There is a major shift now taking place among literary scholars in the understanding of early modern English politics. In the past, many influential critics asserted that the English monarchy was a fundamentally absolutist institution. To give but one example, in Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992), Richard Helgerson proposed that “the intense national self-consciousness of the younger Elizabethans arose under the aegis of Tudor absolutism” (9). By “absolutist,” these critics mean that in England, rex superseded lex, that the monarch was superior to the law and accountable only to God. (This understanding of England's political structure, it should be said, was achieved only by ignoring the work of Margaret A. Judson, J. G. A. Pocock, Markku Peltonen, Johann P. Sommerville, and Glenn Burgess, among others.) Increasingly, however, literary critics have started to replace this inaccurate and oversimplified view by allowing that the monarchy in England was never “absolute,” but mixed—meaning that the prerogatives of the monarch were balanced by the rights and liberties of both Parliament and the people (albeit narrowly construed). To be sure, one can find examples abounding of absolutist rhetoric in this period, but these beliefs ran counter to the more deep-seated English common-law traditions of the Ancient Constitution, which mandated no taxation without representation, no imprisonment without charges, and the monarch's accountability to law.
In Literature and Favoritism, Curtis Perry continues and extends this development with analyses of such canonical works as Hamlet, Sejanus His Fall, and Paradise Lost, although Perry mainly concentrates on more obscure Jacobean and Caroline plays, such as Philip Massinger's The Duke of Milan, John Denham's The Sophy, and William Davenant's The Fair Favorite. Perry begins his book by noting that “hostility toward seemingly all-powerful royal favorites played a central role in the development and articulation of anti-court sentiment in England” (1). But while it surely takes no ghost, or distinguished literary critic, to tell us that, Perry's central point is that the literature on court favorites became a site for worrying about the central constitutional issues of early modern England: “The discourse of favoritism is this period's most important unofficial vehicle for exploring constitutional unease concerning the nature and limits of personal monarchy within the balanced English constitution” (1). The problem of the prince's favorite, Perry continues, shows what happens when the Justinian precept “What pleases the prince has the force of law” becomes literalized and “trumps law and custom” (9). In sum, early modern dramatists (with a few exceptions, Perry's book focuses almost exclusively on drama) used the royal favorite as a vehicle for expressing “real anxiety about absolutism—the tyranny of the king's personal will—and does so long before the reign of Charles I” (13).
The anonymous Catholic libel Leicester's Commonwealth (1584), for example, not only attacks the earl personally as an upstart and a tyrant but also points toward “the structural problem of royal favoritism—its connection to personal monarchy as an institution” (32), which helps explain this text's popularity in the seventeenth century (aside from manuscripts and allusions in the drama, it was reprinted twice in 1641 [40]). This book, as Perry notes, despite its praise of Elizabeth's benevolence, nonetheless articulates “a radically restrictive theory of royal power: monarchy turns to tyranny when errors of the monarch's ‘particular and peculiar inclination’ result in the advancement of pestilential ministers” (43), a theory that would have increasing relevance during the Stuart era, with its combination of extraordinarily powerful favorites (i.e., George Villiers, duke of Buckingham) and assertions of absolutism.
Perry is especially good on how Christopher Marlowe, Francis Hubert, and Elizabeth Cary used the story of Edward II and his infatuation with Piers Gaveston as “a fable about the over-extension of royal prerogative and the resulting preciousness of the monarchical republic” (187). The great advantage of Perry's treatment of Marlowe's play is that he notes the slipperiness of Marlowe's politics. The play, in Perry's view, is not just about “the overextension of prerogative,” but also about “the over-reaching of subjects as well” (187), peers who deem “their king to be without personal will” (195). The section on Hubert's verse history, The Life and Death of Edward the Second (a poem I admit I had previously not been aware of), fascinates because this text is available in three versions (the author revised it substantially between its original composition and its first printing in 1628, and then again for an authorized edition in 1629 [202]), and with each version, Hubert places the monarch under more and more critical scrutiny: “The Elizabethan version casts the queen as a goddess and strenuously avoids examining awkward political questions about the king's own human frailty, while the Jacobean emendations and additions emphasize the moral vulnerability of the king and treat regal self-government as the central political question” (215). Elizabeth Cary's version, growing out of the concerns over Buckingham, also proposes that favoritism potentially threatens England's political structure: “If the king cannot subdue the wild animal within himself, then what pleases the prince has the force of law regardless of law and custom. … Royal misrule leads inevitably to absolutist tyranny even in a state that has safeguards against absolutism built in” (226).
This book has many splendors, and this short review cannot enumerate them all, but I would single out two: Perry's attention to the longevity of such texts as Leicester's Commonwealth and how their meaning shifts over the reigns of different monarchs; and Perry's attention to noncanonical works—in particular, his attention to neglected Jacobean and Caroline plays. At the same time, I have a few quibbles. I am not sure it's accurate to assert, concerning Marlowe's play, that opposition to Gaveston arises from “a disgruntled Catholic aristocracy” (193), since the action takes place before the Reformation. Everybody was Catholic at that time. I also doubt that Shakespeare's Henry V is really a king who rules “for the general good” (201). This is the same man who wages war in France because his father told him to “busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels” (2 Henry IV 4.5.213–14) and who talks about his subjects as a “slave” with a “gross brain” (Henry V 4.1.281, 282). More substantially, I cannot agree with Perry's repetition of the canard in Milton studies that “earthly and heavenly politics” are, as King James might have put it, clean different things, since Milton describes Heaven's rule in precisely the terms he applied earlier in his career to tyranny generally and Charles I particularly and puts into Satan's and Beelzebub's mouth rhetoric lifted almost verbatim from The Ready and Easy Way, among other texts.
But these disagreements pale in the face of Perry's major achievement, which is to situate early modern literature squarely in the context of the Ancient Constitution. For that reason alone, Literature and Favoritism deserves to be read by everyone interested in the confluence of early modern literature and history.
