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. The Great Favourite is written in a mixture of blank verse and rhymed verse. Rhyme was coming to be the dominant fashion in the heroic drama of the Restoration, while the earlier Caroline drama of Ford and Shirley and their contemporaries had favoured blank verse. The two contrasting styles within The Great Favourite may yield some insight into the extent of Howard's rewrite versus the surviving portions of the original text.
Dryden
Howard's brother-in-law John Dryden composed the play's verse Prologue, spoken in the theatre. Though Howard and Dryden were colleagues and occasional collaborators, they also had a brief controversy about the use of rhyme and the role of public taste in drama. Their dispute was played out in their writings of the later 1660s, especially Dryden's Essay of Dramatick Poesie and the Preface to The Great Favourite.
The plot
Howard depicts Lerma as "a Renaissance Overreacher, a Grand Machiavel characterized by enormous ambition, unscrupulousness, and magniloquence." The Duke is a cynical and blasphemous manipulator who promotes his own followers and opposes the established nobility; he is willing to prostitute his daughter Maria to gain influence over the young prince Philip; he even plots the murder of the Queen Mother. The ageing King Philip II moves to restrain Lerma and even banishes him; but then the old king dies, and Lerma ascends in power with the new reign of Philip III. In time, Lerma appears to go too far; the virtuous members of the court, including the Duke of Alva and Lerma's brother the Duke of Medina, re-assert themselves, and it seems that Lerma will endure the conventional fall from grace of his character type. Yet Lerma escapes this expected fall in the final act, by purchasing a cardinal's office from a corrupt Papacy.
Interpretation
Seventeenth-century readers and audiences were adept at drawing socio-political implications from works of literature and drama. Howard's portrayal of the Duke of Lerma was seen by contemporaries as a critique of the Earl of Clarendon, formerly Charles's Lord Chancellor and close confidante. Howard was associated with the "country party" that was then evolving in opposition to Court interests in the English political scene of the day.
