The Deserving Favourite is a Caroline era stage play, a tragicomedy written by Lodowick Carlell that was first published in 1629.
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.)
Carlell dedicated the first edition to two personal friends, Thomas Carey, second son to the Earl of Monmouth, and William Murray.
For these courtiers, playwriting "was one of many fields in which one might emerge in virtuoso self-display, and the lengths to which Suckling and others were prepared to go, following the fashion set by Lodowick Carlell's The Deserving Favourite (c. 1629), to have their works publicly performed, is an indication of the new importance of the theater for an aspiring wit.
Carlell based the plot of his play on a Spanish novel titled La duquesa de Mantua by the popular author Don Alonzo del Castillo Solorzano, first published in 1628 or 1629 (the dates in copies of the first edition vary).
At one point, even the King gets tired of it all, and urges the Duke to resist his love-sickness: "Call back for shame then / That judgement which had wont to govern all / Your actions...") Through self-interest and malice, the bad servant Iacomo is motivated to interfere.
The princess Cleonarda, the King's sister and an avid huntress, comes upon their bodies; she falls in love with Lysander, and takes him to her hunting lodge to nurse him back to health.
Cleonarda reveals her love for him, and tries to obtain her brother's pardon; but the King is determined to execute the man that he believes killed the Duke.
Since all four characters have been impressed with each other's nobility and honour, they accept the obvious resolution of their difficulties: the Duke and Clarinda agree to marry, as do Lysander and Cleonarda.
In the Epilogue to the play, Carlell acknowledges that his audience might consider the drama "only full / Of gross absurdities...." When Cleonarda and Clarinda meet for the first time, the two women praise each other's beauty, in terms that (to a modern ear at least) sound surprisingly erotic.
Lysander later tells Clarinda that after he is executed "You and the Princess may together make / A kind of marriage...." Suggestions of lesbianism crop up curiously in Caroline-era plays, in contrast to earlier phases of English Renaissance drama; they recur in plays by Richard Brome – see The Antipodes, A Mad Couple Well-Match'd, and The Queen's Exchange.