The Travels of the Three English Brothers is an early Jacobean era stage play, an adventure drama written in 1607 by John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins. The drama was based on the true-life experiences of the three Shirley brothers, Sir Anthony Shirley, Sir Thomas Shirley, and Robert Shirley (later Sir Robert). [1] The play illustrates the trend toward extreme topicality in some works of English Renaissance drama.
The play was based on an account of the Shirleys' travels by Anthony Nixon, published in pamphlet form and titled The Three English Brothers. (The Shirley brothers had been the subjects of two previous pamphlets, in 1600 and 1601; but Nixon's work is thought to have been backed by the Shirley family.) [2] The pamphlet was entered into the Stationers' Register on 8 June 1607, and was published soon after. The play was entered into the Register less than two months later, on 29 June that year. [3] This suggests that the three playwrights may have put the drama together in the space of about six weeks.
The play was acted by Queen Anne's Men. Its 29 July Register entry states that the play was performed at the Curtain Theatre, though this information is likely inaccurate; The Queen's company is thought to have moved on to the Red Bull Theatre in 1604 or 1605. Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle , also of 1607, refers to The Travels as a Red Bull play. [4]
The Travels was printed in the same year it appeared onstage, apparently to capitalize on its popularity. The text was issued in a quarto by the bookseller John Wright. Wright published the quarto in two states: the second added an Epistle addressed to the Shirley family. The work's topicality may have won it quick success, though that success was not enduring: the 1607 quarto was the only edition of the play in the seventeenth century. (The playwrights suffered the trap of the topical approach: their material was so current that they did not yet have an end to their story. Their version was soon outdated by further events and later printed accounts.)
The triple authorship of The Travels is not in doubt; the three dramatists are credited by name on the title page, and all three signed the prefatory Epistle to the Shirleys. And it would likely have taken more than one or two writers to produce an actable play in a short period of time. Scholars have made attempts to differentiate the respective shares of the three authors. [5] Since George Wilkins is thought by some to have worked with Shakespeare on Pericles, Prince of Tyre around 1607, the question of his participation in this collaboration has drawn the attention of some Shakespeare scholars. [6] [7] Wilkins probably wrote about three-fifths of The Travels. [8]
(H. Dugdale Sykes, employing a 13-scene scheme for the play, assigned the Prologue to Day, the Epilogue to Day and Wilkins; he allotted scenes 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, and the start of 13 to Wilkins; he gave scene 3 to Day, and the remainder, scenes 1, 7, 9, 11, and the end of 13, to Day or Rowley. [9] Sykes's breakdown resembles the conclusions of other researchers.)
The Travels of the Three English Brothers belongs to a genre of traditional, popular, and somewhat naive drama of adventure and romance that was typified by the plays of Thomas Heywood and his many compatriots. (Concern with accuracy and veracity was not part of the ethos of this popular drama, and the three authors show no such concern in The Travels.) More sophisticated writers of the early Jacobean period looked down of this popular drama; Beaumont was mocking The Travels when he referred to it in Knight of the Burning Pestle, IV, i, 33-5. [10]
Beyond the sheer entertainment value of the Shirleys' story, the dramatists were eager to draw cultural contrasts between Christian England and Muslim Persia, the key locale of much of the Shirley saga. Their play stresses the violence and brutality of Persian society (especially the practice of beheading) as a blatant discriminator between Persia and England. [11] The English display their valor and resourcefulness when assaulted by violence and treachery; when an unarmed Sir Thomas Shirley is attacked by four Turks, he defends himself with rocks. The splendid English move the Persian "Sophy" (the play's version of the Shah) to verbal raptures – and inspire him to grant Christians tolerance in his dominions.
In addition to other real-life figures in the cast of characters (including the Pope), the comic Will Kempe appears in one scene. Himself noted for his travels, Kempe is shown in Venice, where he has a bawdy exchange with a Signor Harlakin (that is, harlequin) and his wife. Kempe reportedly met Sir Anthony Shirley in Rome; but whether this Venetian scene with Kempe is based on anything more substantial that the playwrights' imaginations is uncertain.
The final scene in The Travels of the Three English Brothers contains a noteworthy feature: the three Shirley brothers and their father, widely separate geographically, see and speak with each other through a magical device called a "perspective glass." This device is part of the traditional lore of magic, and occurs in other contexts: Robert Greene includes it in his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay . Though the perspective glass operates thaumaturgically rather than technologically, it nonetheless provides a striking anticipation of modern communications.
William Kempe, commonly referred to as Will Kemp, was an English actor and dancer who specialised in comic roles. He was best known as one of the original stage actors in early dramas by William Shakespeare, and roles associated with his name may have included the comic creation Falstaff. His contemporaries considered him to be a successor to the great clown of the previous generation, Richard Tarlton.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1613.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1607.
William Rowley was an English Jacobean dramatist, best known for works written in collaboration with more successful writers. His date of birth is estimated to have been c. 1585; he was buried on 11 February 1626 in the graveyard of St James's, Clerkenwell in north London.
George Wilkins was an English dramatist and pamphleteer best known for his probable collaboration with William Shakespeare on the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre. By profession he was an inn-keeper, but he was also apparently involved in criminal activities.
Sir Robert Shirley was an English traveller and adventurer, younger brother of Sir Anthony Shirley and Sir Thomas Shirley. He is notable for his help modernising and improving the Persian Safavid army according to the British model, by the request of Shah Abbas the Great. This proved to be highly successful, as from then on the Safavids proved to be an equal force to their archrival, the Ottoman Empire.
Sir Anthony Shirley (1565–1635) was an English traveller, whose imprisonment in 1603 by King James I caused the English House of Commons to assert one of its privileges—freedom of its members from arrest—in a document known as The Form of Apology and Satisfaction.
Pericles, Prince of Tyre is a Jacobean play written at least in part by William Shakespeare and included in modern editions of his collected works despite questions over its authorship, as it was not included in the First Folio. It was published in 1609 as a quarto, was not included in Shakespeare's collections of works until the third folio, and the main inspiration for the play was Gower's Confessio Amantis. Various arguments support the theory that Shakespeare was the sole author of the play, notably in DelVecchio and Hammond's Cambridge edition of the play, but modern editors generally agree that Shakespeare was responsible for almost exactly half the play — 827 lines — the main portion after scene 9 that follows the story of Pericles and Marina. Modern textual studies suggest that the first two acts, 835 lines detailing the many voyages of Pericles, were written by a collaborator, who may well have been the victualler, panderer, dramatist and pamphleteer George Wilkins. Wilkins published The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre which is the prose version of the story, and drew from Lawrence Twines' The Pattern of Painful Adventures. Pericles was one of the seventeen plays that were in print during Shakespeare's life, and was reprinted 5 times between 1609 and 1635.
A Yorkshire Tragedy is an early Jacobean era stage play, a domestic tragedy printed in 1608. The play was originally assigned to William Shakespeare, though the modern critical consensus rejects this attribution, favouring Thomas Middleton.
The Knight of the Burning Pestle is a play in five acts by Francis Beaumont, first performed at Blackfriars Theatre in 1607 and published in a quarto in 1613. It is the earliest whole parody play in English. The play is a satire on chivalric romances in general, similar to Don Quixote, and a parody of Thomas Heywood's The Four Prentices of London and Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday. It breaks the fourth wall from its outset.
John Fletcher was an English playwright. Following William Shakespeare as house playwright for the King's Men, he was among the most prolific and influential dramatists of his day; during his lifetime and in the Stuart Restoration, his fame rivalled Shakespeare's. Fletcher collaborated in writing plays, chiefly with Francis Beaumont or Philip Massinger, but also with Shakespeare and others.
Queen Anne's Men was a playing company, or troupe of actors, in Jacobean era London. In their own era they were known colloquially as the Queen's Men — as were Queen Elizabeth's Men and Queen Henrietta's Men, in theirs.
Shakespeare's plays are a canon of approximately 39 dramatic works written by the English poet, playwright, and actor William Shakespeare. The exact number of plays as well as their classifications as tragedy, history, comedy, or otherwise is a matter of scholarly debate. Shakespeare's plays are widely regarded as among the greatest in the English language and are continually performed around the world. The plays have been translated into every major living language.
Like most playwrights of his period, William Shakespeare did not always write alone. A number of his surviving plays are collaborative, or were revised by others after their original composition, although the exact number is open to debate. Some of the following attributions, such as The Two Noble Kinsmen, have well-attested contemporary documentation; others, such as Titus Andronicus, are dependent on linguistic analysis by modern scholars; recent work on computer analysis of textual style has given reason to believe that parts of some of the plays ascribed to Shakespeare are actually by other writers.
The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, Marshall of France is a Jacobean tragedy by George Chapman, a two-part play or double play first performed and published in 1608. It tells the story of Charles de Gontaut, duc de Biron, executed for treason in 1602.
The Beaumont and Fletcher folios are two large folio collections of the stage plays of John Fletcher and his collaborators. The first was issued in 1647, and the second in 1679. The two collections were important in preserving many works of English Renaissance drama.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English poet and playwright. He wrote approximately 39 plays and 154 sonnets, as well as a variety of other poems.
Thomas Creede was a printer of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, rated as "one of the best of his time." Based in London, he conducted his business under the sign of the Catherine Wheel in Thames Street from 1593 to 1600, and under the sign of the Eagle and Child in the Old Exchange from 1600 to 1617. Creede is best known for printing editions of works in English Renaissance drama, especially for ten editions of six Shakespearean plays and three works in the Shakespeare Apocrypha.
George Eld was a London printer of the Jacobean era, who produced important works of English Renaissance drama and literature, including key texts by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Middleton.
Nicholas Okes was an English printer in London of the Jacobean and Caroline eras, remembered for printing works of English Renaissance drama. He was responsible for early editions of works by many of the playwrights of the period, including William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, James Shirley, and John Ford.