The Elder Brother: A Comedy. First Printed in 1637; Now Reprinted With Slight Alterations and Abridgement for Use on Occasions of Entertainment, Especially in Schools and Colleges [ 1915 ]

by John Fletcher

Originally published in 1915. This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies. All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume.

Genres: Plays

104 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1625

About the author

John Fletcher (1579-1625) was an English playwright and one of the most prolific and influential dramatists of the early seventeenth century, whose career bridged the Elizabethan theatrical tradition and the drama of the Stuart Restoration. He emerged as a major figure in London theatre in the first decade of the 1600s, initially writing for the Children of the Queen’s Revels and soon becoming closely associated with the King’s Men. Fletcher’s early education at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, appears to have prepared him for a clerical career, but like many of the university-trained writers of his generation he gravitated instead toward the commercial stage. His rise was closely tied to his celebrated partnership with Francis Beaumont, with whom he developed a distinctive form of tragicomedy that proved enormously popular. Their collaboration produced several of the period’s most successful plays, including Philaster, The Maid’s Tragedy, and A King and No King, works that helped define Jacobean taste through their blend of romance, political tension, and emotional intensity. Following Beaumont’s withdrawal from writing, Fletcher became increasingly central to the King’s Men and, after the death of William Shakespeare, effectively succeeded him as the company’s principal playwright. During this period he collaborated with Shakespeare on plays such as Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, while also producing a large body of work either alone or with other dramatists, most notably Philip Massinger. Fletcher’s drama is marked by technical fluency, flexible verse, and a keen sense of theatrical pacing, and he showed particular mastery in tragicomedy and comedy of manners, genres that would dominate the Restoration stage. Although some of his early experiments, such as The Faithful Shepherdess, initially failed to find an audience, he quickly adapted his style and achieved sustained popularity, with multiple plays performed at court and revived frequently after his death. During the Commonwealth, scenes from his works circulated widely as short theatrical drolls, and following the reopening of the theatres in 1660, Fletcher’s plays were staged more often than those of any other playwright. Over time, however, his reputation declined as Shakespeare’s stature grew, and by the eighteenth century only a handful of his comedies remained in regular performance. Modern scholarship has emphasized both the scale of Fletcher’s output and the complexity of authorship within his canon, which reflects extensive collaboration and has prompted detailed stylistic analysis. Despite fluctuations in critical standing, Fletcher remains a key transitional figure in English drama, whose influence shaped both his contemporaries and the theatrical traditions that followed.

Reviews

[Gill · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can really spot the parts Massinger wrote (first and last acts) and those by Fletcher - the rest. Massinger sets things up, provides plenty of exposition and ties it all together - in this play in a tearing hurry in the last scene. Fletcher does the comedy and the romantic parts which actually make the characters interesting. This play for some reason was initially printed in prose, and is often presented that way still, though with the Fletcher parts in particular you can really feel the blank verse breaking through.

The plot concerns a pair of brothers, both proposed as suitable husbands for a wealthy heiress. Initially the courtier seems to have all the advantages, but gradually his claims to sophistication and worth are shown to be hollow, while the studious brother turns out to have more to him than was suspected. There's a weird sub-plot in which their father letches after the wife of a servant, but is forced to recognise his own limitations and pay off the couple.

The play is good fun and would still work well on stage.

Read as part of the REP, Reading Early Plays group readathon online in the bleak autumn of 2020. (Formerly the Shakespeare Institute Extra Mile Readathon.)

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rereading The Elder Brother almost exactly two years later, this time with REP, is an interesting experience, because a lot of what I said the first time I still agree with. The dating of the play seems to have changed (serious scholars now DON'T think it is one of Fletcher's last plays, but cannot decide when it does come from), but reading it aloud does make a couple of things much clearer:

Charles' neurodiversity (and the patronising nature of his family towards him, treating him largely as though he is learning-disabled) is much more apparent. Even more than Shakespeare's Richard II or Beatrice, he is autistic

Eustace is a blowhard, and the way Fletcher demonstrates that is by making him into a cod-Marlovian hero, full of misquoted Ovid.

Fletcher cannot be beaten when it comes to sexy can-they-can't-they scenes, with a fantastic scene between the virginal Angellina and the bookish Charles, who both want to get it on, but don't know what to do. Brilliant.

Massinger, left with the last Act to write, fluffs it: it just isn't as good. The fact that this was revived at least three times before 1642, and published at least 6 times (all in slightly different versions) by 1700 suggests that people didn't mind.

Very funny. Very silly.

*****



The Elder Brother, probably the last play Fletcher wrote and possibly finished off by Massinger, or possibly planned as a collaboration all along, is interesting for a number of reasons.

1) it reads much more like a later restoration comedy than most of Fletcher: if you told me it was written by Goldsmith, Wycherley or Sheridan, I wouldn't have been surprised.

2) Its hero, Charles, is clearly on the autism spectrum, and remains so throughout. He is, though, attractive enough to pull Angellina, the heroine (though their wedding night is chaste).

3) It exists in two versions that are almost identical, except one is in prose, and the other has rearranged the lines so they all read in (more or less) blank verse. I read the prose version.

4) its ending is (very) sudden. Angellina's father kidnaps her and Charles' father, and it looks like we're going to have a dramatic showdown, which never quite happens. They just go "it's all sorted", and it is.

5) it's one of the clearest examples of droit de seigneur I have seen in an early modern play, where Brisac, the father, thinks because he employs Andrew and his wife Lilly he has the right to sleep with her. It is kind of frowned upon, but not really.

As with a lot of Fletcher, it is very funny.