Carnival Politics, Generous Satire, and Nationalist Spectacle in Behn'sthe Rover

Abstract

In the epilogue to The Rover. Or, the Banish’t Cavaliers (677), Aphra Behn demarcates a set of faulty interpretive practices and directs the audience to the proper reading of her play by negative example. The unidentified speaker begins by performing a hysterical, puritanical reaction to the basic elements of the play: “The Banisht Cavaliers! a Roving Blade!/ A Popish Carnival! a Masquerade!”1 Here, Behn attempts to school her audience in the politics of reading by anticipating, parodying, and therefore dismissing, a particular anti-Catholic, anti-court hermeneutics of paranoia that she associates with the “Conventickling” Dissenters of the “Mutinous Tribe” (ll. 5, 7). Even more moderate members of the audience rule “With th’ Insolence of Common-Wealths” (l. 6) when they presume to judge the play, which is a classic formulation of Behn’s Royalist politics. Two members of this caviling commonwealth are singled out for Behn’s particular scorn, and their negative pronouncements are also mockingly quoted by the speaker of the epilogue. The first is the “Politick grave Fool” (l. 7) who derides contemporary plays like The Rover as “slight airy Toys” (l. 25); the second is one of the “younger Sparks” (l. 30), who proclaims, “Damn me, I’m sure ’twill never please the Court” (l. 33). These disparaging utterances about Behn’s play are lifted from their supposed origins, repeated in a new context, and essentially altered and turned back on their fictive sources by