Rake [ Politics & Society / Character / Social interaction ]
… for his crimes. John Vanbrugh offers a more comedic approach with The Provoked Wife (1697), where the rake figure is presented as a brutish, philandering husband. One of the most popular plays of the time, and as such one of the most … Debauchee’. See John Wilmot, Selected Poems, ed. Paul Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The rake can be presented as an illustration of unregulated sociability, driven by two opposite forces. On one hand, rakish narratives … and cultural outreach. But the sympathetic portrayal of the Restoration stage was no longer the hegemonic mode: representations of the rake grew more accusatory, mirroring the growing number of women and middle-class artists taking on …
Literature | Masculinity | Rank | Violence
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