The Emperor's Favourite

The Emperor's Favourite, which appears in print for the first time, is one of the four anonymous seventeenth-century plays bound in a single volume in the library of the Newdigate family of Arbury Hall, Nuneaton. Tentatively attributed to John Newdigate III (1600-1642), the play uses the story of the rise and fall of Crispinus, favourite of the Emperor Nero, to mount a critique of the influence of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628) at the courts of James I and Charles I. The volume is illustrated with ten color plates from the manuscript and from John Newdigate's 1628 Parliamentary Diary.