Ros Ballaster

speaker

171 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Ros Ballaster’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · Archive: Aphra Behn · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

Dryden's an interesting case.

He's successful on the stage before Ben.

In the late 1660s, Dryden is commissioned

by the King's Company to write three plays a year.

So he's probably doing quite well out of that.

Ben doesn't have that kind of contract.

Women never get that kind of contract.

So she has to make money.

She's as good as her last play, basically.

And when the theatres go into doldrums, Ben's fortune tends to drop.

We see her moving into other genres.

The plays in 1682, the two companies come together.

There are far fewer new plays.

Ben turns to fiction and then comes back to drama when the theatrical scene revives again.

And her initials, of course, are the same as Afra Ben's initials.

So she's AB.

So there's some suggestion that Ben may have been playing with expectations about her image in this role.

Yeah, I suppose I think I'd want to question, I think it's very, if you're thinking about the libertine as a kind of sexual persona or a form of sexual behaviour, then I think Ben is very clear that it's difficult for women to access that role.

But if you think about libertinism as a kind of aesthetic or philosophy, I think Ben really did embrace that idea.

So the notion of the libertine, the term libertine in classical Rome just means a freed slave.

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