The Elder Brother is an early seventeenth-century English stage play, a comedy written by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger.
The first recorded performance occurred at the Blackfriars Theatre on 25 April 1635;[2] and it was staged at Hampton Court Palace on 5 January 1637.
(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.)
Given Fletcher's highly distinctive literary style, it has not been difficult for scholars to delineate the respective shares of the two authors.
Hoy judged The Elder Brother to be a work originally by Fletcher alone, "the first and last acts of which have been virtually rewritten by Massinger.
He takes care to guide the girl away from the sybaritic sloth in which many aristocratic women indulge, encouraging her to "rise with the sun, walk, dance, or hunt, and learn the virtues of plants and simples" (Act I, scene 1).
The older, Charles (the play's title character), is a scholar, who ignores everyday concerns and prefers his books; the younger, Eustace, is a courtier, fashionable and worldly.
They face a problem, however: under the rules of primogeniture, Charles is heir to his father's estates, while Eustace is merely a younger son with no independent income.
In conversation with Cowsy and Egremont, Eustace is disillusioned by their frank cowardice and their self-centered disregard for considerations of honor; he obtains one of their swords, then chases them away and goes to confront his brother once again.
Being written in prose rather than verse, the play lacks the embellishments of style normal for Fletcher and Massinger; it compensates with vigorous and entertaining vollies of invective.