For writers in the early modern period, thinking about royal favorites
inevitably meant thinking about the uneasy intersection of the per-
sonal and the public in a political system traditionally organized
around patronage and intimacy. Depictions of favoritism in a vari-
ety of texts including plays, poems, libels, and pamphlets explore the
most fundamental ideological questions concerning personal monar-
chy and the early modern public sphere, questions about the nature
and limits of prerogative and about the enfranchisement or other-
wise of subjects. In this study, Curtis Perry examines the ideological
underpinnings of the heated controversies surrounding powerful royal
favorites and the idea of favoritism in the late Elizabethan and early
Stuart period. Perry argues that the discourse of corrupt favoritism is
this period’s most important unofficial vehicle for exploring constitu-
tional unease concerning the nature and limits of personal monarchy
within the balanced English constitution.
.png)
