The Great Favourite

The Great Favourite, or the Duke of Lerma is a stage play written by Sir Robert Howard, a historical drama based on the life of Francisco Goméz de Sandoval y Rojas, Duke of Lerma, the favourite of King Philip III of Spain. The play has often been considered Howard's best dramatic work, as well as a step in the development of the heroic drama of the Restoration era.

The play was premiered onstage on 20 February 1668, acted by the King's Company at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Nell Gwyn played Lerma's daughter Maria. Samuel Pepys saw the play in the company of King Charles II and his court at its first performance, as he recorded in his Diary. (Pepys interpreted the play as a veiled criticism of Charles's conduct with his mistress, and wrote that he had expected the King to interrupt the performance — though this did not occur.)

The play was published in a quarto edition that same year by Henry Herringman, and printed again in a folio collection of Howard's works in 1692.

In his Preface to the 1668 edition, Howard states that the King's Company had possessed an old play on the subject of the Duke of Lerma — an "unfit" thing that was yet "written with higher Style and Thoughts than I could attain to." Howard reworked the old play, "altering the most part of the Characters, and the whole Design...." Alfred Harbage has argued that this old play was a lost work by John Ford, based on resemblances between The Great Favourite and Ford's distinctive drama. Other scholars have suggested that the old play reworked by Howard was The Spanish Duke of Lerma, a lost drama by Henry Shirley that was entered into the Stationers' Register on September 9, 1653, but never published.

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