good friends with Willmore and Belvile, Frederick is the common sense of the group, often trying to get his friends out of scrapes and duels. 
• Ned Blunt: An English gentleman like Frederick, Blunt is an oafish idiot, mocked and disdained by his friends, and valued only for his money.
• Don Antonio: Although Don Pedro wishes for Antonio, the highborn son of a viceroy, to marry his sister Florinda, Antonio only has eyes for the seductive prostitute Angelica.

QUE.1

 Angellica:Considers the financial negotiations which one makes before marrying a prospective bride the same as prostitution. Do you agree?

• About Angellica:

In this video, professor, Judith Hawley, introduced the play with argues related to Marriage.   

Angellica is a famous courtesan who at the time of the play’s events has just lost her benefactor, Don Pedro’s wealthy uncle, who had been paying her monthly expenses of 1,000 crowns. Now she is advertising for a new lover, so she has placed three portraits of herself on the outside of her palatial home, along with the price. Angellica is accustomed to a life of luxury, but she has paid for it by sacrificing her honor and virginity for the riches she extracts from the men who fall prey to her seductive beauty. For Angellica, being a courtesan is a matter of survival and independence; to fall in love would ruin her, for then she would be at the mercy of the men she uses. Unfortunately, she falls hopelessly in love with one of the worst sort of men, Captain Willmore, who wants only physical satisfaction and not a love relationship. After being “undone” by Willmore, Don Antonio graciously offers to be her lifelong companion, thus removing her from the need to market her body.

The play considers the restoration period. Angellica's character presents as prostitute. But in the play, it often referred "Courtesan" and "Whore." The financial negotiation occurred with Angellica. She payed her virginity for Money. While we can see during restoration period there were high demand of marriages for women with financial settled men. While,for prostitute like Angillica, it's become very tough to marry because her duty as prostitution. But if she is not prostituted and she wished to marry Willmore, perhaps there was one condition about Money, again. Because of like Florinda , her brother Don Pedro  forced her to marry with  Don Antonio was the Viceroy’s son. He was a wealthy and young Spaniard chosen by Don Pedro. In that both situation, we can see the result of Monetary. As Elaine Hobby, said 

"The Rover’s banished Cavaliers are spending time in Naples – an Italian city ruled by the Spanish, a place that therefore combined, in the English mind, the supposed lasciviousness of Italians with the intensely patriarchal family structures of Spain.

The play’s representative Italians are the ‘Jilting Wench’ Lucetta, who strips and robs Blunt and dumps him in the sewer, and the fabulously beautiful Angellica Bianca, a famous courtesan from the Venetian Republic who is much fought over. The men’s desire for these Italian women echoes a widespread Restoration libertine commitment to indulging the senses and rejecting marriage".

As Willmore said in Act 1, Scene 2,

"Love and Mirth are my Business in Naples; and if I mistake not the Place, here’s an excellent Market for Chapmen of my Humour."

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Article

Character's List