In a historical context, a rake (short for rakehell, analogous to "hellraiser") was a man who was habituated to immoral conduct, particularly womanizing. Often, a rake was also prodigal, wasting his (usually inherited) fortune on gambling, wine, women, and song, and incurring lavish debts in the process. Cad is a closely related term. Comparable terms are "libertine" and "debauchee".
John Wilmot, the most infamous of the Restoration rakes
The defining period of the rake was at the court of Charles II in the late seventeenth century. Dubbed the "Merry Gang" by poet Andrew Marvell, their members included King Charles himself, George Villiers, John Wilmot, Charles Sedley, Charles Sackville, and playwrights William Wycherley and George Etherege.[5] Following the tone set by the monarch himself, these men distinguished themselves in drinking, womanizing, and witty conversation, with Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, outdoing all the rest. Many of them were inveterate gamblers and brawlers. Some were also duelists, but not with the approval of King Charles, who discouraged the practice of dueling. Highlights of their careers include Sedley and Sackville preaching naked to a crowd from an alehouse balcony in Covent Garden, as they simulated sex with each other, and the lowlight was Buckingham's killing of Francis Talbot in a duel for the latter's wife.[6] In 1682 Thomas Wharton broke into a church at night and relieved himself against the communion table and in the pulpit.[7]
On the whole, rakes may be subdivided into the penitent and persistent ones, the first being reformed by the heroine, the latter pursuing their immoral conduct.[9]Libertinistic attitudes, such as (sexual) licentiousness, alcoholism, vagrancy, cheating and gambling, can be discerned in characters belonging to the satiric norm as well as to the satiric scene. However, only the degree of wit brings the rakish gentleman, the Truewit, closer to the satiric norm, whereas Falsewits are always exploded in the satiric scene. The motivation of a rake to change his libertine ways is either hypocritical (falsewits) or honest (truewits). In other words, penitent rakes among the falsewits only abandon their way of life for financial reasons, while penitent truewits ever so often succumb to the charms of the witty heroine and, at least, go through the motions of vowing constancy.
Another typology distinguishes between the "polite rake" and the "debauch", using criteria of social class and style. In this case, the young, witty, and well-bred male character, who dominates the drawing rooms, is in sharp contrast to a contemptible debauch, who indulges in fornication, alcoholism, and hypocrisy.[10]
Still other assessments of the libertine concentrate on the kind and intensity of libertine demeanor. Here, the rake falls into any one of three categories: extravagant libertine, vicious libertine, and philosophical libertine.
The extravagant rake is characterized by anti-normative conduct throughout, even though he finally settles down in matrimony. Between 1663 and 1668, examples are Wellbred in James Howard's The English Mounsieur (1663/64), Philidor in James Howard's All Mistaken (1665/1672), and Celadon in Dryden's Secret Love (1667). In the 1690s, Sir Harry Wildair in George Farquhar's The Constant Couple (1699) represents this kind of gentlemanly rake. The extravagant rake is as promiscuous and impulsive as he is wild and frivolous, and he finally finds his match in an equally extravagant and witty heroine.[11] He is, above all, a self-aware character who "is what he wants to be", who delights in those qualities "with which he is endowed", and who provides "carnival release".[12] Thus, the extravagant rake is a comic figure because his actions are exaggerated. But he is never a comic fool.
The vicious rake is invariably presented as a despicable, if wealthy person, who thrives on scheming and intrigue. He is frequently married and abuses his wife (examples are Pinchwife in The Country Wife or Sir John Brute in John Vanbrugh's The Provok'd Wife).
Finally, the philosophical rake, the most attractive libertine figure, is characterized by self-control and refined behavior as well as by a capacity for manipulating others. His pronounced libertine leanings are not supposed to contribute anything to the comic development of the plot. Rather, his libertinism is serious, thus reflecting the philosophical principles of the pleasure-seeking, cynical Court Wits. It is this kind of libertinism that has secured the notoriety of, say, William Wycherley's The Country Wife, George Etherege's The Man of Mode, and Sir Charles Sedley's Bellamira: or, The Mistress.[13] Not only characters like Horner and Dorimant spring to mind but also Rodophil and Palamede in Dryden's Marriage-a-la-Mode, Longvil and Bruce in Thomas Shadwell's The Virtuoso and the eponymous heroine in Sedley's Bellamira.[14] These plays are not representative of the average Restoration comedy, however. The reform of the ordinary rakish gentleman is the common pattern for the ending of the play. Similarly, extravagant rakes enter into marriage. However, as soon as the persistence of the rakes remains almost unquestioned, it is difficult to decide whether libertines, no matter of what "colour", play a major part in their authors' satiric strategies. Although Etherege's Dorimant is "tamed" by Harriet, his conversion at the end is rather doubtful. Similarly, Wycherley's Horner is not punished satirically.
The libertine philosophy that the scintillating persistent rakes display seems to rebel against the narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy lurking behind the facade of Puritan honesty and bourgeois moral standards. It has been pointed out that the views of the philosophical libertine were strongly influenced by the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.[15] But then, Hobbes was not necessarily an unquestioned ideal among the court élite, and Hobbesian ideas certainly did not permeate many comedies. John Dryden, for one, drew on Hobbesian ideas in his tragedies but these ideas are internalised by villains only.[16]
In his pursuit of pleasure and sensual satisfaction, the philosophical libertine shows hedonistic, Epicurean, and anti-rationalist patterns of thought. In their ideal of life, the libertines of this order may almost be compared to the genius of a somewhat later time: like the genius, the libertine rake is anti-authoritarian, anti-normative, and anti-traditional.
It is, above all, the emotional distance from the objects of his desire as well as from the havoc he creates, which renders the persistent rake so frightening. Criticism of the libertine was heard not only in the 1670s when sex comedies were en vogue but also earlier, whenever the male partner of the gay couple was blamed for having indulged in immoral behaviour. One major counter-argument was the call for poetic justice. Shadwell and Dryden, for example, discussed the necessity of poetic justice to punish dissoluteness in their plays.[17] To reintroduce moral standards, the rake, they demanded, had to be reformed towards the end of the play. If a persistent rake was allowed to propagate his philosophical libertinism, "poetische Ungerechtigkeit" ("poetic injustice") was likely to threaten the norm. Shadwell's Epsom Wells may be regarded as a chief instigator of an excessive libertinism which is not questioned. The play, significantly, ends with a divorce rather than the standard device of a marriage.
However, the number of persistent rakes continued to grow, together with an upsurge in cuckolding action, and, between 1672 and 1687, not all persistent rakes are punished satirically.[18] Only towards the end of the century did the increasing criticism of dramatic immorality and obscenity make the authors return to more traditional moral standards. In 1688, Shadwell's Squire of Alsatia initiated the return to a Horatian prodesse in comedy, which had already been put forth in the Preface to The Humorist (1671): "My design was it, to reprehend some of the Vices and Follies of the Age, which I take to be the most proper, and most useful way of writing Comedy" (The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers, Vol. I, p.183).
As a consequence, future emphasis was no longer on libertine adventures but on the conversion and domestication of the dashing young men. Thomas d'Urfey's Love for Money (1691) and Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift (1696) are moralizing plays and pave the way for the sentimental comedy of the early eighteenth century.
"Restoration comedy" is English comedy written and performed in the Restoration period of 1660–1710. Comedy of manners is used as a synonym for this. After public stage performances were banned for 18 years by the Puritan regime, reopening of the theatres in 1660 marked a renaissance of English drama. Sexually explicit language was encouraged by King Charles II (1660–1685) personally and by the rakish style of his court. Historian George Norman Clark argues:
The best-known fact about the Restoration drama is that it is immoral. The dramatists did not criticize the accepted morality about gambling, drink, love, and pleasure generally, or try, like the dramatists of our own time, to work out their own view of character and conduct. What they did was, according to their respective inclinations, to mock at all restraints. Some were gross, others delicately improper.... The dramatists did not merely say anything they liked: they also intended to glory in it and to shock those who did not like it.
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester was an English poet and courtier of King Charles II's Restoration court, who reacted against the "spiritual authoritarianism" of the Puritan era. Rochester embodied this new era, and he became as well known for his rakish lifestyle as for his poetry, although the two were often interlinked. He died as a result of a sexually transmitted infection at the age of 33.
George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, 20th Baron de Ros, was an English statesman and poet who exerted considerable political power during the reign of Charles II of England.
The Country Wife is a Restoration comedy written by William Wycherley and first performed in 1675. A product of the tolerant early Restoration period, the play reflects an aristocratic and anti-Puritan ideology, and was controversial for its sexual explicitness even in its own time. The title contains a lewd pun with regard to the first syllable of "country". It is based on several plays by Molière, with added features that 1670s London audiences demanded: colloquial prose dialogue in place of Molière's verse, a complicated, fast-paced plot tangle, and many sex jokes. It turns on two indelicate plot devices: a rake's trick of pretending impotence to safely have clandestine affairs with married women, and the arrival in London of an inexperienced young "country wife", with her discovery of the joys of town life, especially the fascinating London men. The implied condition the Rake, Horner, claimed to suffer from was, he said, contracted in France whilst "dealing with common women". The only cure was to have a surgeon drastically reduce the extent of his manly stature; therefore, he could be no threat to any man's wife.
Thomas Shadwell was an English poet and playwright who was appointed Poet Laureate in 1689.
A libertine is a person devoid of most moral principles, a sense of responsibility, or sexual restraints, which they see as unnecessary or undesirable, and is especially someone who ignores or even spurns accepted morals and forms of behaviour observed by the larger society. Libertinism is described as an extreme form of hedonism. Libertines put value on physical pleasures, meaning those experienced through the senses. As a philosophy, libertinism gained new-found adherents in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, particularly in France and Great Britain. Notable among these were John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, and the Marquis de Sade.
Sir George Etherege was an English dramatist. He wrote the plays The Comical Revenge or, Love in a Tub in 1664, She Would If She Could in 1668, and The Man of Mode or, Sir Fopling Flutter in 1676.
Sir Charles Sedley, 5th Baronet, was an English noble, dramatist and politician. He was principally remembered for his wit and profligacy.
In English literature, the term comedy of manners describes a genre of realistic, satirical comedy of the Restoration period (1660–1710) that questions and comments upon the manners and social conventions of a greatly sophisticated, artificial society. The satire of fashion, manners, and outlook on life of the social classes, is realised with stock characters, such as the braggart soldier of Ancient Greek comedy, and the fop and the rake of English Restoration comedy. The clever plot of a comedy of manners is secondary to the social commentary thematically presented through the witty dialogue of the characters, e.g. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), by Oscar Wilde, which satirises the sexual hypocrisies of Victorian morality.
Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset and 1st Earl of Middlesex, KG was an English poet and courtier.
Thomas Killigrew was an English dramatist and theatre manager. He was a witty, dissolute figure at the court of King Charles II of England.
Elizabeth Boutell, was a British actress.
Restoration literature is the English literature written during the historical period commonly referred to as the English Restoration (1649-1659), which corresponds to the last years of Stuart reign in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In general, the term is used to denote roughly homogenous styles of literature that centre on a celebration of or reaction to the restored court of Charles II. It is a literature that includes extremes, for it encompasses both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the high-spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of The Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Treatises of Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments and holy meditations of Robert Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, and the pioneering of literary criticism from John Dryden and John Dennis. The period witnessed news becoming a commodity, the essay developing into a periodical art form, and the beginnings of textual criticism.
Henry Herringman (1628–1704) was a prominent London bookseller and publisher in the second half of the 17th century. He is especially noted for his publications in English Renaissance drama and English Restoration drama; he was the first publisher of the works of John Dryden. He conducted his business under the sign of the Blue Anchor in the lower walk of the New Exchange.
The Mulberry-Garden is a comedy by Restoration poet and playwright Sir Charles Sedley (1639-1701) and was published in 1668
Bellamira: or, The Mistress is a comedy by Sir Charles Sedley, published in 1687, partly modelled on Terence's Eunuchus.
Cave Underhill (1634–1710?) was an English actor in comedy roles.
Samuel Sandford was an English character actor, known for his roles as villains.
The Rival Widows, or the Fair Libertine is a 1735 comedy play by the British writer Elizabeth Cooper. The plot is a re-gendered mashup of two popular eighteenth-century genres: the libertine comedy and the comedy of sentiment. The beautiful and brilliant libertine widow Lady Bellair battles the hypocritical friend and rival Lady Lurcher for the attentions of man of feeling Freelove. Bellair loves Freelove, but is exasperated by his rhetoric of feeling and his lack of interest in using witty exchanges or clever plotting to try to seduce her and win her love. In response, she creates various strategems to essentially manipulate him into tricking her into agreeing never to love him, knowing that she will desperately want anything that is forbidden to her. Her character is well summarized early in the play with her own comment that "my pleasures are my principles" and Freelove's summary of her character: "she has wit enough to supply the present dearth of it on the stage, and good nature to make that wit agreeable, even at court. In short, she's gay without levity, libertine without scandal, generous without design, and well-bred without affectation" (1.6). Her comments on marriage convey her recognition that power is at the core of all pleasure for a libertine:
The Merry Gang was a group of aristocrats associated with the court of Charles II of England during the Stuart Restoration of 1660. The gang was centred on John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, who stated their aim was to restore the idea of masculinity that had prevailed at the time of Henry II. They were also patrons of the arts, supporting the poet John Dryden and the dramatist Nathaniel Lee.
References
↑ Harold Weber, The restoration rake-hero: transformations in sexual understanding in seventeenth-century England (Univ. Wisc., 1986; ISBN0-299-10690-X).
↑ See generally, Jean Gagen, "Congreve's Mirabell and the Ideal of the Gentleman", in PMLA, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Sep. 1964), pp. 422–427.
↑ David Haldane Lawrence (2007) "Sowing Wild Oats: The Fallen Man in Late-Victorian Society Melodrama", Literature Compass vol. 4 no. 3, pp. 888–898 (2007).
↑ John Harold Wilson, A Rake and His Times (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1954).
↑ Fergus Linnane (2006) The Lives of the English Rakes. London, Portrait: 19–20
↑ Graham Parry (1986) "Minds and Manners 1660–1688" in Stuart England edited by Blair Worden. London, Guild Publishing: 176–8
↑ Kenyon, J.P. The Stuarts Fontana Edition 1966 p.188
↑ Fergus Linnane (2006) The Lives of the English Rakes. London, Portrait: 113–166
↑ David S. Berkeley, "The Penitent Rake in Restoration Comedy", Modern Philology, 49 (1952), pp. 223–33
↑ C. D. Cecil, "Libertine and Précieux Elements in Restoration Comedy", Essays in Criticism, 9 (1959), pp 242–44; Robert D. Hume "The Myth of the Rake in 'Restoration Comedy", Studies in the Literary Imagination, 10 (1977), p. 38.
↑ Robert Jordan, "The Extravagant Rake in Restoration Comedy," Restoration Literature: Critical Approaches, ed. Harold Love (London, 1972), pp. 69–90
↑ For the special case of Bellamira, see Sir Charles Sedley's "The Mulberry-Garden (1668) and "Bellamira: or, The Mistress" (1687), ed. Holger Hanowell, p. lxxxvii ff.; the article on the rake is an excerpt from Hanowell's edition, with permission by the editor.
↑ Harold Weber, The Restoration Rake-Hero, pp. 52, 91–97. Warren Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 22–51.
↑ Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge, 1962); Louis Teeter, "The Dramatic Uses of Hobbes' Political Ideas," ELH, 3 (1936), pp. 140–69.
↑ Wolfgang Zach, Poetic Justice: Theorie und Geschichte einer literarischen Doktrin (Tübingen, 1986), pp. 115–22.
↑ Zach, Poetic Justice, p. 127; Hume, "Myth of the Rake," pp. 52, 55
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
