The Rake as Symbol of Social Disorder in Restoration Drama
This paper examines the figure of the rake-hero in Restoration comedy as a complex symbol of social disorder that simultaneously challenges and affirms the institution of marriage. Drawing on three plays—Edward Ravenscroft's The Careless Lovers (1673), George Etherege's The Man of Mode (1676), and Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift (1696)—the paper argues that the rake's apparent opposition to matrimony is a rhetorical stance rather than a genuine subversive position. Read against the political and moral turbulence of the Civil War, the Interregnum, and the Restoration, these characters reflect society's need to balance new personal freedoms with the conservative social structures that marriage represented. Each rake's eventual reconciliation with matrimony is shown to encode culturally specific attitudes toward love, freedom, and social conformity.
- Introduction: The Rake and the Institution of Marriage: Thesis and historical context for rake-hero
- The Rake and His Times: Scholarly debate on libertinism and marriage
- Careless in The Careless Lovers: Careless's ambiguous reform and free marriage
- Dorimant in The Man of Mode: Dorimant's glamorous, open-ended reformation
- Loveless in Love's Last Shift: Loveless's conservative, unconvincing conversion
- Conclusions: Rake as social mirror, not mere rebel
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its literary argument in precise historical context — the Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration — showing how stage comedy functioned as a cultural index rather than mere entertainment.
- Close reading of primary texts is consistently integrated with secondary scholarship (Hume, Birdsall, Hughes, Stone), allowing the paper to position its argument in ongoing critical debate rather than simply summarizing existing views.
- The three-play structure creates a clear analytical arc: from the ambiguous libertinism of Ravenscroft, through Etherege's open-ended irony, to Cibber's conservative moralism — demonstrating historical change within the genre.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper models productive disagreement with established critics. It engages directly with Virginia Birdsall's argument that rakes "make their spirit prevail," then dismantles it by showing that all three rake-heroes ultimately accept matrimony — using the plays' own evidence rather than mere counter-assertion. This technique of cite-then-refute is central to graduate-level literary argument.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a thesis-forward introduction that situates the rake in historical context, followed by a theoretical section on existing scholarship. Three body sections then apply the argument to individual plays in chronological order, moving from the most ambiguous case to the most conservative. The conclusion synthesizes the findings and widens the frame with a brief comparison to Oscar Wilde, reinforcing the paper's historicist approach.
Introduction: The Rake and the Institution of Marriage
One of the distinctive features of Restoration comedy is the figure of the rake as romantic hero. The image of the rake-hero is of a witty, cynical, calculating, and self-serving man who pursues his own pleasure above all other considerations. Antagonistic to established rules and mores, the rake rejects conventional ideas of virtue, integrity, fidelity, and restraint; above all, he adopts a rhetorical position of opposition to the institution of marriage. However, it is significant that in most plays which feature a rake-hero in a prominent role, he becomes reconciled to the concept of marriage and ends up either actually married or firmly committed to it.
It is the contention of this paper that, first, it is overly simplistic to see the rake as irredeemably opposed to marriage, and that the relationship between such figures and the institution of wedlock is more ambiguous than has often been perceived; and that, second, this reflects the particular context of the Restoration period in England. The violence and discord of the Civil War (1642–9), the repressive moral climate of the Interregnum (1649–60), and the tumultuous return of the Monarchy in the Restoration (1660) had constructed a social and moral context in which a rejection of narrow Puritan morality, the re-establishment of potentially licentious entertainments such as the theater, and the welcoming of a degree of license in matters of personal conduct and morality combined with a concern to re-establish social and political conservatism. The aim was to ensure that no such breakdown in social structure as the Civil War and consequent events had represented would be allowed to occur again. In short, the rake-hero simultaneously celebrates the new moral freedom of permissiveness and asserts the importance of limits on that freedom; he marks out the acceptable rules of conduct for the revived court bourgeoisie of Restoration England while reflecting the new climate which they had created.
In this paper the significance of the rake-hero as a symbol of social disorder will be examined against this wider context. Three plays will be considered in detail: The Careless Lovers (1673) by Edward Ravenscroft; The Man of Mode (1676) by George Etherege; and Love's Last Shift (1696) by Colley Cibber. In The Careless Lovers, the seemingly incorrigible rake Careless is reconciled to marriage by his love for the seemingly equally libertine Hillaria; in The Man of Mode, Dorimant proposes to Harriet Woodvil and agrees to follow her into the country to receive her answer; in Love's Last Shift, Loveless returns to his virtuous and faithful Amanda after a conversion from his rakish ways. The first two plays come from the period sometimes seen as the apogee of Restoration comedy, in which the libertine quality of the earliest Restoration plays begins to reflect more of a concern with morality and humanity; the latter play marks the beginnings of sentimental drama, in which the reform of character through appeal to his or her noble qualities — and, by extension, to the same qualities in the audience — is the central concern of the drama. Throughout this period, the rake remains central to the modes of engagement of stage comedy with the social concerns of its time.
Works Cited
Birdsall, Virginia Ogden. Wild Civility: the English Comic Spirit and the Restoration Stage. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1970.
Cibber, Colley. Love's Last Shift. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973.
Clayton, R. & Cordner, M., eds. Four Restoration Marriage Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Dharwadker, Aparna. "Class, Authorship, and the Social Intertexture of Genre in Restoration Theater." Studies in English Literature, 37, 3 (1997), 461–82.
Etherege, George. The Man of Mode. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Hughes, Derek. English Drama 1660–1700. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.
Hume, Robert D. The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.
Hume, Robert D. The Rakish Stage: Studies in English Drama, 1660–1800. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.
Lynch, Kathleen M. The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy. New York: Biblo & Tannen, 1965.
Ravenscroft, Edward. The Careless Lovers. Ed. Edmund S. Henry. New York: Garland, 1987.
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