"Let's ramble": Fantastic Scenography in Aphra Behn's 'The Rover'

In Aphra Behn’s 1677 play The Rover two young women open the action in a scene which concludes a debate on the inequities of women’s lives with Hellena’s liberatory statement:

[… let us] be as mad as the rest, and take all innocent freedoms. Sister, you’ll go too, will you not? Come prithee be not sad. We’ll outwit twenty brothers if you’ll be ruled by me. Come put off this dull humour with your clothes, and assume one as gay and as fantastic as the dress my cousin Valeria and I have provided, and let’s ramble. (The Rover, 1.1.173-8)

The conventional motifs and experiences of Carnival (masquerade, identity shifting, topsy-turvydom, cross-dressing, pleasure) are condensed in the summative verb calling on and initiating dramatic action (“and let”s ramble”). The ramble invokes a spatial, consequential (“and”), literary, urban and mobile sensibility which the play examines from the perspective of the female characters and discursively and dramatically as a gendered […]