Publication
The play was first published in 1637, in a quarto printed by Felix Kingston for the booksellers John Benson and John Waterson, with a title-page attribution to Fletcher. The first quarto exists in two states, with minor typographical differences between them. A second quarto was issued in 1651 by bookseller Humphrey Moseley. (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.) A third quarto followed in 1661, with a fourth in 1678
The Elder Brother was omitted from the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, like other previously-printed Fletcher plays; it was included in the second folio of 1679. The title pages of all the quartos agree that the play was staged by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre.
The play also exists in a manuscript, part of the collection MS. Egerton 1994 in the collection of the British Library. The text of the MS. shows a range of small differences from the printed texts (mainly single words, and a few lines).
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