Over the past few months, the Santa Clara Early Modern Book Initiative has been working on something new! As quarantine has made it impossible for us to set foot in SCU’s Archives & Special Collections for our usual tasks, we’ve shifted gears to work on a project that will shine a light on a long-forgotten seventeenth century play, The Elder Brother. This summer, we’ve worked on creating a new modern edition of the play, meant for college-level students. This interesting process has confronted us with complex decisions about spelling, footnotes, long notes, and vocabulary alike. To learn more about that, check out our previous post, “Turning the Early Modern into the Modern.” But in the process of working with the play, our research brought us to the intriguing history of the play, the authors, and a debate about piracy.

The Elder Brother is a comedy-drama by John Fletcher and Phillip Massinger, two playwrights who were well-known in the seventeenth century. But, according to the first quarto edition of the play, published in 1637, it was only written by Fletcher. To complicate matters further, the second quarto (a copy of which is at SCU) attributed authorship instead to John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, together. The third and fourth quartos returned to Fletcher alone, but the fifth once more named Beaumont an author. When the Beaumont and Fletcher second folio was published later in the century, it also attributes The Elder Brother in part to Beaumont. None of the seventeenth century texts attribute authorship to Massinger, in whole or part. So, why Beaumont? And why not Massinger?

For years before Beaumont’s retirement in 1613, Fletcher and Beaumont collaborated with each other on more than a dozen plays. They became a writing team early in Fletcher’s career, and became close friends, even living with each other for years. The two were inseparable in the public consciousness from the start; Fletcher’s first credited work, the 1606 play The Woman Hater, was co-authored by Beaumont. The two were so intertwined, that after their deaths the two folio editions that contained Beaumont and Fletcher’s work attribute all of Fletcher’s solo plays and plays authored with other collaborators to Beaumont as well. To this day, the body of works by John Fletcher, written solo or in collaboration with other authors, is known as part of the “Beaumont and Fletcher canon.”

Regardless, Beaumont couldn’t have been an author of The Elder Brother, meaning that the second quarto’s attribution is likely a mistake. The play was written in early 1625, a few months before John Fletcher’s death due to the plague, and Beaumont had died years before in 1616! So, it’s likely that publishers attributed the play to Beaumont to boost sales of the published copies. By the time the later editions were published, the Beaumont/Fletcher pair were well known for their joint efforts, and marketing Fletcher’s ‘solo’ play as a Beaumont/Fletcher production might have made the play more desirable to the average seventeenth century theatre-lover. 

Okay, you might ask, but who was Phillip Massinger, then, and what is his relation to this comedy? Massinger was a younger British playwright who collaborated with both Beaumont and Fletcher. After Beaumont’s death, Fletcher and Massinger began to work together more often. The two worked together on various popular plays, comedies and tragedies alike. Scholars have identified Massinger as a contributing author of The Elder Brother, although the play isn’t actually attributed to him in any of the original quartos and folios published in the 1600s. As I mentioned before, The Elder Brother was written at the end of Fletcher’s life, and it was likely the last play he ever wrote. Scholars argue that at the time of Fletcher’s death, the play was still in a rough state, and Massinger possibly finished the play for Fletcher. In fact, some have argued that Acts 1 and 5 of The Elder Brother were effectively rewritten by the original playwright’s colleague. Massinger also likely wrote both the prologue and epilogue, especially since the prologue mentions Fletcher’s death. According to some arguments, we can see both Fletcher and Massinger’s authorial traces in the play, even though the work was never attributed to Massinger in the 1600s.

By naming Massinger the second author of the play, we hope to recognize his contributions to the play—not so much to uncover the truth about the “correct” balance of authorship as to acknowledge the collaborative dimension of early modern England’s theater.

To the modern reader, this lack of credit might seem unbelievable. Publishing a book without crediting the author(s) is plagiarism, after all, or at least the betrayal of intellectual property. But, and in a way not so different from modern book trade advertising, seventeenth century publishers often treated attribution as a marketing strategy. Even more significantly, playwrights in the Renaissance often worked collaboratively, whether that was synchronic (that’s simultaneous work on the same play) or diachronic (revising or finishing the work of the previous author). For his part, Massinger had silently revised more than one of Fletcher’s plays. Especially after the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio, the pair of “Beaumont and Fletcher” was far more recognizable than “Fletcher and Massinger.” By naming Massinger the second author of the play, we hope to recognize his contributions to the play—not so much to uncover the truth about the “correct” balance of authorship as to acknowledge the collaborative dimension of early modern England’s theater.

This authorship issue wasn’t the only challenge we faced when working on this play. The case of the second and third quartos of The Elder Brother demonstrates another seventeenth century publisher’s trend: book piracy. For a long time, the 1651 copy of The Elder Brother (one of which is housed here in SCU’s Archives & Special Collections!) was regarded by scholars as the third edition of the play, even though it is more likely the second published. This is because the third copy is a pirated edition, printed illegally by a publisher in 1661, one Francis Kirkman, who was in the business of creating “bootlegs” of popular dramas during the Restoration Era.

According to scholar and analyst Johan Gerritsen, Kirkman aimed to create a copy that looked like the first edition of The Elder Brother, and thus marked the print year as 1637. All previous modern editions of The Elder Brother hadn’t taken this faux print date into account, with some speculating instead that Q4, another 1661 copy of the play, was instead the only pirated text. However, the editors of DEEP (the Database of Early English Playbooks), Zachary Lesser and Alan Farmer, agree with Gerritsen: the real second edition is the 1650/1 edition of the play, indeed the one housed here at SCU’s Archives and Special Collections. The key take-away of this curious case is that the book previously known as the ‘second quarto’ is in fact the third, and vice-versa. 

In the process of our research, I’ve come to realize that The Elder Brother’s various editions are notable examples of these seventeenth century idiosyncrasies surrounding the printing of stage dramas. The ways that publishers and their advertising ploys played a huge part in the reception of dramas is visible in its history. While The Elder Brother has gone so long without recognition, we hope that our audience can use our free, modern edition as a way to delve deeper into the world of seventeenth-century theatre. If you’d like to know more information on the authors, the various seventeenth-century editions, our research, and, of course, to read the play itself, we urge you to check out our edition of The Elder Brother when it is published!