Disguise and Deflowering in The Rover

Disguise & Clothing

Taking place in Italy during Carnival, the common comedic trope of lovers in disguise is quite prominent in The Rover. Still, I was surprised by how often people seem to be in disguise, and the number of different disguises people take on. The women in particular enter “in habits different from what they have been seen in” a number of times. Hellena, for example, is seen as a gypsy, a male page, and in some other sort of carnival costume through the course of the play. Florinda’s gypsy costume is the key to her testing the fidelity of Belvile, and the only way se can move about the city unnoticed. When Lucetta tricks Blunt, she lures him into a dark room and steals his clothing, and he spends a great deal of time in his “shirt and drawers” (4.5, p. 228), and later looking “ridiculously” in a “Spanish habit” (5.1, p. 245).

In relation to our other plays, The Rover seems to call for much more elaborate costuming. I suppose this has something to do with changing theatrical styles, but I wonder how such issues take part in the greater themes of the play. If the characters are always changing clothes, is not the audience put in a similar position as the other characters, trying to figure out who’s who? What about Hellena’s page boy costume, in which she is actually a woman pretending to be a boy (and not a boy pretending to be a woman pretending to be a boy)? How does that change the dynamic of gender transgression as it has been seen previously in plays like Philaster or Cymbeline?

The play contains a lot of sight/seeing metaphors as well [i.e. Hellena says Willmore’s “horrible loving eyes” (1.2, p.179) will cause her to fall in love with him, Angelica’s portraits, Willmore: “I will gaze, to let you see my strength” “Holds her, looks on her, and pauses and sighs”]. What can we make of all this?

Love, Violence, and Rape in The Rover

The Rover exhibits a treatment of sexuality that is forever teetering on the edge of extreme violence. By the end of the play, I was more than a little disturbed by the views towards sex of some characters. Florinda is nearly raped twice in the play, and not by people who are “villains” as we have come to define other rapists in 17^th century drama (like DeFlores or Cloten, for example, who are bad guys from the start). Willmore and Blunt are funny characters, at worst slightly debauched, and yet each of their scenes with Florinda offers a surprising rationale for rape. Even before the actual scenes, there’s a hint of this in the song that’s sung below Angelica’s window:

…guilty smiles and blushes dressed [Caelia’s] face.

At this the bashful youth all transport grew,

And with kind force he taught the virgin how

To yield what all his sighs could never do. (2.1, p 188)

This seems to suggest the issues of lustfulness that Willmore uses to excuse his actions. Feminine beauty “transports” the male, and he must use “force” to teach her how to “yield.” In 3.5, Willmore enters drunk and assaults Florinda. When she resists, he attempts to reasons with her that sleeping with him is “no sin” because “’twas neither designed nor premeditated.” When she threatens to cry “murder, rape, or anything,” Willmore reminds her that her that she left her gate open, therefore she is as much to blame. In Blunt’s attempted rape in 4.5, he is so disgusted with women after Lucetta tricked him that he desires to be “revenged on one whore for the sins of another” and to “make up his loss here on [Florinda’s] body.” Both men, when confronted with their near-crime, say that they thought they were accosting a common harlot.

My question is: what are we to make of sexuality in the play? With the near rapes, the duels, Angelica’s bit with the gun, Blunt’s cozening, and so on, it addresses some serious issues about sex and violence. Is this common for restoration comedy? It seems both a farce and an invective—all without that moralizing, nicely wrapped up ending in which everyone gets their comeuppance. Do we see the “rapists” as punished in any way in the end, or is it treated as more of a simple mistake of a man “transported” by a woman’s wiles?