THE WORKS
OF
APHRA BEHN
Edited by
MONTAGUE SUMMERS
VOL. I
The Rover (Part i); or, The Banish’d Cavaliers
The Rover (Part ii); or, The Banish’d Cavaliers
The Dutch Lover
The Round-Heads; or, The Good Old Cause
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
STRATFORD-ON-AVON: A. H. BULLEN
MCMXV
To Francis James,
this the first collected edition of
Aphra Behn.
CONTENTS.
Items in italics were added by the transcriber. The plays arelocated in two separate files, together with their respective Notes, asexplained in the “Notes” section of this file.
“The Rover” Parts I and II are separate plays; Part II is asequel.
Students should note that the editorial material (1915) is sometimessignificantly at variance with current (2007) Behn scholarship.
| PAGE | |
| PREFACE | xiii |
INTRODUCTION | xv |
| lxii | |
| lxiv | |
| 1 | |
| 109 | |
| 215 | |
| 331 | |
| NOTES | 427 |
PREFACE.
It is perhaps not altogether easy toappreciate the multiplicity of difficulties with which the first editorof Mrs. Behn has to cope. Not only is her life strangely mysterious andobscure, but the rubbish of half-a-dozen romancing biographers mustneeds be cleared away before we can even begin to see daylight. Matterwhich had been for two centuries accepted on seemingly the soundestauthority is proven false; her family name itself was, until my recentdiscovery, wrongly given; the very question of her portrait has its ownvexed (and until now unrecognized) dilemmas. In fine there seems nopoint connected with our first professional authoress which did not callfor the nicest investigation and the most incontrovertible proof beforeit could be accepted without suspicion or reserve. The various