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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So a libertine is someone who, we might say, thinks outside the box, refuses all systems, refuses rule, refuses convention.
It's a kind of public blasphemy, arrogance performance.
You can see that in the figure that Ben most admired, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.
And his surname, Wilmot, of course, is echoed in the name of the hero of the rover, Wilmore.
So that kind of role is being invoked.
And I think Ben clearly identified with that and wanted to be seen as part of that libertine circle, those young court thrusting cavaliers round Charles who were challenging convention, challenging rule, saw themselves as a new young generation taking over from the old Commonwealth men now manifested as parliamentarians.
and there's a very strong kind of libertine ethics or ethos.
One way to put it is to sort of say, you know, Ben pursued a career in writing.
She wasn't a kept mistress.
We know very little.
If she was, she kept that hidden.
So it's in her writing that you see this kind of libertarian energy rather than in her life.
She's always very sceptical about marriage.
Most of her plays concern young women who are, or the majority of her comedies concern young women who are unhappily contracted to old men and want to get back to their young lovers who they've been separated from.
But she's also... I mean, she is against marriages because it's an institution, if you take this libertine ethic.
So she has a kind of... Ben's an odd combination of idealism and pragmatism.
So she has this longing for a golden age, a world in which there was no marriage, no contract, people give love freely.
She often idealises that, but she also said...
She has a poem called The Golden Age in which all of that is idealised and then right at the end we realise this is all spoken in the voice of a man who's just trying to get a woman into bed with him.
So this libertarian language she understands is something that rakes use to try and get women into bed.
Showing 61–80 of 171 · page 4 of 9
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