The Elder Brother

The Elder Brother is an early seventeenth-century English stage play, a comedy written by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. Apparently dating from 1625, it may have been the last play Fletcher worked on before his August 1625 death.

Both the Prologue and the Epilogue of the play mention Fletcher's passing; the Prologue refers to him as "now dead," indicating, perhaps, a recent event. The Elder Brother is unusual in the canons of both Fletcher and Massinger in being almost entirely in prose rather than verse. (Only the Prologue, the Epilogue, and a lyric in III,v are in verse; and the Prologue and Epilogue are of uncertain authorship, in this play as in others.) A prose play was logically easier and quicker to compose that a work in verse. It is possible that The Elder Brother was a "rush job" done in the final weeks and months of Fletcher's life.

The early performance history of the play is unknown. The first recorded performance occurred at the Blackfriars Theatre on 25 April 1635; and it was staged at Hampton Court Palace on 5 January 1637. The play was revived during Restoration era, like many other popular plays in the Fletcher canon; it was performed as early as Friday 23 November 1660, and Samuel Pepys saw it on 6 September 1661, but thought it "ill acted." The play remained in the repertory for years, and was a "principal old stock play" of the era.

The play was first published in 1637, in a quarto printed by Felix Kingston for the booksellers John Benson and John Waterson, with a title-page attribution to Fletcher. The first quarto exists in two states, with minor typographical differences between them. A second quarto was issued in 1651 by bookseller Humphrey Moseley. (The rights to the play were transferred to Moseley in Oct. 1646, according to the Stationers' Register; the recording entry cites the playwright's name as "Mr. Fflesher" — one of the odder vagaries in the famously flexible orthography of the English Renaissance.) A third quarto followed in 1661, with a fourth in 1678

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