“Some for this Faction cry, others for that”: Royalist Politics, Courtesanship, and Bawdry in Aphra Behn’s The Rover, Part II

Aphra Behn’s treatment of female sexuality in The Second Part of The Rover (1681) is puzzling. The First Part of The Rover (1677) has long been read as a celebration of desiring women, from its sympathetic portrayal of the courtesan Angellica Bianca to its celebration of the frankly sexual aristocrat Hellena.¹ The Rover, Part II, though, represents women’s sexuality more ambiguously. Behn’s second Rover play centers on a courtesan, La Nuche, who is characterized favorably, and an aristocrat, Ariadne, who makes her desires known; however, this play also features another sexualized female character, La Nuche’s aging bawd, Petronella, and she is subjected to some of the cruelest treatment doled out to any woman in Behn’s oeuvre. Portrayed throughout the play as desperate, Petronella is ridiculed for her wish to remain young and for her obsession with wealth; by the end of the play, she has become The Rover, Part II’s villain.

In late seventeenth-century England, courtesans and bawds shared key traits: both were women who worked in the sex trade, and both were sexualized in the literature and periodicals of the day. Despite these similarities, courtesans and bawds were represented quite differently by late seventeenth-century texts: while late-Stuart writings frame courtesans as beautiful practitioners of the art of sexuality, texts from this period characterize bawds as hardnosed, unattractive businesswomen. Such distinctions are reflected in the period’s political rhetoric. As James Turner has shown, much late seventeenth-century political discourse centered on sex and, in particular, on sexualized women. Courtesans and bawds serve different functions in that rhetoric. Positioned at the center of Charles II’s libertine politics, courtesans played a key role in the king’s efforts to draw up support for his rule, their beauty celebrated as evidence of Charles’s sexual conquests. Bawds, on the other hand, were condemned by crown partisans, who vilified procuresses’ business acumen as greedy and denounced their sale of women as economically and socially disruptive (Mowry 79-103).

I argue here that The Rover, Part II’s ambivalent treatment of female sexuality is bound up with its partisan politics. Little critical work has been done on The Rover, Part II, but this text marks an important transition in Behn’s career.² The first play staged after The Rover, Part I and The Feigned Courtesans were performed at court in early 1680, The Rover, Part II signals Behn’s reinvigorated support for Stuart rule.³ Written at the height of the Exclusion Crisis, the play trumpets its royalism throughout, from its opening dedication to the controversial Duke of York to its epilogue’s denunciation of audience members who “Rail for the Cause against the government” (298). In the past fifteen years, much scholarship has focused on Behn’s political investments, and such work has brought to light the complicated interrelationship between her partisan and sexual politics.⁴ Building on this scholarship, I read The Rover, Part II alongside the period’s political rhetoric about courtesans and bawds, teasing out the links between this play’s royalism and its treatment of sexualized women. Ultimately, I contend that The Rover, Part II does not celebrate desiring women more generally, as previous critics have suggested, but rather that this play supports a particular, politically expedient version of female desire.⁵

“Confound the mercenary Jilt!”

The Rover, Part II treats its courtesan character remarkably favorably. In a move that goes beyond even The Rover, Part I’s sympathetic portrayal of Angellica Bianca, The Rover, Part II concludes with La Nuche in a long-term relationship with Willmore, the courtesan having won the rake-hero’s affections over her aristocratic rival, Ariadne. Scholarship on The Rover, Part II has interpreted Behn’s favorable characterization of the courtesan as evidence of this play’s lionization of female sexuality. Heidi Hutner contends that “Behn’s resistance to repressive strategies of control is evident in the two parts of The Rover in the move from the prostitute as outsider to the prostitute as heroine...