The Travels of the Three English Brothers

The Travels of the Three English Brothers is an early Jacobean era stage play, an adventure drama written in 1607 by John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins. The drama was based on the true-life experiences of the three Shirley brothers, Sir Anthony Shirley, Sir Thomas Shirley, and Robert Shirley (later Sir Robert). The play illustrates the trend toward extreme topicality in some works of English Renaissance drama.

The play was based on an account of the Shirleys' travels by Anthony Nixon, published in pamphlet form and titled The Three English Brothers. (The Shirley brothers had been the subjects of two previous pamphlets, in 1600 and 1601; but Nixon's work is thought to have been backed by the Shirley family.) The pamphlet was entered into the Stationers' Register on 8 June 1607, and was published soon after. The play was entered into the Register less than two months later, on 29 June that year. This suggests that the three playwrights may have put the drama together in the space of about six weeks.

The play was acted by Queen Anne's Men. Its 29 July Register entry states that the play was performed at the Curtain Theatre, though this information is likely inaccurate; The Queen's company is thought to have moved on to the Red Bull Theatre in 1604 or 1605. Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, also of 1607, refers to The Travels as a Red Bull play.

The Travels was printed in the same year it appeared onstage, apparently to capitalize on its popularity. The text was issued in a quarto by the bookseller John Wright. Wright published the quarto in two states: the second added an Epistle addressed to the Shirley family. The work's topicality may have won it quick success, though that success was not enduring: the 1607 quarto was the only edition of the play in the seventeenth century. (The playwrights suffered the trap of the topical approach: their material was so current that they did not yet have an end to their story. Their version was soon outdated by further events and later printed accounts.)

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