The Rover and Other Plays (Oxford World's Classics)

Aphra Behn is often lauded as the first professional woman writer but there is already something which we might recognise as a `female tradition' of writing by the time she is born in 1640. That said, writing for a public was still regarded as putting oneself in public circulation (something which many aristocratic male writers like Philip Sidney and, closer to Behn's time, Rochester deemed beneath them) thus making a slippage between female writing and prostitution all too easy. That Behn went ahead anyway is partly due to economic necessity but it also means that her plays are in constant dialogue with those of male Restoration playwrights.The highlight of this collection which gives us four of Behn's plays is The Rover (1677). Rochester, the most notorious rake of Charles II's court, serves as the model for Willmore (a play on Rochester's surname, Wilmot), but the text takes a revisionary view of what it might mean to be a rake or, indeed, the female object of a rake's desire. Behn's play is witty and bright, but also offers a transgressive view of gender relations (permittable in the theatre - already a subversive space) and puts female desire at the heart of the text.The three other plays are from a later period in Behn's life and don't have quite the same buoyancy and sparkle about them. The introduction is brief though pertinent, and the glossary and notes helpful. Recommended.

Read this for my Uni course, a great play and very funny in parts, enjoyed reading it from the start until the end! :)