Rake (stock character)

Often, a rake was also prodigal, wasting his (usually inherited) fortune on gambling, wine, women, and song, and incurring lavish debts in the process.

They were typified by the "Merry Gang" of courtiers, who included as prominent members John Wilmot, George Villiers, and Charles Sackville, who combined riotous living with intellectual pursuits and patronage of the arts.

[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.

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.

[8] Other rakes include Francis Charteris, Alessandro Cagliostro, Lord Byron, Jimi Arundell, John Mytton, Giacomo Casanova, Charles Mohun, the Marquis de Sade, Robert Fielding, and Beauchamp Bagenal.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.