The Rover, Part I

Note on this Digital Edition

This publication is part of the research project «Teatro español y europeo de los siglos XVI y XVII: patrimonio y bases de datos», referencia PID2019-104045GB-C54 (acronym EMOTHE), funded by MICIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.

This digital edition is an adaptation of the version of The Rover included in Montague Summers' 1915 anthology The Works of Mrs. Aphra Behn. All spelling and punctuation has been modernized using U.S. English spelling conventions, and all abbreviations (primarily found in the stage directions) have been expanded to represent their full meaning. All interventions made by Summers that do not appear in the original 1677 quarto have been marked in between brackets; any additional changes made by the TEI digital text editor have been marked with double brackets.

For reference and citation purposes, this edition numbers speeches within each scene; for instance, the suggested reference form for the first speech in the play is 1.1.sp1.

PROLOGUE, Written by a Person of Quality

Wits, like physicians, never can agree
When of a different society;
And Rabel’s drops were never more cried down
By all the learned doctors of the town
Than a new play, whose author is unknown.
Nor can those doctors with more malice sue
(And powerful purses) the dissenting few
Than those with an insulting pride do rail
At all who are not of their own cabal.
If a young poet hit your humor right,
You judge him then out of revenge and spite;
So amongst men there are ridiculous elves
Who monkeys hate for being too like themselves,
So that the reason of the grand debate,
Why wit so oft is damned when good plays take,
Is that you censure as you love or hate.
Thus, like a learned conclave, poets sit
Catholic judges both of sense and wit,
And damn or save as they themselves think fit.
Yet those who to others’ faults are so severe
Are not so perfect but themselves may err.
Some write correct indeed, but then the whole
(Bating their own dull stuff i’th’ play) is stole:
As bees do suck from flowers their honeydew,
So they rob others striving to please you.
Some write their characters genteel and fine,
But then they do so toil for every line
That what to you does easy seem, and plain
Is the hard issue of their laboring brain.
And some th’effects of all their pains we see
Is but to mimic good extempore.
Others by long converse about the town
Have wit enough to write a leud lampoon,
But their chief skill lies in a bawdy song.
In short, the only wit that’s now in fashion
Is but the gleanings of good conversation.
As for the author of this coming play,
I asked him what he thought fit I should say
In thanks for your good company today:
He called me fool, and said it was well known
You came not here for our sakes but your own.
New plays are stuffed with wits and with debauches,
That crowd and sweat like cits in May-Day coaches.