Although we’ve all been facing great challenges throughout the past several months on account of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Santa Clara Early Modern Book Initiative (SCEMBI) continues to bring more attention to early modern English texts that have faded from the public eye. Without in-person access to SCU Archives & Special Collections, our team has had to do its fair share of adapting. Rather than our typical work of expanding library records and cataloguing texts within our own collection, we’ve been working on a different project with a parallel aim.

At the moment, we’re editing the text of John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The Elder Brother, a seventeenth-century play showcasing romance, marriage, infidelity, family feuds, and brotherly rivalries. Our goal is to create a modernized textual edition suitable for college-level readers. To do this, we compare early editions of the text (a process called “collation”), research and account for archaic language, and explain in our notes phrases and metaphors that we don’t hear or see anymore today. Essentially, we’re trying to make this play more accessible to modern audiences who may only be familiar with Fletcher and Massinger’s now more-famous theater colleague, William Shakespeare. But our work isn’t a simple matter of changing every “faire” into “fair”; trying to modernize and preserve a text at the same time is quite complicated, and it’s this aspect of the project that makes our work so interesting.

Before we offer a picture of the project, we must recognize that this would not have been possible without the work of the Professor Andrew Keener’s Winter 2020 Textual Editing class, who began modernizing Fletcher and Massinger’s play long before we got involved. More than anyone else, this is their project, and we at SCEMBI are grateful to continue their work before it goes out into the world. Many thanks to Kaliray Arison, Sarah Parent, Charlotte Seton, and Nick Witkin.

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This kind of editorial work immediately creates some interesting puzzles. Editors have options when working with their selected texts and it is really up to us to determine what choices to make. To help us along the way, our guiding principle is to create balance between accessibility and fidelity to the original text.

So, what does this approach look like in action? To start, we had to figure out what language to keep, what language to change, and what needs to be explained through textual notes. We decided to keep words like “thou,” “tis,” and “blest” because we felt that examples such as these do not impede the reading experience even if the spelling or words themselves are not used today. On the other hand, we’ve made a few minor changes to some words with archaic spellings if they represent words that are still commonly used. Sometimes, all it takes is the removal of the final “e” in words like “faire” or “mistresse.” Other times, we change spelling to clear up the confusion between words like “travel” and “travail,” words that once could have shared the same spelling despite meaning completely different things (“travel” accommodates today’s meanings, while “travail” gestures towards connotations of labor). Finally, when we want to keep a word or phrase that we know may be off-putting to modern audiences, we add some notes to help guide the reader much in the same way as annotations in modern editions of Shakespeare’s plays. I mean, we didn’t know what a “kickshaw” or a “coxcomb” was when reading this play for the first time, but now we’re happy to tell you! (For the record, a trinket or toy – after the French quelquechose – and a fool, respectively.)

Of course, you could ask, “Why not just modernize every word of the play? Isn’t it arbitrary to just pick and choose which words to change and which ones to leave alone?” While the process itself may be meticulous, we feel that it is necessary to preserve as much original language as possible because it maintains the essence of the authors’ work. For example, after encountering the word “servulating” in the text, a quick search in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) told us that “servulate” essentially means “to be servile.” However, that was not the only detail we found: this play contains the only instance of this word recorded in the OED. This word is extremely rare! As such, we felt that it’s emblematic of Fletcher and Massinger’s authorial style, so we made a little annotation and left the word as it was (even if other versions of the text simply feature “service”). To compare this case, let’s take a look at one of the most recognizable lines from Shakespeare, “wherefore art thou Romeo?” In today’s English, the first three words in this phrase would never be used in the same way. But, would changing this to “why are you Romeo?” be the best choice? We would feel that such a change would diminish the style of Shakespeare’s work, and so we try to apply the same idea to The Elder Brother. Sometimes a more difficult word or phrase yields a stronger reading – in fact, this is a principle used by many editors: the harder meaning is the more plausible one.

One important goal of our work is to bring attention to John Fletcher and Philip Massinger to a wider audience. Fletcher and Massinger were well-known in the seventeenth century, although they have fallen into general obscurity since. Fletcher was well-known for his wit, and became the lead playwright for the King’s Men acting company after Shakespeare’s death. In fact, he became known as Shakespeare’s successor, and rivaled him in popularity during his life and especially during the Restoration (that’s the 1660s). Many of his plays were beloved on stage, including The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, his sequel to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. According to the Master of the Revels at the time, The Taming of the Shrew was “liked,” but The Woman’s Prize was “very well-liked.”

The Elder Brother was not Fletcher’s most famous play, but it was still admired. As the last play he ever wrote, it became a testament to his fame after his death. Throughout the seventeenth century, there was high demand for the play in print, which resulted in five quarto editions, and another text of the drama appeared in the second Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1679. (For comparison, Romeo and Juliet received the same number of quarto editions.) On the Restoration-era stage, The Elder Brother was evidently well received, and played often, becoming a staple of British theater. It was not the only beloved Fletcher drama: scholars at the University of Delaware have found that Beaumont and Fletcher plays were performed about twice as often as Ben Johnson or Shakespeare’s plays during this time!

While Massinger was not as popular in his time as Fletcher, he contributed heavily to many of Fletcher’s works, and wrote a variety of other plays. His most popular solo play, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, was loved well into the 19th century, and its central character, Sir Giles Over-reach, was regarded as one of the most interesting villains of the era. Both Fletcher and Massinger created masterpieces of the stage, many of which have become eclipsed by other, more well-known works, especially those by Shakespeare and Jonson. As Massinger’s prologue of The Elder Brother makes it clear, the finished play was a tribute to Fletcher’s work after his death; he hoped that it would, “to after-times, preserve his name.” In creating this modern edition, our aim is to fulfill this hope and spotlight the work of Fletcher, as well as his contributing collaborator Massinger.

But, in the end, it’s not just up to the editors to determine what’s right for these texts today. As always, we look to our audience, and we hope that it can grow as a result of our work. We invite you all to read (or enact) our free, accessible edition of The Elder Brother once it is complete. And, if you’d like to get an even closer look at this play’s textual history, check out SCU’s second quarto edition of the play once Archives & Special Collections reopens, or view the digitized copy online anytime.

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Header image: title page of The Elder Brother from the SCU Digital Collections.