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
She says her father was given a job as lieutenant governor of the island.
That seems unlikely if he was a barber.
I mean, it's a remarkable novel and it's much studied now.
I think probably because there's a debate about the extent to which it's making a case against slavery.
But at least one might sort of say that it's a novel which exposes the kind of savagery at the heart of colonial government.
In that respect, you could see it as presaging a novel like Heart of Darkness.
Like Marlowe in Heart of Darkness, the narrator...
is a character in the novel who is complicit with the English colonial government that she's also criticising for its cruelty to this noble African prince who has been enslaved.
He leads a slave rebellion, it's put down, he's horribly tortured, murders his wife and then he's publicly executed and his courted parts are sent around the colony to
She finishes saying this mangled spectacle of the king.
It's recalling again Charles I's murder, so it's a wonderful kind of mixture of contemporary allegory and analogy and contemporary critique of the colonial situation.
It's their mantra.
And I think we mustn't underestimate her success as a playwright, whether you're thinking of her as a female playwright or not.
I mean, between 1617 and 1688, she has 18 plays put on the stage.
Dryden has 14, and Durfee has 14, and that's the highest number for any male playwright over the same period.
So she's extraordinarily successful as a playwright, and she's really admired for this capacity, what are called her stage management, the way she manages stage space, the discovery scene, that moment when the shutters come back and you find a young couple in bed, is much admired.
And that plays through all of her fiction.
One way to put it is, I mean, fiction is a really new form.
The novel's really new, and she's bringing a lot of theatrical convention into the novel.
Although she does say that she gets more criticised for it because she's a woman writer.
Showing 101–120 of 171 · page 6 of 9
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