swords, arrest Belvile, who has returned at the noise, as the
assailant, conveying him by Antonio’s orders to the Viceroy’s palace.
Antonio, in the course of conversation, resigns Florinda to his rival,
and Belvile, disguised as Antonio, obtains Florinda from Don Pedro. At
this moment Willmore accosts him, and the Spaniard perceiving his
mistake, soon takes his sister off home. Angelica next comes in hot
pursuit of Willmore, but they are interrupted by Hellena, dressed as a
boy, who tells a tale of the Rover’s amour with another dame and so
rouses the jealous courtezan to fury, and the twain promptly part
quarrelling. Florinda, meanwhile, who has escaped from her brother,
running into an open house to evade detection, finds herself in Ned
Blunt’s apartments. Blunt, who is sitting half-clad, and in no pleasant
mood owing to his having been tricked of clothes and money and turned
into the street by a common cyprian, greets her roughly enough, but is
mollified by the present of a diamond ring. His friends and Don Pedro,
come to laugh at his sorry case, now force their way into the chamber,
and Florinda, whom her brother finally resigns to Belvile, is
discovered. She is straightway united to her lover by a convenient
priest. Willmore is then surprised by the apparition of Angelica, who,
loading him with bitter reproaches for his infidelity, is about to
pistol him, when she is disarmed by Antonio, and accordingly parts in a
fury of jealous rage, to give place to Hellena who adroitly secures her
Rover in the noose of matrimony.
4 SOURCE.
The entire plan and many details of both parts of _The Rover_ are taken
openly and unreservedly from Tom Killigrew’s _Thomaso, or The
Wanderer_, an unacted comedy likewise in two parts, published for the
first time in his collected works by Henry Herringman (folio, 1663-4).
It is to be noticed, however, that whilst Killigrew’s work is really
one long play of ten closely consecutive acts, the scene of which is
continually laid in Madrid, without any break in time or action, Mrs.
Behn, on the other hand, admirably contrives that each separate part of
_The Rover_ is complete and possesses perfect unity in itself, the
locale being respectively, and far more suitably, in two several
places, Naples and Madrid, rather than confined to the latter city
alone. Mrs. Behn, moreover, introduces new characters and a new
intrigue in her second part, thus not merely sustaining but even
renewing the interest which in _Thomaso_ jades and flags most wearily
owing to the author’s prolixity and diffuseness.
Killigrew, a royalist to the core, participated in the protracted exile
of Charles II, and devoting this interim to literature, wrote _Thomaso_
whilst at Madrid, probably about the year 1654-5. Although undeniably
interesting in a high degree, and not ill written, it shares in no
small measure the salient faults of his other productions, boundless
and needless verbosity, slowness of action, unconscionable length.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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