Archive: Aphra Behn

Summary

In Our Time Archive: Aphra Behn

Podcast: In Our Time / BBC Radio 4
Host: Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)
Guests: Janet Todd, Ros Ballister, Claire Bowditch
Date: August 6, 2026

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Main Theme

This episode explores the remarkable life, literary legacy, and enduring contradictions of Aphra Behn—the first English woman to earn a living through writing. Set against the backdrop of Restoration England, discussion ranges from Behn’s humble origins, her pioneering career in theatre and fiction, political loyalties, bold views on gender and sexuality, and her shifting reputation over centuries. The conversation is rich with insight into Behn’s works (“The Rover,” “Oroonoko,” “The Widow Ranter,” her poetry), her life as a spy, and her influence on women writers and gender representation.

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Key Discussion Points

Aphra Behn’s Origins and Early Life

• Scarcity of Detail: Very little is known about Behn’s early life. It is generally accepted her father was a barber in Kent, and her mother a wet nurse for a higher-status family.
  • Janet Todd: “She’s not born into the kind of family that keeps letters in the attic and that has a big house... So it’s not surprising that very little is known.” (06:17)
• Education: Despite humble beginnings, Behn became highly educated, an autodidact, and extremely resourceful.
  • Janet Todd: “She obviously makes great use of everything and everybody she knows. And she’s just a very, very clever girl.” (06:17)
• Connections: Likely benefited from her mother’s connection to the Killigrew family, particularly Thomas Killigrew. This connection opens doors to both the theatre and espionage.

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Espionage Career and Surinam

• Spying for Charles II: Behn worked as a spy for Charles II with the code name ‘Astraea’ (in both espionage and as a pen name).
  • Sent to Antwerp to try to turn William Scott, a dissident, into a double agent.
  • Janet Todd: “She was already a spy when she went to Suriname… in Antwerp, codenamed 160 and called Estrella again, she was sent there to bring in this William Scott.” (08:11)
• Letters Ask for Funds: Surviving letters are mostly appeals for financial support—a motif throughout her life.
  • Janet Todd: “All through her life most of her letters that we have are asking for money.” (09:03)
• Surinam: Circumstantial evidence strongly suggests Behn visited (and possibly spied in) Surinam, but no definitive proof exists.
  • Janet Todd: “If she wasn’t there, a woman remarkably like her was there, also calling herself Astraea.” (33:00)

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The Restoration Theatre & Women Playwrights

• State of the Theatre: After being shuttered in 1642 during the Puritan era, theatres reopened under Charles II with significant changes:
  • Only two licensed companies (King’s and Duke’s), managed by patent-holders.
  • Notable Shift: Women were permitted for the first time to play female roles on stage.
    • Ros Ballister: “Our impression is, of course, that this is a... novelty and excitement. So seeing women playing female parts on the stage.” (11:07)
  • New opportunity for women playwrights.
• Behn’s Entry: Likely began writing for financial necessity after other ventures (spying) proved unprofitable.
  • Ros Ballister: “She has to make money. She’s as good as her last play, basically.” (12:24)
• Other Women: Frances Boothby and Elizabeth Polwhele were peers, but only produced a single play each. Behn was the most prolific and successful.

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Literary Works: Plays and Fiction

The Rover (1677)

• Success Factors: Delivered the Restoration audience’s favorite formula: a pairing of lovers (constant couple & witty couple), imbued by Behn with depth, complexity, and “darkness” via the character of Angelica Bianca—a courtesan.
  • Claire Bowditch: “Angelica Bianca is an extremely complicated character... She’s not simply there as a prostitute, she’s there as a devoted woman as well.” (17:29)
• Themes:
  • Complex attitudes to sexuality, gender roles, and power.
  • The world as “stacked against women,” who succeed with wit and cunning more than brute force.
    • Janet Todd: “Women need to use their sexuality and to use their wit and cunning to succeed... If they don’t, they will lose in the sexual game and therefore lose in the social game.” (18:11)
• Libertinism: Behn explores female agency but highlights the double standard that made a true “female libertine” largely a social impossibility.
  • Janet Todd: “There isn’t a position in society for the female libertine.” (19:15)
  • Ros Ballister: “But if you think about libertinism as a kind of aesthetic or philosophy, I think Ben really did embrace that idea.” (20:16)

Oroonoko (1688)

• Political Context: Published during crisis in James II’s reign; possibly an allegory for contemporary political affairs.
• Plot: The tragic tale of an African prince enslaved in South America; exposes the savagery of colonial rule.
  • Ros Ballister: “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.” (33:53)
• Debate: Whether Behn was anti-slavery remains open, but her work is pioneering for centering a Black protagonist and critiquing colonial power.

The Widow Ranter

• Virginia Setting: Explores English characters exiled to the colonies; features a female character indulging in “libertine” behaviors.
  • Claire Bowditch: “The Widow Ranter is possibly as close as we might come in Behn to that female rake... She revels in smoking, she smokes a pipe, she gets drunk... mostly drunk by lunchtime.” (36:01)
  • Highlights the intersection of gender, pleasure, and independence.

Fiction vs. Drama

• Stagecraft and Structure: Behn mastered both forms. Her fiction is theatrical; her plays, tightly managed. She brought new energy to the early English novel.
  • Ros Ballister: “Between 1670 and 1688, she had 18 plays put on the stage... She’s extraordinarily successful as a playwright.” (39:06)

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Gender, Libertinism, and Religion

• Marriage as an Institution: Behn is deeply skeptical, especially of forced matches for young women.
  • Ros Ballister: “She has this longing for a golden age... But she also said... this libertarian language she understands is something that rakes use to try and get women into bed.” (23:23)
• Court Life vs. Feminism: Behn’s strong support for the monarchy is juxtaposed with her advocacy for women’s independence—a contradiction examined by critics.
  • Claire Bowditch: “She is a mass of contradictions... we have the feminism and the royalism as sort of contradictory.” (45:11)
• Atheism and Irreverence: Behn was unusual among women of her time for her skepticism toward religion.
  • Janet Todd: “She writes poems where she talks about faith as feeble. She says that Christianity is the last shift of routed argument.” (25:17)

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Reputation, Bawdiness, and Legacy

• Charges of Bawdiness: Restoration sex comedy was the norm, but Behn was targeted for it as a woman.
  • Janet Todd: “Her plays are very bawdy... people are not punished for their peccadilloes... she was criticized for quite a lot of it once this kind of sex comedy had gone out of fashion.” (40:02)
  • Ros Ballister: “She gets more criticised for it because she’s a woman writer.” (40:58)
• Posthumous Reputation: Her fame declined in the moralistic 18th and 19th centuries.
  • Janet Todd recounts the story of Walter Scott’s aunt, who revisited, then rejected, Behn’s works out of newly acquired prudishness (42:54–43:34).
• Revival & Feminist Canon: Virginia Woolf’s famous quote brought her back to public attention (“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn...”). Yet the panel warns that reducing Behn to a proto-feminist icon ignores her literary complexities.
  • Janet Todd: “Virginia Woolf... brings her back... as an amazing woman writer, but I don’t think that Virginia Woolf really gave her her due as an actual creative writer.” (44:27)

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Enduring Contradictions and Modern Relevance

• Contradictions: Behn’s feminism vs. royalism, subversive themes vs. loyalty to authority, radical gender play vs. entrenched social norms.
  • Claire Bowditch: “She’s left us a very interesting legacy... she is a mass of contradictions and several of her characters are masses of contradictions.” (45:11)
• Appeal to Students and Modern Readers: Her gender play, wit, and complexity remain attractive and relevant.
  • Ros Ballister: “She’s really attractive to students... playing with gender identity and the attraction of ambiguity around gender, around gender disturbance is central to Ben’s writing and to what makes her attractive then and now.” (45:58)
• Restoration Theatre Today: Adapting Behn’s plays for the modern stage and the challenges inherent in their bawdy and “problematic” content.
  • Rover: Continues to be revived; opinions differ on contemporary staging (50:07–52:28).
  • Modern productions need to balance Restoration pace, style, and controversial themes (e.g., depiction of sexual violence).

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Notable Quotes and Moments

• On Behn’s origins:
  “We must be prepared to live with what we do not know about her early years.”
  — Melvyn Bragg quoting Germaine Greer (05:59)

• On her resourcefulness:
  “She learns how to write in all genres. She learns how to comport herself among the learned... She’s just a very, very clever girl.”
  — Janet Todd (06:17)

• On Behn's double standards for men and women:
  “There isn’t a position in society for the female libertine.”
  — Janet Todd (19:15)

• On the place of women in theatre:
  “Our impression is, of course, that this is a... novelty and excitement. So seeing women playing female parts on the stage.”
  — Ros Ballister (11:07)

• On contradictions in Behn’s legacy:
  “She is a mass of contradictions and several of her characters are masses of contradictions... we are not all one-dimensional.”
  — Claire Bowditch (45:11)

• On Behn's enduring appeal:
  “She’s really attractive to students... this playing with gender identity... is central to Ben’s writing and to what makes her attractive then and makes her attractive now.”
  — Ros Ballister (45:58)

• On bawdiness and moral taste shifts:
  “Her plays are very bawdy... people are not punished for their peccadilloes... she was criticized for quite a lot once this kind of sex comedy had gone out of fashion.”
  — Janet Todd (40:02)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Behn’s Early Life & Education: 05:13–07:55
• Spying & Surinam: 07:55–09:03, 32:43–33:39
• Restoration Theatre & Playwriting: 09:11–13:40
• Other Women Playwrights: 13:40–14:53
• Success with The Rover: 16:15–17:47
• Masculinity, Femininity, & Libertinism: 17:59–24:56
• Religious Skepticism: 25:17–26:34
• Royalist vs. Feminist Contradiction: 27:15–28:45
• On Oroonoko & Colonialism: 31:41–35:03
• The Widow Ranter & Female Rake: 35:15–37:41
• Fiction vs. Plays: 37:41–39:51
• Bawdiness and Reputation: 39:51–42:54
• Decline & Revival of Reputation: 42:54–44:27
• Modern Relevance & Gender: 45:05–46:25
• Bonus: Restoration Theatre Today: 47:00–54:23

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Final Thoughts

This episode highlights Aphra Behn as a groundbreaker in women’s literature, an innovator in Restoration comedy, a forceful public intellectual, and a mass of contradictions—simultaneously feminist and royalist, radical and pragmatic, witty and bawdy. Her literary talent, political complexity, and challenging of gender norms ensure her lasting importance and relevance to new generations.

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Further Reading

A reading list is referenced in the episode description for deepening your exploration of Aphra Behn and her times.

Transcript

[Podcast Host]

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[Melvyn Bragg]

This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than 1000 episodes you can find in the In Our Time Archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello and welcome to the first in a series of archive editions of In Our Time, which I found especially fascinating. I first came across the 17th century dramatist and novelist Aphra Behn when studying drama at Bristol University. Long forgotten in the 1970s, her reputation and works were experiencing a most deserved revival thanks to the powerful injection of feminism in the theatrical and academic worlds. She was quite simply one of the most influential and popular playwrights of the Restoration period in England. This was a joyous response in the arts to the end of the rather Dead hand of life under Oliver Cromwell's protectorate and the return of the monarchy in 1660 under Charles II. Since the 1970s, Ben's place in the world of academia has been secure. Yet in the wider world, she remains relatively unknown, still living in the shadow of playwrights like Congreve and Dryden. This is disappointing, because, as Melvyn Bragg's guests demonstrate in this episode, Ben was not only a hugely successful dramatist, novelist and poet, she forged a career and gained recognition as the first woman to make her living from writing a world which, until the Restoration, women had been prevented from inhabiting. And exploring that, among her other career paths, she indulged in espionage only adds to the biography of this truly remarkable woman. And even though back in the day, I actually read and studied Ben, this episode opened my eyes to many of the things I had missed. I hope it'll do the same for you. Enjoy listening.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Hello. Aphra Behnu was a prolific playwright for the Restoration stage, a poet, a writer of fiction and a sometimes spy. And her life spanned one of the most turbulent times, turbulent times in English history. She was born as the Civil war started in 1640, flourished under the restored Stuart monarchy, and stayed loyal to James II after the Glorious Revolution, right up to her death in 1689. And she was the first English woman to make her living from writing. As tastes changed, she was dismissed as too bawdy. But Virginia Woolf wrote, all women together ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. With me to discuss Aphra Behn, are Janet Todd, former president of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University, Ross ballister, professor of 18th century literature at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, and Claire Bowditch, professor, postdoctoral research Associate in English and Drama at Loughborough University. Chan Tod. How much do we know about Aphroben's early life?

[Janet Todd]

Well, not a lot, but she was clearly humbly born. We think that her father was a barber in Kent. She was born into this tumultuous time, as you've already mentioned, and for the rest of her life, she had a horror of civil strife and Puritan rule, the notion of a government that has to control behavior and morality. Her mother appears to have been a wet nurse in a more elevated family. And I think it's probably through that connection that she gets to know a man called Killigrew, who, when the Restoration comes, is both involved in the secret service and in the theatre. And, of course, Ben comes into history first as a secret agent, but in

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

terms of her childhood, Germaine Greer said, we must be prepared to live with what we do not know about her early years.

[Janet Todd]

That is what we are doing, I think, rather substantially. I hope one day there will be more known.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Is it sure that her father was a barber in Kent? It seems to be more sure that her mother was a wet nurse, doesn't it?

[Janet Todd]

I think the barber bit is pretty secure. It's all circumstantial because she's not born into the kind of family that keeps letters in the attic and that has a big house where they can control and hold their own archives. So it's not surprising that very little is known. And the fact that she is constantly referred to as someone humbly born, I think is fair enough. But what I think is almost more important than exactly what her provenance was is where did she get her amazing education? She is obviously an autodidact. She obviously makes a great use of everything and everybody she knows. And she's just a very, very clever girl.

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But.

[Janet Todd]

But nonetheless, she learns how to write in all genres. She learns how to comport herself among the learned, among men who are at the Inns of Court. She learns all that somewhere.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

That was the question I was going to ask you. Where did she learn it?

[Janet Todd]

Oh, please don't, because I don't know. All I can do is speculate and I think it's to do with these connections that she makes.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Somehow, through the wet nurse, she got into the libraries of one or two great big houses with libraries.

[Janet Todd]

I think she probably to reading books. And I think she.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

That's the best we can do, is it?

[Janet Todd]

I think it's the best we can do. And I think it's a lot. I mean, a lot of people who are very clever can get there through their wit. And I think the other thing is it's a period in which women could do this. The period in which women could, who are clever, witty and pretty as well, could actually rise and get to a position where they could hobnob with people of learning and education.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

And this is in the terrible Civil War period, masses of deaths, and then in the Cromwellian period, the period of what was called the Commonwealth and so on. And she's doing that then. But we do know she was a spy in Anthem.

[Janet Todd]

We do know that for sure.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

You're on your own, Jan. Away she go. How did you get to be a spy in Anthony?

[Janet Todd]

Right. I was hoping I was going to be asked about her theatrical world, but I think she was already a spy when she Went to Suriname, which is an amazing place for a woman to go at that time. And I think that because she was already being called Astraea, which was her code name later and her theatrical name. And in Suriname she also met a William Scott who was a dissident, a Republican and an enemy of the King. And when she was definitely a spy in Antwerp, codenamed 160 and called Estrella again, she was sent there to bring in this William Scott and make him turn into a double agent so that he would walk, he would work for the government of Charles ii.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

And we've actually letters and reports and how she. I need more money to do this job.

[Janet Todd]

Wrote endlessly about needing more money. And I think all through her life most of her letters that we have are asking for money.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Ros Balison what was the state of the theater when Ben began to write? Did she write? Did she say how? Why did she begin to write for the story?

[Ros Ballister]

Well, as Jan said, it seems likely that it's this connection with Thomas Killigrew. We know that in her novel that she publishes in 1688 called Orinoco, Aphraben mentions that she sent some Indian feathers from Suriname to Killigrew, to the King's Company for a performance. So I think she has connections with the stage. And I suppose what Jan's outlined here is a situation where she clearly wasn't making money through the other careers that she tried. Spying wasn't working and she doesn't seem to have been a very effective spy. So I think she turns to the stage to try and earn money. She probably looks at models like John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell who were the rising professionals in the stage at the time. I think it's worth understanding what the theatre's like in this period.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Because it had been closed down in 1642.

[Ros Ballister]

Exactly.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

It opened up again, but only two theaters compared with the massive theatres there were in, as it were, Shakespeare and post Shakespearean world. And it was very different.

[Ros Ballister]

Can you tell us about how different kind of theatre? I mean lots of people sort of say this isn't just a revival or a restoration, it's a reinvention of theatre. Charles II does two things that are very significant. He gives two patents to two companies that are called the Duke's Company and the King's Company. Killigrew runs the King's Company. Davenant runs the the Duke's Company. Most of all of Ben's plays until 1682 are performed by the Duke's Company, interestingly. So that's James, named after James, Duke of York, later James ii. And he seems to have been the member of the royal family, the monarch that.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Yeah, but the theatre came back as a different thing. What different thing was it?

[Ros Ballister]

Okay, so it's. It's a patent theatre, it's owned by those managers, whereas previously they were still companies.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Women can play women.

[Ros Ballister]

Well, the second part in his second in 16. Well, a few years later, Charles passes an edict that says all parts for women must be played by women. And interestingly, he says that because he says otherwise, there are scurrilous and obscene passages that are given to female parts. So he's saying actually he's going to make the theatre more respectable by having women play these parts. Our impression is, of course, that this is a kind of enormous novelty and excitement. So seeing women playing female parts on the stage.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Is it true that the women are now legitimately allowed to go to the theatre for the first time, or had they gone before?

[Ros Ballister]

I think they'd always gone to the theatre before. I think there are new kinds of parts for women that sort of. Ben starts her career writing tragi comedies, actually. And those tragic comedies have amazing parts for women. They're sort of the commandeering, powerful woman, the woman who kind of commands love with her eyes. These extraordinary actresses like Elizabeth Barry, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester's Mistress and Nell Gwynne, who have real stage presence and are really attractive to the audience. So they're a draw. They're allure to this new kind of theatre.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

When you say she decided to go to the theatre to make a living, it was very risky. Why did she. What sort of living did she make? In the beginning,

[Ros Ballister]

it's really difficult for us to work out what people earned from theatrical work. Again, what's different about these theatres is in the Renaissance period, a playwright received sort of eight pounds for their script and it was then owned by the company. In this period, the playwright earns the profits from the third night of a performance. So once all of the cost is taken out, you get the profits. If you run to a sixth or ninth night, you might get those profits. Another bit of earning might come from publishing your play. You might get about £10 for that. Three months later, if you're a man, you might get some dedication. Dryden. Some money from dedications. 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.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Clara Burdage. Were there other women writing plays at the time? Writing plays at times. She was the most successful in Herbert, but were there others around?

[Claire Bowditch]

She was the most successful, but yes, by the time that she started writing for the stage in 1670, 1671, there were at least two other women around at that time. The first was Frances Boothby, who wrote a tragi comedy. As Ros said, that's where Ben started her dramatic career. The one who came either slightly after or about the same time as Ben was Elizabeth Polwill. But as far as we know, they both only had one play performed, whereas Ben ran for two decades, nearly.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Can you give us an overview of the sort of plays that Aphar Ben was writing?

[Claire Bowditch]

Indeed, she started with tragicomedy, and in 1673, for her third play, she moved to comedy. The third play was definitely a trial in comedy. She hadn't quite got the sense of space and how the stage worked down at that point. And she really continued with comedy right the way through her career until just before her death, when she returned to one. One Tragicomedy.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

And she's in a very. You mentioned. Dryden has been mentioned, but there's also Wycherley around and Etheridge around, and Ravenscroft. And Ravenscroft and so on. So she's in with a lot of very successful men. Do they resent her? Do they bring her on? What's their view? Is there a view. Is there known to be a collective view that they have of this woman being very successful, getting a lot of

[Claire Bowditch]

plays on anyway, I think amongst her immediate colleagues, she does command their respect. They write prologues and epilogues for her plays, which might be indeed interpreted as some kind of professional compliment. Even when we get into her prose and some of her translations, she's receiving dedicatory verses from her peers that are extremely complimentary. That's not to say that everybody was complimentary about her, but as I understand,

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

by this time she's been married, but the marriage didn't last very long. How is she living? Have any idea? Is she living in a little lodging in cheap. So where is she?

[Claire Bowditch]

We don't know exactly where she was living. We do know that she could keep a servant. So she was. She had about enough money to keep a servant. But in terms of her location, we assume she's immediately London based and probably somewhere near the theatre on. On the Thames. But we don't have a location for her.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

So I understand that her first notable success was a play called the Rover, 1677. Why was that a success, you think?

[Claire Bowditch]

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.

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Really.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

It was quite bold because actresses were thought to be prostitutes. Actresses were thought to be prostitutes by some people at that time. So by putting someone like that on the stage, she was smacking them in the face with it, wasn't she?

[Claire Bowditch]

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.

[Ros Ballister]

And her initials of course are the same as Aphra Behn'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.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

In what ways was the robotypical of Ben's ideas? I've read a lot from the three of you about Ben's ideas about masculine, feminine, libertine women commit libertines and so on. Could you develop that a bit?

[Janet Todd]

Well, I think she develops it more in the later plays, but it certainly starts here. That dichotomy between the virgin who gets the rake, the man the most desirable man, and the whore who doesn't, but has the best speeches, I think is going on all the way through. And these lovelorn women who are a little more experienced. It's a feature of Aphraben's plays. But I think what's there already is the notion that the world is stacked against women. It's a patriarchal world. And that women need to use their sexuality and to use their wit and cunning to succeed in the world violence. Men have. So women are going to have to use guile. And if they don't, they will lose in the sexual game and therefore lose in the social game. So I think that's there already.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Did she say in some way legitimize the female libertine?

[Janet Todd]

I don't think anybody can quite legitimize it. I think a female libertine, quite near

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

it, as I understand.

[Janet Todd]

I think it's. You can't be, I think in the end, a female libertine. As Helena says. What would I get out of sexual congress before marriage? Well, you know, a cradle full of mischief. The double standard is absolute. And the only people who came near to being female libertines are aristocratic women. And I think Ben admires those, but also knows that it's pretty difficult to be a libertine woman further down the social scale. Even in a wonderful work that she. That's an anonymous work called Love Letters, she has a woman who moves from being the virgin, the desirable virgin, into being a free woman. But in the end, she's a sort of wandering whore. There isn't a position in society for the female libertine.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

But she did want people as well, home for you. She did want women to be. To be seen as to more independent and more liberated than they had been seen until then, as I understand it. What do you say?

[Ros Ballister]

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 behavior, 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. 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, Will Moore. 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 courts 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. Not 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

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[Ros Ballister]

Life.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

What place did marriage play in that scheme of things?

[Ros Ballister]

She's always very skeptical 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.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Let's just be more specific. She isn't against marriage. She's against young women being unhappily contracted for marriages.

[Ros Ballister]

Yes, yes, but she's also, I mean, she is against marriages because it's an institution, if you take this libertine ethics. 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 idealizes that. But she also said, you know, she has a poem called the Golden Age in which all of that is idealized. 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.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

But come back to the. Sorry, Jan, but can I just pursue this one more time? But the idea of a female rake, which I mentioned earlier, which I've seen in the notes of one or two of you, was not something you wanted to pursue. Was not something she wanted to pursue.

[Ros Ballister]

Well, I think when you think about the character of Helena in the Rover, there's a wonderful point when Helena says to Wilmore, I'm Helena the constant, Helena the inconstant, and you're Robert the constant. And there she's sort of saying, I'm inconstant in the sense I can keep making myself into a new character to attract you and keep your attention. Whereas you, the. The supposedly the manifestation of the rake, Wilmore is actually a bit of a bore who's completely driven by his sort of sexual appetites. He's constantly looking for another woman. So she's the one who has the kind of flexibility, mobility, to reinvent herself, make herself into a new kind of character, the sort of freedom that the libertine as an ideal might have.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

And then we're living in a time of at least an acquaintance, perhaps even a friend of hers, Nell Gwynn, who was very open about her status.

[Ros Ballister]

Yes, I think Ben wants to differentiate herself from actresses. I mean, I think she really wants to be part of this court wit group rather than one of identified with the actress.

[Janet Todd]

I just wanted to come in on the idea of the ethical libertine, because I agree with Ros on that very much. And one of the most extraordinary things about Ben is, is that she goes against religion. And very, very few women of the time could set up for almost for atheism in the way that she does. She writes poems where she talks about faith as feeble. She says that Christianity is the last shift of routed argument. She even writes a paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer in which she says, I haven't had enough daily bread actually, and I'd like some more. And as for trespasses, well, you should give in to them. Good heavens.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Oscar Wilde foretold.

[Janet Todd]

Yes, I mean, she is extraordinary in that respect. And she very much admires the classical philosopher Lucretius, whom she reads in translation. And Lucretius thought that the world is all made up of shifting atoms. And so that When a person dies, then he or she just becomes a series of atoms floating off into the air. So there is no afterlife. And Ben clearly did not believe in an afterlife.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Claire Clare Burdage. She was a very strong supporter of the Stuart monarchy, Charles II for 25 years, and then his brother James, even though he was opposed by a great number of people in the country. And. And I think maybe one or two of our listeners might think a very strong Tory monarchist, Tory loyalist, fascinated by the Court, dazzled by it, really. And a very strong. Can we call a feminist without stepping on everybody's. So can we just use it to be getting on with over feminist, which is more of a slightly different position? What would you have to say about that?

[Claire Bowditch]

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 feminine terms. So, for instance, she praises them as fathers, both, you know, fathers of their, in Charles's case, illegitimate sons and fathers of the nation. So she couches that in domesticity, really. And she also looks back, as Jan was saying, to the Classics, and there the kind of classical heroes are used in place of support of the monarchy or support, specifically of Charles or James. So her support works on really two different levels, I think, one on a quite learned level and one on quite a domestic level.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Did the court repay her devotion to them?

[Claire Bowditch]

We don't have any specific record of favours that were given to her. For instance, in 1681, she did dedicate one of her plays, the second part of the Rover, to the future James II, and one might assume she was in some sense remunerated for that, whether financially or through some kind of Court favour. But I think if she'd received any kind of gratuitous favour, she would have been satirised by somebody and we would know about that. So I think it was probably proportional to either the work that she was doing or what other people were receiving.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Jan, you want to come in?

[Janet Todd]

I was just going to Say exactly, we don't know. But towards the end of her life, she was such a propagandist for James ii, and very few people were as loyal as she was at the end. So I have a feeling that she was paid at that point. She. She's always short of money, so you can never really tell from the fact that she's short of money that she isn't being paid. But that slew of propagandist poems at the end, all printed by the King's printer, I would have thought that she was at that point being paid by the government of James II.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Given James II's Catholicism and her attitude to religion, did that not irk him, or was it not at odds with her protestations of loyalty?

[Janet Todd]

Well, I think she can protest anything when she needs to, and I think she sort of flirts with Catholicism. She certainly likes the bells and smells of Catholicism. She's very keen on the whole panoply of it, so I don't think she would be opposed. And I think she, unlike the majority of the nation, she saw James II as somebody who was tolerant. And so when he was imposing Catholicism, she saw in a way that he was allowing tolerance. But her total devotion, or apparent devotion, she's always equivocal. Her apparent devotion to James II is something of a puzzle to most of us. She sees him as some sort of extraordinary heroic man, but somebody who's authentic and in the end, guileless. And he falls because. Partly because of that. But I don't think she was ever very keen on Charles ii, actually, Ros.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

She wrote fiction as well as plays, and her best known book is Oronoko. But did she write fiction to make more money? The plays. She wrote a lot of plays, but they don't seem to be in the great money spinners of Dryden's plays, except perhaps one or two of them. He did three a year on a contract and so on, or Congress plays. However, what's striking about this novel, A, did she turn to it for money? Because she's very straightforward about what she did for money and what she didn't, and B, what do you think of it?

[Ros Ballister]

Well, we've just been talking about James and it's important to remember that Oronoko is published in 1688 and it's published just as James is in real crisis. The bishops are refusing to cooperate with him. And it's a story at its heart. It's a story about a romance hero who has a pregnant wife and he murders her and their unborn child because he refuses to remain in slavery. He's an African prince who's enslaved in South America, in Suriname, he's a Gold coast prince. So although he's a black African hero, it's very evident when you look at this moment in which James and his wife Mary of Medina have just given birth to a baby boy. And that's the reason that James is being removed from the throne, that Ben's publishing this novel. So it's still, it seems to me, part of her political commitment to James.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

During this conversation, it's been taken for granted that she did go to Surinam in southern. Do you all take that for granted? Because it's doubted any or any. Your notes. Whether she did, whether or not she.

[Ros Ballister]

I think critics have doubted it. Historically, they've doubted it. And there's.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

When you three this, you can all say alleged, not unproved and so on.

[Janet Todd]

Well, we can't be absolute because we haven't found a diary saying, here I was in Suriname. But there's a huge amount of circumstantial evidence that she was there. And if she wasn't a woman remarkably like her was there also calling herself Astraea, which is, after all, the name she uses all the way through. I mean, there are state papers that mention the women in Suriname and it fits.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Why did you go to Suriname in the first place?

[Janet Todd]

Well, aha. We don't know, but I think she went as an agent right away. But it's only. It's only speculation.

[Ros Ballister]

She says her father was given a job as lieutenant governor of the island. That seems unlikely if he was a barber.

[Janet Todd]

Well, she always. She gets herself into her own works. Her works are really faction. She often puts herself into what she's writing and when she does that, she nearly always elevates her birth.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

So to come back to this novel itself, what's most striking about it on

[Ros Ballister]

the background, 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 explains. 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 quartered parts are sent around the colony. She finishes 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.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Still on the other side, as it were, of the ocean, not of the life itself. Claire, there's another late play, the the Widow Ranta, set in Virginia. Now what's she doing there and why is she setting it in Virginia?

[Claire Bowditch]

Well, part of the real charm of the Widow Ranter is its collection of very varied characters because part of the cast is made up of Englishmen who have been transported to the colonies. So they've committed a petty crime in England and they've been transported over there. And because of the lack of government, it's up to them to form some kind of order. So there's, on the one hand, there's that going on, as Ros was saying, in relation to Arunako, there's a missing governor. So a little bit of a topsy turvy world. And the two texts definitely share that aspect of.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

What's the widow ranting about?

[Claire Bowditch]

The Widow Ranta is possibly as close as we might come in Ben, to that female rake for one particular reason, which is that she revels in smoking, she smokes a pipe, she gets drunk. She's mostly drunk by lunchtime. And those kinds of physical pleasures that we might associate with libertinism are kind of embodied in the Widow Ranta. But on the other hand, she's a wealthy widow, so she herself was transported as an indentured slave when she got to the colonies. She was bought off the boat to pay for her passage and as such had to work for the. The man who'd bought her. The man who bought her married her within six months and he was a wealthy colonel there. And had, I think she phrases it, the. The grace to die quite soon thereafter and leave her unassisted. This.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Sorry, Unassisted.

[Claire Bowditch]

Unassisted, yes. Well, there's no.

[Janet Todd]

We don't know.

[Claire Bowditch]

We have no evidence. Yeah. But yes, this, this old skeleton has the good grace to die and leave her this wealthy widow. But so on the one hand she's enjoying all of these bodily pleasures and on the other hand she is in love with a colonel there called Daring, and she's worried that he wants her for her money and so she has to put him through these tests where she's checking his constancy and his motives. Because the fact that she's a wealthy widow leaves her with some problems because she's gone.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

They're just going to marry her for her.

[Claire Bowditch]

Exactly, yes.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Jan, briefly, is there any way you would like to compare her, briefly, her fiction with her playwright? Do you think she's a better novel writer novelist than a playwright?

[Janet Todd]

I think she's a wonderful both, actually. But her plays are what made her famous at the time, and a lot of them are wonderful. But we don't put on that many restoration plays now. So there's no doubt that at the moment it's Oronoko and the other short story stories that people tend to read if they're reading anything. But if I can just go. Can I just say one more thing about the Widow Ranta? Because I think that's a. It's a wonderful play. Because not only we have we got the Widow Ranta in there and we've got the heroic Bacon, but we've also got the sort of farce of government which goes through all her plays. Her mockery of those people who think that they can rule other people and who think they can, you know, the moment they get into power, they simply serve their own interest. And the moment these people get going in the widow around her, they make themselves a great big punch bowl.

[Claire Bowditch]

On the subject of her as a fiction writer versus a playwright, I'd say that in her fiction, certainly you get this sense of theatricality. She's very good at describing bodies in space. She's very good at describing expressions on people's faces in the way that she scripted them, you know, already for her plays.

[Ros Ballister]

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 1670 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. She's. She's. One way to put it say, 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.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Let's stick as it were, with a couple in bed for a moment or two. She had a reputation. Sorry, John, but she had a reputation as a bawdy writer, didn't she, at the time? Is that true? What was bawdy about it?

[Janet Todd]

It's very bawdy.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Give us one or two examples. It is early, but still.

[Janet Todd]

Well, let's go through. I mean, other people were bawdy too. Bawdy sex comedy was the mode and

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

that's why she wrote it was thought of as bawdy.

[Janet Todd]

Well, the second play, for example, opens with two people getting out of bed, clearly having had sex and not being married. She has plays in which people go to bed with each other without realizing who they are, but it doesn't really matter. In the morning they say, well, that was fun, wasn't it? People are not punished for their peccadilloes. She has old men who come into, supposedly, the bridal chamber and open their nightgowns and display themselves to the women. I mean, this is pretty bawdy stuff. In fact, she was criticized for quite a lot of it once this kind of sex comedy had gone out of fashion.

[Ros Ballister]

Although she does say that she gets more criticised for it because she's a woman writer. So she says other playwrights are just as bawdy as me. They don't get this kind of trouble.

[Claire Bowditch]

Yes, I think that she says that in the play that comes immediately after the Rovers, A Patient Fancy, where there's a scene in which the wife of Sir Patient Fancy is trying to hide the lover that she's got stashed behind the bed whilst her husband is trying to find, you know, this lover. And she says that the women are the people that attacked her most.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

I brought that up partly just to talk about it, because it was talked about, but partly because it was that aspect of her work which seemed to, as it were, strike her out of the lists. For two centuries. Her reputation was very high, as you pointed out, Ros. 18 plays. They must have kept wanting more, and the picture and the poetry haven't even got to that. But she went right up. Her reputation went right down. Why was that starting with you, Jan?

[Janet Todd]

Well, I think that the Restoration itself was vilified. As you move into the 18th century, the whole area, the whole period was seen as. As corrupt and licentious and a sort of blip on the proper.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Why do people suddenly not like licentiousness?

[Janet Todd]

The world turned, became more moral. The Dutch king came in. The Dutch. It's the Dutch. The world has turned towards a more sentimental version of life. The distinction between men and women is re established. Women are supposed to particularly to be more associated with emotions and religion and with the virtuous side of life. And so Aphra Behn sticks out now not just as one of many playwrights who are bawdy, but as a woman who was bawdy. And as such he is vilified constantly throughout the next century.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

There's a note and a letter from Walter Scott which summarizes this totally.

[Ros Ballister]

Georgia, wonderful story. So Walter Scott Scott. Although one can't help think about the fact that Walter Scott's making the novel in the early 19th century. So he's sorting it out. Okay, I will get to the point. So Walter Scott has a great aunt who says to him, I used to love these stories by Ephra Behn. Can you get hold of a few for me? So he's a bit surprised. He goes off, finds them, he sends them to her in brown paper because they're kind of a bit embarrassing to send. She writes back, sends them back and says, these are appalling. I can't believe I like these. She said, 60 years ago I sat in company and we read these out loud and I. And we loved them. And now I see just how crude they are.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

But that's fascinating because she also says, throw them on the fire. Yes, Al. And then she says, but six years ago, people like myself, being a gentle, a woman of gentility, you sit around and read them aloud to each other. Fascinating little vignette of the way taste can change so swiftly.

[Ros Ballister]

And it's a. It's a complicated question, isn't it? Because one might sort of think, well, does this mean that women are being re contained in the age 18th century? But in a way they're just being rethought as, in a way, moral agents. They're responsible for the moral credit of the. Of the nation. And Ben is seen as someone who discredited the morality of the nationwide very publicly in the late 17th century.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

You, among others, are revivifying, reasserting reputation. Can I just. That quotation I started a program with about Virginia Woolf laying flowers on her grave during. Do you think that you go along with that, Jan? Did you go and lay flowers?

[Janet Todd]

I did, I did with Lucy Worsley in a program. But I think it's a tricky one. It's on every book about Aphra Behn, pretty well on the COVID But Virginia Woolf, I think, brings her up or back into history to some extent, but as a woman, as an amazing woman writer and I don't think that Virginia Woolf really gave her her due as an actual creative writer. So I think it's a good quotation. And Virginia Woolf is famous, so it's useful that she said it and it's very quotable, but it doesn't do justice to the great writer.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Her reputation is being restored by persons like yourself and others. But is her legacy there at Auckler?

[Claire Bowditch]

I think she's left us a very interesting legacy because as we've touched on at various points in this program, she is a mass of contradictions and several of her characters are masses of contradictions. And there's a lot for people like us and people like your listeners to work out with her. So, you know, we have the feminism and the royalism as sort of contradictory. We have characters in some of her fiction, you know, a nun who's also a bigamist, people like that, the courtesan who's the devoted woman. So there's an awful lot that she has to say that captures the fact that we're not all one dimensional. You know, we do have these. These kinds of.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Sorry, can you see it percolating through to your students and them saying, oh, absolutely.

[Ros Ballister]

I mean, I think she's really attractive to students. I mean, she's really attracted to modern culture because she's so adept at this blurring of gender boundaries. She's praised for the combination of manly witness and feminine grace. In a way, she's a kind of. This playing with gender identity and the attraction of ambiguity around gender, around gender disturbance is central to Ben's writing and to what makes her attractive then and makes her attractive now.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Well, thank you all very much. Thank you. Ros Balliser, Jan Todd, Clare Bowditch. And if you have a topic for us that you think deserves a big radio audience, please send your ideas through our website or or Twitter. BBC In Our Time. By the 27th of October, Warren will be the subject of our program on the 7th of December. Next week we're discussing the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic wars, which settled the balance of power across Europe for the next hundred years. Thanks for listening.

[Janet Todd]

And the In Our Time podcast gets

[Claire Bowditch]

some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

What major thing did we leave out?

[Ros Ballister]

Poetry.

[Claire Bowditch]

Clarinda.

[Janet Todd]

We left out poetry. I came to poetry and the equivocation that is always in her work. But I wanted to say the one thing at the end about the theatre is really one of the tragedies of literary history, is that Pepys thought he was going blind and stopped writing his diary just before Aphrod Ben enters the stage.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Why didn't you say that?

[Janet Todd]

Well, because you didn't give me a chance to do it.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Bags of time. You could have taken the thing by the horns. I asked the most wide open questions.

[Janet Todd]

I don't want to be rude. Do I want to be rude? I do not. Especially not to a man who's in such a disadvantage in being in the minority

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

anyway. I don't think the lack of peeps is a sort of great blow to the program.

[Janet Todd]

No, I agree it isn't. It just seemed to me a rather nice point.

[Claire Bowditch]

But it would be.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

I think the poetry is. But I did. I came up to the poetry in the structure, and I thought, we haven't got time. We'd spent. We just spent quite a good time. And I knew that would be a proper discussion between the three of you. And I wanted to get to the Paulin reputation and the legacy and the poetry. And I just didn't have time. So that's my.

[Ros Ballister]

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, you know, Ben's reputation has grown because people have become so fascinated by the novel and the history of the novel, and that novel Oronoko, is particularly fascinating. So I think, 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 enjoy so much because it's really intimate and personal. Like Rochester, she leaps out of the page and talks to you in her poetry.

[Janet Todd]

And they're. They're poems that are often written in a social space, and they're all answering each other. Even things like the disappointment, the famous one about male impotence or premature ejaculation, whichever that is, obviously in a social setting where several others are writing poems like that. So I think it's very.

[Ros Ballister]

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 tone of poetry that men speaking 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 resentments none. But I can well imagine or console, you know, here I am.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

We did. Yeah. You make these decisions, don't you? I mean, That's. That's what you've got. You've got to make decisions. And I actually. What you said convinces me that I made the right decision for the program. But it's a pity we didn't. On the other hand, this podcast is going to millions of people. So bang away about poetry.

[Ros Ballister]

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, it's what?

[Janet Todd]

And the whole poem leaves you thinking, what? At the end, you simply thinking, what?

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

What?

[Janet Todd]

Well, who exactly has done what with whom?

[Claire Bowditch]

What is it?

[Janet Todd]

Where is the sex? Where is it? And is it. Is it cerebral? Is it physically. What is it? What's going on?

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Do you. I mean, you put. Do you see, Ah, her plays put on.

[Janet Todd]

Rover's just been on at the rsc. At the rsc.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Ah.

[Claire Bowditch]

And we actually did a reading of the.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

How did it go down?

[Janet Todd]

Very well. We were discussing it before and I thought it was slightly too singing and dancing as a production, whereas the previous one with Jeremy Irons had been darker some years ago. But it shows the fact that it is repeatedly put on. It shows that she is actable. I just wish they would do some others. The Patient Fancy. The Lucky Chance.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

It's very hit and miss. I saw. I'm not gonna name because I want to put down the director, but I saw. Seen a couple of Restoration restorations in the last few years and they've been very unconvincing. I think everybody thinks if I'm. Because it's all powder and that I've got to go. It's artificial from the start in a way that's. It misses the point.

[Ros Ballister]

I think it's. A lot of it is about the. About training. People don't really train in restoration theatre in the way that they do in Renaissance theatre or in. Or in modern theatre. So it's about getting the pace right. And it can be too slow or too fast. Too fast.

[Janet Todd]

They tend to throw themselves about, I think, in restoration drama, as though that's the necessary thing and it's overboard.

[Ros Ballister]

So you actors have to really engage the audience and pull them into the story. They can't be just doing it in front of you.

[Claire Bowditch]

In Restoration plays, there were pauses between acts where there would be a musical interlude and so on. Yes. Which we don't have a modern equivalent for that. So unless you compensate or adjust for the pace in some kind of way. And I actually disagree with Jan and think that the Rover did it very well, at the RSC with various musical interludes, but the whole kind of experience of the theatre is not one that we necessarily have an exact equivalent for. So.

[Ros Ballister]

Yes, I think, I also think it's a shame that we don't see them because actually when you try and read the plays, they're quite hard to follow. People say this about the country wife and the man of mode as well. Everyone seems to be called Will something or Belle something. And there are three different couples with different names. When you see it on stage, you understand how perfectly blocked these plays are so that you, you know, there are bodies playing these parts. You see the difference between them, you see the contrast between the couples working out physically in front of you, don't you?

[Janet Todd]

I think that that's absolutely true and I think they are very theatrical, which is one reason, in fact, they're not cinematic. They're not, they wouldn't easily be made into. That's a very good point, into a television drama then. They're not like that. So I think that she's, she's not in that world and she has to live in the theatre and the theatre is not a hugely popular.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

But it could be my chance. I didn't see the RSC thing, but these things could be reimagined. We've got some very good, very good indeed, directors and actors who are taking older plays and saying, let's redo it like this. I mean, and it's working very well. For instance, so many people have taken a lump out of Chekhov and turned it into that eight hour play which your first play he wrote, which has been cut into by David Hare, by Michael Frayne, by many others and anyway.

[Janet Todd]

But you have to have the audience, don't you? You have to make the hunters come and buy the tickets and it's the

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

good luck by having a starry cast.

[Ros Ballister]

That was all that you've also got a problem with. The Rake is also, I think, a problem in a lot of modern performances. You know, that kind of predatory, threatened rape scene is really hard to manage in front of a modern audience. I took my students to see the RSC production. They managed it very well actually. But they were, all of them were talking on the way back about, you know, how do we read this scene?

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

What do we do this morning with what's on the news?

[Ros Ballister]

Absolutely, yes.

[Janet Todd]

What she's talking about doesn't go away. I mean, all the things she raises from the idea of rape and predatory men in power, because the relationship of power and sex is something very strong in Ben. From that to the farce of government. I think all this is really very relevant, Evergreen.

[Ros Ballister]

The fact that the rake backs away from rape because he thinks, oh, actually this is a genteel woman. Yeah. So he doesn't back away from it because he shouldn't be raping. Backs away from it because she's pot.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

Well, I think you've got your saying about Persia. We got it'll. I think that'll. That is the Plenty of people hear that. I think the priest servants coming in to make an important announcement. I need to know if you want

[Ros Ballister]

refreshments, tea or coffee.

[Claire Bowditch]

I'm okay, thank you.

[Podcast Host]

Why do some brilliant business ideas come a cropper? I'm Sean Farrington and in a new series of toast I'll be looking at five more brands, businesses and wonder products which offered a lot but didn't stick around, including a budget cinema selling tickets for 20 pence and the toilet paper we knew from school.

[Melvyn Bragg (Moderator)]

I remember worrying about.

[Ros Ballister]

About getting paper cuts in an area that you wouldn't wish to be getting a paper cut.

[Podcast Host]

Finding out what we can learn from their disappearance. Toast from BBC Radio 4. Listen. First on BBC Sounds.