[In the following essay, Nethercot discusses Udall's career and examines his major work, Ralph Roister Doister.]

One day in the early nineteenth century the Reverend Thomas Briggs attended a public auction of books and came away with what has so far turned out to be a unique copy, in black letter, of Roister Doister, which shares with Gammer Gurton's Needle the somewhat misleading designation of “the first regular English comedy.” “Regular” would seem to many historians of English drama to mean that it followed the established classical rules or principles.

Sometime between July 22, 1566, and July 22, 1567, the Register of the stationers, printers, and booksellers of London recorded a fee of fourpence as “Recevyd of Thomas hackett for his lycence for pryntinge of a play intituled Rauf Ruyster Duster, etc.” Since Briggs's copy lacked either a title page or a colophon, it was fortunate that Thomas Wilson, an old Etonian pupil of Nicholas Udall's, in the third edition of The Rule of Reason, Containing the Art of Logic (1553), had printed, as an example of the vast difference punctuation can make in the meaning of a text, the garbled letter which Ralph Roister Doister had carelessly copied from his scrivener and sent to the object of his suit, Dame Christian Custance. Wilson had stated that this letter was “taken out of an entrelude made by Nicolas Vdal.” (Udall had already written a few introductory lines for Wilson's The Art of Rhetoric in the same year.) Roister Doister then dropped out of sight until Thomas Tanner mentioned it in his Bibliotheca Britannica-Hibernica in 1748. Then it again disappeared until 1813, when Philip Bliss alluded to Tanner's reference in his re-edition of Anthony à Wood's Athenae Oxonienses. It remained for J. P. Collier in his 1825 Select Collection of Old Plays to put these fragments together and determine authorship. However, the play had already been printed in 1818 by its discoverer, Thomas Briggs, an old Etonian, who had then loyally deposited it in the Eton College library, where it still lies. The history of this playbook became so romantically famous that on April 22, 1922, a correspondent signing himself simply C. K. S. (Clement K. Shorter) wrote to The Nation and Athenaeum in London that a complete copy of the play, with the missing title page, had just been discovered behind a modern grate in a chimney corner by the unidentified owner of a country house; but a note in Notes and Queries as late as 1940 was unable to elicit any further information about this probably fictitious copy.

Nicholas Udall (the name also appears as Owdall, Owdale, Woodall, Wodale, Uvedale, Vuedale, and so on) was born in the parish of the Holy Rood, Southampton, about Christmastime in 1504, 1505, or 1506. (The records are incomplete and the references contradictory.) He got his early education at St. Mary's College (really a “school,” according to today's terminology), Winchester. (Winchester's modern archivist, Herbert Chitty, has unearthed many new facts from the records of the school and town, made use of by G. Scheurweghs in his painstaking and elaborate edition of Nicholas Udall's Roister Doister, Vol. XVI of the Bang-DeVocht Materials for the Study of the Old English Drama (Louvain' 1939). Nicholas's father, or at least a close relative, may have been Thomas Wodale (or Owdal), a notary who from 1510 to 1525 resided in or owned a tenement in Kingsgate Street near the school. The boy was entered in St. Mary's register in 1517 and remained at least until January 15, 1520. Instead of going to New College, Oxford, as Winchester boys generally did, he was admitted to Corpus Christi by its founder, Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, on June 18, 1520, although he did not take up residence until 1521. After a time he was appointed lecturer for the younger students and received a small stipend for teaching in 1526-7 and 1528-9. Finally, after being elected a Fellow, he was given his B.A. degree in 1526, as “Nicolaus Woddallys.” During his stay at the University he displayed the first sign of rebelliousness and unconventionality, for he got into trouble with the authorities because of his involvement with one Thomas Garet, who was suspected of Lutheranism, a dangerous persuasion during these early days leading to the Reformation. He left Oxford in 1529, but in 1534 declared that he had studied outside it for five years.

Sometime before May 1533, he got an appointment as a teacher in a London grammar school, possibly St. Anthony's. About Whitsuntide of that year he and his fellow-Oxonian John Leland, recently appointed King's Antiquary, composed verses and songs to be used in various pageants at Queen Anne Boleyn's coronation. Udall's first important literary and educational work, however, came in the next year: Flowers for Latin Speaking, Selected and Gathered out of Terence, and the Same Translated into English. Although this textbook was often reprinted during the sixteenth century, when Udall later “supplicated” for and received his M.A. in 1534, the University authorities for some unknown reason asked him not to translate any more Latin works into English. As might be expected, the independent young teacher paid no attention to this recommendation, and within a few years achieved a high reputation as a classical scholar and author.

In June 1534 he was made a “headmaster” at Eton College, which meant simply that he was engaged as a teacher of the humanities. Part of his job was to oversee the production of school plays, one of which was given before Thomas Cromwell himself, Cardinal Wolsey's favorite and the secretary of the Privy Council. Although Udall soon became noted for both his learning and his severity in punishment, he also revealed the kind of anomalous streak which marked so many Renaissance men of talent: his public and private lives were quite different things. He quickly fell into a morass of debts, and on November 25, 1538, was actually outlawed from the city of London until he paid them. Only after several court appearances and a final settlement (discussed by H. J. Byrom in “Some Lawsuits of Nicholas Udall” in Review of English Studies [RES,] 1935) was he able to take advantage of the 1544 Act of General Pardon. In 1537 he was appointed Vicar of Braintree, London, although he never took holy orders or even resided there. It is suspected that he paid a curate to perform his parochial duties and pocketed the rest of this income. He kept this vicarage until December 1544, although in 1541 he, along with his servant and two late scholars at the college, was suspected of being involved in a theft of silver plate and other articles from the school. While apparently not guilty of the actual theft, he was committed to the Marshalsea prison for some months and dismissed from his job. Even a long and repentant letter to Sir Thomas Wriothesley of Titchfield, one of the Secretaries of State and a friend of his friend John Leland, was unsuccessful in regaining his position. In this letter, as Scheurweghs puts it, he “humbly owns that he has led up to then an unruly life, doing his work very carelessly, neglecting study and teaching, losing his time in laziness and indulging in riotous pleasure,” including “buggery” with one of the students; and so on.

In spite of these misadventures, Udall continued his scholarly interests and in 1542 published his Apophthegms, a translation of Erasmus's Apothegmata. Although he was still heavily in debt, he lent money to his friends as well as borrowed it, and by 1545 even owned a “tenement” in the Greyfriars district in London, which he was fined for keeping in very bad repair. He was still in and out of the courts for his financial transactions, but had friends in high places and later received aid from Queen Catherine Parr. It was at her request that in 1545 he accepted the translation of Erasmus's paraphrase upon the gospel of Luke in his Paraphrases of the New Testament, and when in 1547 the Privy Council ordered that copies of Erasmus's work, in English, were to be set up in all the churches, the editing of the first volume, containing the Gospels and the Acts, was entrusted to Udall. In his preface to his translation of the Luke paraphrase he showed increasing allegiance to the Reformation in all its phases and informed the Queen of his desire to translate into English all the best Latin works conducive to the New Learning so that they could be brought within the range of the ordinary reader. Because of these intentions he was granted patent letters by the Lord Chancellor to print, in 1550, his translation of Peter Martyr's Tractatio de Sacramento Eucharistiae and other works. For these educational and cultural contributions he was highly praised by leaders such as John Bale (bishop, militant Protestant reformer, and author of several morality and mystery plays), and was commonly designated as “generous,” or “gentleman,” in official documents.

Udall was still living in London in 1550. By June 1552 his income had considerably improved, but his financial troubles made him no stranger to the civil courts, whose records preserve a great deal of what is known of his private affairs. At the end of 1551 he was appointed a prebendary of the Royal Chapter of St. George within Windsor Castle and moved to Windsor, but apparently did not work too hard to earn his special stipend by preaching. Nevertheless, in March 1553 he was made rector of Calborne, Newport, on the Isle of Wight, but probably never went there. Back in London by the Easter Term of 1554, he was once more arrested for not paying for a ring he had acquired several years before. Yet on December 16, 1555, he was made a master at St. Peter's Grammar School (better known unofficially as Westminster School), which was affiliated with the Abbey. A “Nicholas Yevedale” was buried in St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, on December 23, 1556.

As an author Udall's interests were by no means confined to classical translations and religious works. Bishop Bale, in his important Scriptorum Illustrium Majoris Britanniae … Catalogus, or Catalogue of Illustrious Writers of Great Britain (1557), listed as one of the items in Udall's bibliography: “Comoedias plures, Lib. I.” This volume of “Several Comedies” has never been discovered, but many traces of Udall's interest in the drama and in theatrical performances remain. He directed school plays at Eton and many scholars, such as Willi Bang, Leicester Bradner, Laurie Magnus, A. R. Moon, W. H. Williams, and E. K. Chambers, attribute to him many anonymous plays, such as Placidas, Jacob and Esau, Jack Juggeler, Respublica, and Thersites. Jules E. Bernard, Jr., in The Prosody of the Tudor Interlude (Yale Studies in English, 1939), has found what he regards as metrical support for Udall's authorship of Respublica and Jack Juggeler, but not for Thersites. It is known, too, that Udall wrote a play entitled Ezekias (i.e., Hezekiah, obviously not a comedy) and that it was performed before Queen Elizabeth on her visit to Cambridge University in 1564. But the play is not extant. During the reign of the violently Roman Catholic Bloody Mary, with whom he managed to stay on friendly terms in spite of his Erasmian Protestantism (see William L. Edgerton, “The Apostasy of Nicholas Udall,” Notes & Queries, [NQ,] 1950), Udall established a connection with the court theater. Payments for “certen plaies made by Nichols vdall” were made by the Clerk of the Revels between December 13, 1554, and January 6, 1555, and the Master of the Revels was ordered by the Queen to “delyuer or cause to be delyuered to the said vdall … soche apperel for his Auctors as he shall thinke necessarye and requisite for the furnishing and condigne setting forth of his Devises before vs and soche as may be semely to be shewid in our Royall presens,” and to continue this coöperation “from tyme to tyme. …” Scheurweghs, however, thinks that these orders do not prove any permanent appointment with the court theater and certainly do not show any clear association with the court masques.

The only extant play, therefore, that can be confidently assigned to Udall is Roister Doister. This comedy in its simple, almost naive, indigenous English features might not at first seem to have emanated from a playwright with such a life and background. But classical and humanistic elements, clearly present, could easily have come from this quill. Although early students of the play assigned it to Udall's Eton period, it is now generally assigned to the last years of his life. From topical references in the play itself, Scheurweghs concludes that it must have been written between 1545 and 1552. He prefers the later date because of the final prayer. He believes the prayer was originally addressed to Edward VI, but that pronouns were changed to fit Mary, during whose reign Udall died. (See also William Peery, “The Prayer for the Queen in Roister Doister,” University of Texas Studies in English, [UTSE,] 1948, and Edgerton, op. cit.) The play was apparently composed as a Christmas comedy for the boys at some London school. (Herbert T. Webster in “Ralph Roister Doister and the Little Eyases,” NQ, 1951, discusses several episodes which “seem to be addressed to a childhood world which had been rarely invoked in Udall's time.”)

For his plot Udall obviously drew on several classical comedies which would have been familiar to his audience, both youthful and adult: the general “braggart soldier” motif from Plautus's Miles Gloriosus; the story of Roister Doister's wooing from Terence's Eunuchus; and perhaps the idea of imagining oneself to be dead from Terence's Phormio. The parody of the burial service was probably suggested by the poem “On the Death of the Duke of Suffolk” on May 3, 1450, or perhaps some intermediate imitation of this poem by John Skelton, Alexander Barclay, or Erasmus. Edwin S. Miller discusses the liturgical aspects of the scene in “Roister Doister's Funeralls” (Studies in Philology, [SP,] 1946) and suggests that its satirical or nonsatirical tone would depend on the date; that is, on whether the Roman liturgy was or was not in favor. In From “Mankind” to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England (Harvard, 1962), D. M. Bevington concludes that the recurrence of certain classical structural elements in early Tudor drama, including courtly and humanistic plays performed by schoolboys and college students as in Roister Doister, goes to prove that “the elite never lost contact with the native stage.” Scheurweghs points out that, although the setting has the complete unity of place of classical comedy, the action covers almost three days and thus stretches the unity of time. He also believes that Udall did not intend his play to be divided into scenes because no regular principle of scene division seems to be followed. He attributes the present state of the text, with the two songs relegated to a sort of appendix, to the surmised fact that they existed in separate leaflet form and that the whole play had been handled freely in manuscript form by choirmasters, stage directors, and copyists before being finally turned over to a rather incompetent printer after Udall's death.

Aspects of the play which would give it an appeal to more mature and sophisticated audiences have also been noted. In “The Elizabethan Dramatic Parasite” (SP, 1935) E. P. Vandiver has maintained that the character type which began with Merrygreek was essentially a composite of the classical parasite, the Vice of the morality plays, the Italian parasite of the commedia erudita and the commedia dell'arte, and the parasite of the Teutonic school-drama, in which he was “regarded as a very opprobrious character.” In “Satirical Parody in Roister Doister: A Reinterpretation” (SP, 1964) G. W. Plumstead has directed attention to another overlooked dimension of the play: its parody of the chivalric love ethic of humility, courtesy, and “gentilesse,” which makes the principal characters much funnier than mere imitations of the stock braggart soldier, the mistress, and the parasite of Roman comedy. Finally, in “Ralph Roister Doister: Miles vs. Clericus” (NQ, 1960) Nan Cooke Carpenter has related the situation to the medieval debate, the play being a sort of dramatization of the question of who is the ideal lover—the soldier or the scholar—and deciding it in favor of neither, but giving the answer to a member of the rising wealthy merchant class.

Of the several modern reprints of the play, the text of Ewald Flügel in C. M. Gayley's Representative English Comedies has been generally followed, even to the extent of beginning a new line for each speech. In the original, however, the speeches, if short or irregular in length, were run along on the same line until a rhyming word was reached (the prosodic form), after starting with a limping rhyme royal, and becoming in general a rough Alexandrine or iambic hexameter.