As a Restoration comedy, The Rover is primarily comedic in mood. However, the mood is also tense and menacing at times. When the characters who usually contribute the most to the comedic mood go overboard, the audience is meant to stop smiling and begin to feel on edge. Although Willmore charms and the audience most of the time, his rakish and excessive tendencies also make him a dangerous figure. There are scenes in which his lines and actions make the audience laugh in one moment and shudder in the next. The oscillation between these two contrasting moods creates an uneasiness that runs as an undercurrent throughout the play's five acts.
Through this dual mood, Behn reveals the dark underbelly of the play's festivity and carnality. Not only are the stakes both lower and higher when most people's identities are concealed at all times, the excessive delight and freedom of Carnival eventually reaches a tipping point when it puts central characters in danger. Although Behn was not using this precariousness to suggest a nostalgia for the puritanism of the Interregnum, she does seem to suggest that not all groups in society were empowered by the Restoration's revelry. While she, as a staunch Royalist, saw the Interregnum as an oppressive period in her country's history, Behn shows that the Cavaliers' conception of Carnival reinforced an oppressive dynamic that celebrated masculine desire but denied women agency over their own bodies. Through the dual mood, she expresses her disillusionment with Carnival's—and, on another level, the Restoration's—broken promises of unfettered indulgence, absolute freedom, and toppled hierarchies.
