Staging Favorites: Theatrical Representations of Political Favoritism in the Early Modern Courts of Spain, France, and England by Francisco Gómez Martos

Abstract

Reviewed by: Staging Favorites: Theatrical Representations of Political Favoritism in the Early Modern Courts of Spain, France, and England by Francisco Gómez Martos Carl Austin Wise Francisco Gómez Martos. Staging Favorites: Theatrical Representations of Political Favoritism in the Early Modern Courts of Spain, France, and England. ROUTLEDGE, 2021. 128 PP. FRANCISCO GÓMEZ MARTOS takes a pan-European approach to analyzing the figure of the king’s favorite minister in the theatrical traditions of Spain, France, and England during the seventeenth century. This comparative method is a fitting lens for an installment in Routledge Press’s Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge Series, which aims to frame its scholarship from a globally connected perspective. Historians have long presented royal favoritism from a broader European position after the seminal studies of J.H. Elliott’s Richelieu and Olivares (Cambridge UP, 1984) and Elliott and Laurence Brockliss’s subsequent The World of the Favourite (Yale UP, 1998), yet scholars of literature have largely remained siloed in their respective national literatures. Spain’s comedias de privanza, France’s drames des favoris, and England’s body of theater featuring Tudor and Stuart favorites all enjoy some degree of critical attention, yet, as Gómez Martos points out, there is a notable lack of literary scholarship that takes a comparative, pan-European perspective to favoritism plays as a single corpus. In adopting just such an approach, Staging Favorites examines how three select early modern plays from Spain, France, and England present royal favorites from the perspective of neo-Stoicism. Beyond its comparativism, perhaps the book’s most interesting contribution is the chapter on La paciencia en la fortuna (ca. 1615), an unattributed comedia that had never been published. Gómez Martos argues in another study that the two surviving manuscripts are copies of a play performed in Madrid in 1615, and he uses both the play’s production records and meter analysis to propose Lope de Vega as the author (“La paciencia en la fortuna: An Unprinted Play by Lope de Vega,” Arte nuevo: Revista de estudios áureos, vol. 6, 2019, pp. 57–89). After a brief introduction, chapter 1 gives a short overview of political favoritism in early modern Europe and discusses how court culture and literary patronage responded to the near absolute power over court life exerted by Philip III and Philip IV’s privados, the Duke of Lerma and the Count-Duke of Olivares; Louis XIII’s ministre Cardinal Richelieu; and James [End Page 107] II’s favorites, the Earl of Somerset and the Duke of Buckingham. Despite the enormous variety of plays about royal favorites and the lack of consensus among scholars on how to classify them, Gómez Martos proposes that this genre of plays is connected by a neo-Stoic understanding of kingship and royal favoritism. Developed in the writings of the Dutch philosopher Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), neo-Stoicism merged the classical philosophy of Seneca with Christian theology to propose the notion of how an ideal person, in this case the royal favorite, should behave. Chapter 2 looks at Spanish comedias de privanza, which emerged in the early seventeenth century when the newly crowned Philip III anointed the Duke of Lerma as his privado and gave him near king-like authority to rule in Philip’s absence. To seventeenth-century courtiers, Lerma’s rapid rise to power and unorthodox control over the monarchy strongly resembled Juan II’s medieval advisor Álvaro de Luna (ca. 1388–1453), who ruled Castile for decades before suffering a spectacular fall from power, imprisonment, and execution. Pulling from their own history of Juan II and Luna, Spanish writers saw royal favoritism as an unstable institution that could rise or fall without warning on the whims of the monarch. Damián Salucio del Poyo’s two-part La próspera fortuna and La adversa fortuna de Ruy López de Ávalos, and La privanza y caída de don Álvaro de Luna appeared in 1612 almost immediately after Lerma’s arrival in court and serve as the model for most of the privanza plays in the decades to follow. After discussing these well-known privanza plays, Gómez Martos...