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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

I think she's really attractive to students.

She's really attractive to modern culture because she's so adept at this blurring of gender boundaries.

She's praised for the combination of manly wit and feminine grace.

In a way, she's this playing with gender identity and the attraction of ambiguity around...

around gender disturbance is central to Ben's writing and to what makes her attractive then and makes her attractive now.

So that's my... I mean, I think it's also poetry is a diminishing interest in art now for readers.

I mean, it's really interesting that Ben's reputation has grown because people have become so fascinated by the novel and the history of the novel.

And that novel, Orinoco, is particularly fascinating.

So I think... And again, one could say restoration poetry is not widely read now, and it's a shame because it's beautiful, it's occasional, it's got a real tone and temperament to it that people can...

I enjoy it so much because it's really intimate and personal.

Like Rochester, she leaps out of the page and talks to you in her poetry.

So I think it's very... And if we were thinking about libertinism, I suppose that would have been the space that we could have said, in the poetry, what you see her doing is taking a style of poetry or a turn of poetry that men speak in and making women's voices heard in it.

So at the end of this disappointment poem, there's a little line that says, the nymph's resentment's none but I can well imagine or console.

Tell people to just Google this wonderful title, To Fair Clarinda Who Made Love To Me, Imagined More Than Woman.

It's a title that leaves you thinking what?

I think a lot of it is about training.

People don't really train in restoration theatre in the way that they do in Renaissance theatre or in modern theatre.

So it's about getting the pace right.

And it can be too slow or too fast.

And it's very forward-facing theatre, so your actors have to really engage the audience and pull them into the story.

Showing 141–160 of 171 · page 8 of 9