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Rake (character)
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A rake is defined as a man habituated to immoral conduct. Rakes are frequently stock characters in novels. Often a rake is a man who wastes his (usually inherited) fortune on wine, women and song, incurring lavish debts in the process. The rake is also frequently a cad: a man who seduces a young woman and impregnates her before leaving, often to her social or financial ruin. To call the character a rake calls attention to his promiscuity and wild spending of money; to call the character a cad implies a callous seducer who coldly breaks his victim's heart.
During the English Restoration period (1660-1688), the word was used in a glamorous sense: the Restoration rake is a carefree, witty, sexually irresistible aristocrat typified by Charles II's courtiers, the Earl of Rochester and the Earl of Dorset, who combined riotous living with intellectual pursuits and patronage of the arts. The Restoration rake is celebrated in the Restoration comedy of the 1660s and 1670s. After the reign of Charles II, and especially after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the cultural perception of the rake took a dive into squalor. The rake became the butt of moralistic tales in which his typical fate was debtor's prison, venereal disease, or, in the case of William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress, insanity in Bedlam.
The rake is often portrayed as a heavy drinker or gambler. An earlier form of the word was
rake-hell, a form reshaped by
folk etymology to mean someone who stokes the fires of
Hell, making them hotter. The actual
etymology of the word is from the
Old Norse reikall, meaning "vagrant" or "wanderer;" this was borrowed into
Middle English as
rakel.
Well known fictional rakes and cads include:
Historical figures who have informed the stock character include:
The stock character of the rake can be contrasted with some others. The
town drunk is frequently intoxicated, and impoverished by heavy drinking, but here the focus is on the character's
alcoholic state rather than on sexual excess; the town drunk is typically older than the rake. The
fop and the
dandy spend too much money on clothes and fancy living, but the
stereotype would have them less sexually effective than the rake.
See also
