Claire Bowditch
speaker
97 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 6 Aug
Claire Bowditch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I think The Rover was especially successful because what it did was to give the restoration audience what they wanted.
And what generally they wanted was a kind of pairing.
Two sets of lovers, one a constant couple who had some opposition to their romantic union.
The other was a witty couple, one rake and one clever woman who's trying to capture this rake.
So it had that about it.
It ticked that box.
It had that formula.
But what Ben also did with it was to complicate that binary with a character called Angelica Bianca, who was a courtesan.
And Angelica Bianca added a darkness to that play that I think appealed to two different constituencies, really.
She was.
She was, I think.
And Angelica Bianca is an extremely complicated character.
She's not simply there as...
a prostitute.
She's there as a devoted woman as well.
And so I think that, yes, that's a very clever way of shutting down some of those arguments about what women in the public sphere were like.
I think that, indeed, we, as critics of Ben, struggle to reconcile these two, in one sense, very progressive ideas for her time in terms of her championing of women in the public sphere and her really quite staunch royalism.
You know, they seem diametrically opposed.
In a sense, she's quite clever in how she does reconcile these two things, though, because what she refrains from doing is looking back immediately to the Stuart line, if you like, in order to contextualise her support for both Charles as a Protestant, or at least a public Protestant, and James as a public Catholic and his heir presumptive.
What she does instead is support them in what might be thought of as quite
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