One woman is the cross-dressing virgin Hellena, who proves that male dress allows a freedom to women otherwise available only to a whore like her rival, Angellica Bianca. Although the loser in the contest and in the end almost too passionate to be contained in the modern conception of a comedy, this latter figure is treated neither with the ferocity Renaissance drama reserved for the whore and passionate woman nor with the complexity of Killigrew’s earlier play Thomaso where, shadowed by other whores, she becomes an investigation of prostitution itself within a morally corrupt society. In The Rover Angellica Bianca is wittily linked with the author both through her initials and through Behn’s ‘Postscript’ in the printed version, which brings playwright and prostitute together as entertainers of men: ‘… I, vainly proud of my judgment, hang out the sign of Angellica… to give notice where a great part of the wit dwelt’.

The second part of The Rover is not as sparkling as the first and it relies more heavily on farce in the courtship of two monstrous rich women, a giant and a dwarf, and in the trickeries of a disguised mountebank, all taken from Thomaso, but in its different denouement it provides an interesting dialogue with the first. The second Rover retells the story of the cavalier Willmore, now a widower and faced once more with the choice of witty and rich virginal girl as bride or experienced and impecunious whore as companion. This time he chooses the whore – there is never any question of marriage for this character in Behn – and stays true to gallantry: ‘Give me thy hand, no poverty shall part us,’ Willmore says as he makes the bargain ‘without the formal foppery of marriage’. The whore replies, ‘She that will not take thy word as soon as the parson’s of the parish, deserves not the blessing.’ The virgin is left to lovelessness and a respectable appearance.

This change of direction and characterization may reflect Behn’s darkening vision of sexual relations and social demands, her fear of the enslaving nature of any marriage, even one entered into by so knowing a heroine as Hellena. In its stress on the libertine world view and the passing of youth and beauty, it may also be responding to the death of the person many spectators regarded as the original of the cavalier rake Willmore: Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, also reputed to be the model for one of the most famous Restoration heroes, Dorimant in Etherege’s Man of Mode (1676). Rochester’s reputed deathbed conversion to Christian piety after a life of cavalier libertinism may have dismayed Behn since she lays no stress on it (nor did she follow Thomaso in thoroughly reforming her hero, Willmore), preferring to emphasize the witty courtier who, in Dr Johnson’s words, ‘blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness’.9 Among the role-playing Rochester’s many pranks had been his disguise, reminiscent of Willmore’s in The Rover, Part II, as a mountebank pretending to restore their youthful attractions to ageing women.

Finally the change may also have had something to do with the skills of Elizabeth Barry, Rochester’s one-time mistress, who played the whore in the second Rover as she had played the virgin in the first – she would go on to play Angellica rather than Hellena in revivals of Part I. She was good at portraying passionate women tormented by their desire to give up everything for love and their equal horror at being used as ‘A man’s convenience, his leisure hours, his bed of ease/… The slave, the hackney of his lawless lust!’, as the character she played in Behn’s sour comedy The City Heiress (1682) expressed it.

In many of these plays of the late 1670s and early 1680s the cavalier libertine figure is presented as irresistible to women, although he may simultaneously be ridiculous, a buffoon and a rake at once. Willmore of the two parts of The Rover is very much the object of clever women’s desire, and he spends a good deal of his time drunk or so blinded by lust that he cannot tell one female from another or resist falling on the nearest petticoat. Yet he does represent something of an ideal when set against men and women who couple out of lust for power and money; the free love he offers is, however, never quite free for women, as Hellena wittily points out.

Perhaps this rakish figure, with his libertine and cavalier associations, had in addition some autobiographical resonance. Throughout the 1670s and early 1680s Aphra Behn had been writing occasional verses addressing her friends under conventional pastoral names. Many of these were collected in her volume of 1684, Poems on Several Occasions; together they investigate the relations between men and women and describe sexual arousal and fulfilment often in a kind of classical pastoral golden-age setting, where no constraining social context need surround the amorous play. In other poems, however, Behn humorously portrays the manoeuvres of men and women as they struggle both for sexual gratification and for social power. On the evidence of these works it seems that for a considerable time she was uneasily in love with yet another lawyer with cavalier style but Puritan background, described in ‘Our Cabal’ before the affair started as a haughty, inconstant man, dangerously attractive to both sexes; he was also a thorough libertine in philosophy and action: ‘A wit uncommon, and facetious,/A great admirer of Lucretius’. This figure, probably John Hoyle, portrayed after his murder in a quarrel in 1692 as an atheist, a sodomite professed, a corrupter of youth and a blasphemer of Christ’, seems to have inspired the series of letters, Love-Letters to a Gentleman, printed after Behn died. While having an autobiographical ring since they portray Behn as ‘of a generous and open temper, something passionate’, to use the words of the ‘Memoirs’, these also conform to the literary model of the desiring and complaining woman recently made popular by the translation of the French Letters of a Portuguese Nun. As with the Portuguese Nun, the amorous pain of the lady in Love-Letters seems to be subtly assuaged by the written expression of it and by the dramatizing of a writing self.

It is possible that many of her most famous poems, as well as Love-Letters and some of her dramatic characters, were inspired by the affair with Hoyle. ‘The Disappointment’, distantly based, like Rochester’s ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, on Ovid’s Amores but deriving more directly from a recent French poem, records a sexual experience of premature ejaculation. But unlike the male-authored poems it is told from the female point of view, so that conventional male seduction tactics and sexual habits can both be mocked; where Rochester’s poem ends with the woman more or less forgotten and the man railing against his limp penis, Behn’s hero is left blaming fate and the lady whose resentment is quite understood by the presumably female narrator. Unlike the French original which allows the man to compensate for his initial failure with a later more piquant success, Behn’s lover is left with his embarrassment. The disappointing experience recurs in the first part of Behn’s novel of the 1680s, Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister.

In the late 1670s and early 1680s London, much addicted to scheming throughout Charles II’s reign, faced the major catastrophe of the Popish Plot brought on by Titus Oates’s allegations of Roman Catholic designs on the kingdom. The impetus was the problematic succession to the throne, for Charles, though he had numerous illegitimate offspring including the popular and Protestant Duke of Monmouth, had no legitimate ones and his successor was therefore his brother, James, Duke of York, a declared Catholic and anathema to the Whigs, many of whom supported Monmouth. To Aphra Behn, who was devoted to James as both duke and future king, it seemed that the Civil War of the 1640s was about to be fought all over again.

The unrest had more than political consequences. The ‘cursed plotting age’ emptied the theatres, she complained in the prologue to The Feigned Courtesans (1679). This fact did not, however, prevent her from subjecting the remaining audience to a partisan view of courtly Tory virtue and Whig and city corruption, and in several plays she wittily turned Whig and Puritan politics into bedroom farce. No doubt too she maintained the ‘royal cause’ outside the theatre by writing Tory ‘doggerel’, mentioned in the ‘Letter to Mr Creech at Oxford’ and in the prologue to The False Count (1681), although, as with her espionage, it appears that she was not paid by His Majesty for her efforts. Despite all the outspoken loyalty to ‘the King and his Royal Brother’ she managed to offend the former in the summer of 1682 in an epilogue to an anonymous play in which, beyond her usual berating of the Whigs, she castigated the Duke of Monmouth for his sin of ‘rebelling ’gainst a king and father’. This was displeasing to Charles and she was briefly arrested.

In the same year the theatres were in financial as well as political trouble. The King’s Company collapsed and the two companies were merged.