Mrs. Aphra Behn, from the portrait by Sir Peter Lely 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 publisher's device: W H and windmill 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 are located in two separate files, together with their respective Notes, as explained in the “Notes” section of this file. “The Rover” Parts I and II are separate plays; Part II is a sequel. Students should note that the editorial material (1915) is sometimes significantly at variance with current (2007) Behn scholarship. PAGE PREFACE xiii INTRODUCTION (_Memoir of Mrs. Behn_) xv _The Text_ _lxii_ _The Portraits of Mrs. Behn_ _lxiv_ _Footnotes to Introduction_ THE ROVER (PART I); OR, THE BANISH’D CAVALIERS 1 THE ROVER (PART II); OR, THE BANISH’D CAVALIERS 109 THE DUTCH LOVER 215 THE ROUNDHEADS; OR, THE GOOD OLD CAUSE 331 NOTES 427 xiii PREFACE. It is perhaps not altogether easy to appreciate the multiplicity of difficulties with which the first editor of Mrs. Behn has to cope. Not only is her life strangely mysterious and obscure, but the rubbish of half-a-dozen romancing biographers must needs be cleared away before we can even begin to see daylight. Matter which had been for two centuries accepted on seemingly the soundest authority is proven false; her family name itself was, until my recent discovery, wrongly given; the very question of her portrait has its own vexed (and until now unrecognized) dilemmas. In fine there seems no point connected with our first professional authoress which did not call for the nicest investigation and the most incontrovertible proof before it could be accepted without suspicion or reserve. The various collections of her plays and novels which appeared in the first half of the eighteenth century give us nothing; nay, they rather cumber our path with the trash of discredited _Memoirs_. Pearson’s reprint (1871) is entirely valueless: there is no attempt, however meagre, at editing, no effort to elucidate a single allusion; moreover, several of the Novels—and the Poems in their entirety—are lacking. I am happy to give (Vol. V) one of the Novels, and that not the least important, _The History of the Nun_, for the first time in any collected edition. Poems, in addition xiv to those which appeared in Mrs. Behn’s lifetime, and were never reprinted after, have been gathered with great care from many sources (of which some were almost forgotten).