Royal favorites rose to power more or less simultaneously in early modern Spain, France, and England. According to Francisco Gómez Martos, their avatars were protagonists of no fewer than 150 plays (113), set in remote times and places but relevant to contemporary local politics and cultural conditions. While this volume's title suggests a comprehensive inquiry into the topic, its scope is appreciably more precise. The author's background study, together with contextualized and comparative analyses of favorites in three plays from the three kingdoms, will enlighten students of these national theaters. The selection of texts and the order of their treatment are unintuitive but arguably justifiable.
The first chapter outlines the importance principally of Neo-Stoicism and Tacitism (broadly, valuing patience and pragmatism, respectively [23]) in prevailing theories of the favorite's political role during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Spanish matter in chapter 2 fixes the course for the rest of the book. The Duke of Lerma, favorite to King Philip III from 1598 to 1618, was very well known and influential in European circles. That the dramatic subgenre he liberally patronized was generally flattering to court favorites is unsurprising. Less to be expected is that Gómez Martos chooses for close reading the unpublished and virtually unknown La paciencia en la fortuna, possibly by Lope de Vega and dated ca. 1612 (40). Here the fortunes of the loyal Duke of Moncada, who serves Pedro IV of medieval Aragon, execute a common Peninsular arc. That is, he patiently endures an unwarranted fall from grace, to be redeemed when the king finally realizes his man's great worth.
A similar character, Moncade of Barcelona, follows a similar trajectory (with artful twists) in chapter 3's French example. Gómez Martos observes that the drames de favoris flourished especially during Cardinal Richilieu's 1624–42 ascendancy. Like Lerma, the powerful French favorite was enamored of theater, and even collaborated in playwriting himself. Nevertheless, the discussion takes us a generation past Richilieu to 1664's Le Favori, ou la Coquette by Marie-Catherine Desjardins. Staging Favorites is original in examining Neo-stoic principles in the only female-authored French drama on favoritism (67). Furthermore, Desjardins affords the heroic lady Lindamire dramatic near parity with her beloved, the melancholy Moncade. After his fall, he regains royal esteem thanks mostly to her efforts (69). The “coquette” of the title, however, is the opportunistic (Tacitean) female antagonist. That Elvire escapes adverse consequences for her scheming concludes the play more ambiguously than our Spanish example (76).
The final chapter casts back in time to the subgenre in England. Here dramatic favoritism peaked during the 1612–28 heyday of the Earl of Somerset and then the Duke of Buckingham, foremost ministers to Kings James I and Charles I. Gómez Martos positions Ben Jonson's 1603 Sejanus His Fall (itself indebted to Marlowe's Edward II, ca. 1592), as seminal for subsequent theatrical renditions of the type. Unlike Spanish and French depictions, late Elizabethan and Jacobean favorites are often villainous (84)—even, as in Sejanus, with imputations of sodomy (86). The scholar compares Neo-Stoicism in Desjardins's equivocal representation of the favorite with Jonson's condemnation of a malignant protagonist and court culture. Although significantly predating Le Favori, the English tragedy shows that the “unethical way of behaving has greatly advanced and completely conquered the highest political sphere, so that the favorite and his clients, including the majority of the [Roman] Senate, are involved in evil and corrupted practices” (98). The playwright's alignment with the Duke of Essex, executed in 1601 for rebellion, informs these bleak characterizations.
Gómez Martos employs a historian's tools in his scrutiny of royal favorites. Commendably researched in early modern milieux, the book is occasionally less authoritative at least in Peninsular dramaturgy. Spain's “greatest [epoch] of theater” was not “at the turn of the seventeenth century” (14); stage kings were not considered sacred or godlike (48); Lope was not—he only aspired to be—a court dramatist (114).
Quotations are usually Englished, although regular access to the original Spanish and French passages would have been helpful. In-text documentation could use more consistent specificity. Still, it is a novel if chronologically wayward approach to the favorite through an intriguing set of plays. One also hopes that soon a critical edition of La paciencia en la fortuna will be inspired by the attention it receives in this volume.
