Abstract
Staging Favorites: Theatrical Representations of Political Favoritism in the Early Modern Courts of 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. 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.