(Maguire) .
The stock characters of the restoration drama included the fop and the rake. One of the features unique to Restoration comedy is the figure of the rake as romantic hero. Birdsall points out that the rake- hero is a descendant of earlier comedic male characters who were rogues, "shrewd, double-dealing rascals dedicated to the cause of their own freedom and prosperity" (6). The rake-hero exhibits a number of attitudes and characteristics that one can detect in Horner, Willmore, and Lovemore. He is unmarried, cynical, coarse but with the manners of a gentleman, witty, manipulative, and self-serving. He tends to create his own brand of morality which includes a belief in the open pursuit of sensual pleasure and a dismissal of marriage. His "wit consists not so much in his defiance of traditional notions of right conduct, as in the casual and unruffled manner in which he expresses the 'shocking' sentiments" since "the first major requirement for a reputation for wit is the appearance of being in complete control of one's feelings and/or of one's circumstances, whether one is or not" (Wilkinson, 96).
Willmore, the rake-hero of our play, epitomizes the libertine ideal of sexual freedom more so than Horner, the rake- hero of The Country Wife. He likes Naples where there is "a kind of legal authoriz'd Fornication, where the Men are not chid for 't, nor the Women despis'd" (I.ii: 123-5). He frankly asks both Helena and Angelica to sleep with him when he first meets each of them and declares to Belville, "Thou know'st there's but one way for a Woman to oblige me" (I.ii: 267). But like Horner, all women seem the same to him. He declares, "Oh for my Arms full of soft, white, kind-Woman!" (II.i: 16) and accosts Florinda in the garden for no other reason than that she is there and "'tis a delicate shining Wench" (III.iii: 25). After the attempted rape is stopped by Belville, Willmore recalls Angelica lives nearby and blithely goes to her house.
