The Deserving Favourite

The Deserving Favourite is a Caroline era stage play, a tragicomedy written by Lodowick Carlell that was first published in 1629. The earliest of Carlell's plays "and also the best," it is notable for its influence on other plays of the Caroline era.

The play was first printed in 1629 in a quarto issued by the stationer Matthew Rhodes. (The work was not entered into the Stationers' Register prior to publication. This violation of the rules was unusual, though not unprecedented; the same is true of a few other plays of the era, like Greene's Tu Quoque in 1614, and A Fair Quarrel in 1617.) The title page states that the play had "lately" been acted, first at Court before King Charles I and then "publicly" at the Blackfriars Theatre, by the King's Men.

Carlell dedicated the first edition to two personal friends, Thomas Carey, second son to the Earl of Monmouth, and William Murray. Both were gentlemen of the King's Bedchamber.

A second quarto was issued in 1659 by the stationer Humphrey Moseley.

There is no indication just how recent a production that word "lately" might mean, though it could have been in the same year, 1629. This play was an early instance of a phenomenon that came to distinguish the final phase of the King's Men's existence: what can be called "vanity" productions of plays written by courtiers. Previously, the King's Men had chosen their plays on the basis of their appeal to the popular audience; but in the Caroline era they staged more plays by courtiers like Carlell, William Cartwright, Sir John Suckling, and Thomas Killigrew. At least some of these productions were subsidised in varying ways. The plays were sometimes published soon after their premieres in vanity editions, the folio printing of Suckling's Aglaura being the extreme example.

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