Each event affected both the theatre and social norms of the country. Amazingly this tumultuous and repressive period would spark a new generation of dramatic and comedy writers including William Wycherley, George Farquhar, William Congreve, and Aphra Behn. (Barton,3).
Given a period with such socio-historical background and male dominated constraint, an era where women publishing their writings tantamount prostitution, Aphra Behn remains the first professional woman who boldly and openly entered the masculine area of play writing. Even Virgina Wolf praises her by saying .
All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn. for it was she who earned them the right to speak their mind.
Today Behns work is heralded as feminist, a strong commentary on womens role in her society and how women were viewed by men during the Restoration period. (Barton, 2).
Behn was able to adapt Thomas Killigrews play Thomaso, or the Wanderer (1664) with a female gaze. The storylines of the resulting plays The Rover and The Second Part of the Rover are constructed in the same manner. In these plays revolving around the rover Willmore, Behn addresses some delicate issues concerning mens and womens rights, duties and privileges in a society where male dominance is taken for granted. Willmore envisages marriage as a juggling knot, denoting a cheating, trick-playing (marriage) knot (The Rover 5.1.198: Spencer, Explanatory notes 347).
The aim of this paper therefore is to show how the play manifests the restoration comedy and how at the same time Behn subverts those notions.
When the theatres reopened, writers looked for inspiration after the twenty year ban and found it in the Spanish Comedy of Intrigue. This genre focused more on the plot rather than the development of the characters and therefore was able to capture the audience in the tides of continuous changing situations. The play, Rover, hence consists of four different plots tied together by a sole character, Willmore.
