SOURCE: Pittenger, Elizabeth. “‘To Serve the Queere’: Nicholas Udall, Master of Revels.” In Queering the Renaissance, edited by Jonathan Goldberg, pp. 162-89. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Pittenger examines material connected with Udall and attempts to gain insight into his suspected relationships with his pupils.]

Thence for my voice, I must (no choice)
Away of forse, like posting horse,
For sundrie men, had plagards then,
          such childe to take:
The better brest, the lesser rest,
To serve the Queere, now there now heere,
For time so spent, I may repent,
          and sorrow make.
                              …
From Paules I went, to Eaton sent,
To learne streight waies, the latin phraies,
Where fiftie three, stripes given to mee,
          at once I had:
For fault but small, or none at all,
It came to pas, thus beat I was,
See Udall see, the mercie of thee,
          to me poore lad.(1)

The Authors life of his owne penning,” written by Thomas Tusser for the introduction to his Fiue hundred pointes of good Husbandrie (1573), is a generic example of autobiographical writing that recalls the experiences of a schoolboy.² The conventional topics—being selected for the choir (“Queere”), going on from Petty school to higher forms (St. Paul's and Eton), the lessons in grammar (“the latin phraies”) and discipline (“fiftie three stripes”)—convey the boy's fraught relation to school and to his master, and go well beyond merely playing on the topos of “the best schoolmaster and the greatest beater.” Moreover, Fiue hundred pointes was reprinted in nearly twenty editions up to 1638; it thereby enhanced and perpetuated the reputation of Tusser's teacher, Nicholas Udall, as a fierce flogger.³ Udall (1504-56) was headmaster of Eton from 1534 until his dismissal in 1541. The obviously lasting impression he made on Tusser (and, presumably, on other pupils as well), is not my main concern in this essay.⁴ Rather, I juxtapose the two stanzas from Tusser's poem in order to raise questions about the relation of the eruptive violence of the pedagogic scene to the quiet eroticism of the choice of boys “to serve the Queere.” Illegitimate, anachronistic, irresponsible as it might be, if we hear a pun on “queer,” it draws attention to the ways in which the lines acknowledge and displace the attractiveness of boys, encouraging us to treat with suspicion the assertion that men's interest in boys is due to their capacity to sing, “the better brest, the lesser rest.” After all, it's hard to imagine what would happen in choir practice to provoke so much remorse: “For time so spent, I may repent, / and sorrow make.” Or why being pressed into “Queere” service—“Thence for my voice, I must (no choice)”—registers simultaneously pride and shame, the need to be apologetic though victimized. In the pages that follow, I will be pursuing this nexus of guilt, repentance, and punishment in much of the material connected to Nicholas Udall. Through him, I will be exploring the relationship that Tusser's poem also displays: the relationship between what may and may not be said and the registers for occluding and acknowledging male-male desire.

MASTER OF REVELS

To begin, I turn to a curriculum vitae of sorts compiled by John S. Farmer, in his edition of Udall's comedy Ralph Roister Doister (1552): “Nicholas Udall … was a man of many parts in his time—public scholar, University man, heretic, recanter, Latin versifier, dictionary maker, potential monk, schoolmaster, suspect, Marshalsea man, theological translator and author, prebend, playwright, and Director of the Revels.”⁵ Amid the predictable and largely commendable activities of a Tudor humanist, two roles stand out: “suspect” and “Marshalsea man,” oblique references to some crime or infraction beyond those that are named, “heretic” and “recanter.”⁶ Though Udall spent much time in litigation over debt and other financial problems, the crime Farmer does not name is the incident that brought Udall to the attention of the Privy Council. On March 14, 1541, one day after Thomas Cheyney confessed to robbing articles of silver, the record reads:

Nic. Vuedale, Schoolmaster of Eton, beying sent for as suspect to be of councail of a robbery lately commited at Eton by Thomas Cheyney, John Hoorde, Scolers of the sayd scole, and … Gregory, seruant to the said scolemaster, and hauing certain interrogatoryes ministred vnto hym, toching the sayd fact and other felonious trespasses, wherof he was suspected, did confesse that he did commit buggery with the said cheney, sundry times heretofore, and of late the vjth day of this present moneth in the present yere at London, whervpon he was commited to the marshalsey.⁷

The record seems to leave little doubt: Udall confessed to committing buggery with his pupil, Thomas Cheyney, several times in the past and as recently as a week before the “interrogatoryes.” Immediately following, Udall was dismissed as headmaster of Eton and committed to the Marshalsea prison. While this would seem to indicate his guilt, the resolution of the case is not that clear. Udall's punishment is a rather mild one considering that 25 Henry VIII c. 6 made the crime of buggery a felony punishable by death.⁸ Indeed, as many scholars remark, the case hardly marked Udall's downfall, and in the decade following he enjoyed a distinguished career, prominent publications, financial rewards, and even favor at court.

The perplexing nature of the case, even as it is represented in the records of the Privy Council, asks us to start again and raise the most basic kinds of questions: what crime, if any, was committed? What relations obtain between the charges of burglary, debauchery, and buggery in the Privy Council record? How might these relate to the facts of the case, but also to the various representations of them that can be found in Udall's writing? Or indeed, in the explanations offered by modern scholars?

In his monograph on Udall, William Edgerton treats the case as a paradox.⁹ He argues that there would be no doubt about the charges if Udall had disappeared from the map. But Udall went on to thrive, an oddity, according to Edgerton, given the “unsavory character” of the crime (38). Edgerton draws the “obvious conclusion” that Udall had powerful friends at court and on the Privy Council, who “kept his offenses and trial secret.” Thomas Wriothesley, perhaps his patron, sat on the Privy Council and heard Udall's case. The situation was even more tangled because the Eton boy, Thomas Cheyney, was a relative by marriage to Wriothesley; thus there were other motivations for keeping the matter hushed. Plausible as this is, however, it will not explain why others in power would have had an interest in Udall. Nor will it account for the fact that even before the trial Udall's writing harps on being falsely accused and damaged by rumor.¹⁰

Udall's associations with well-connected men might explain why his career was left undamaged, but Edgerton argues that the “theory … leaves unexplained not only the Council's leaning over backward later to befriend Udall, but also why, if it was so anxious to keep the matter secret, it allowed his case to become a matter of record in the first place. Historians are only too aware that the Privy Council included in the register only matters it felt like recording” (38-39). Though it is not clear to me what Edgerton wants to claim about Udall's innocence or guilt, his language conveys an insinuating gesture: with the image of the Privy Council bending over backwards to help a sodomite out and then not too anxious about keeping the matter secret, Edgerton places both Udall and his Privy friends in compromising positions. Yet he continues oddly, coyly, to hedge “if the offense had really been buggery.”

Edgerton throws up his hands and opts for an answer that would make a room of editors proud: “There is one solution, although it means cutting the Gordian knot, and that is to suppose that an error was made in recording Udall's confession in the register” (39). He cites an article by E. R. Adair, who argues that the record is full of mistakes.¹¹ The Clerk of the Council, William Paget, took rough notes and later transcribed them. His handwriting starts to deteriorate midway through the case. Thus “buggery” was accidentally confused with “burglary,” which, Edgerton reiterates, are near enough orthographically to be mistaken (40). What does it mean that textual error can be used to explain (away) the problems raised by this case, that guilt is transferred from records that are supposed to be accurate to the “corruption” of a recorder, whose handwriting “deteriorates”?¹² And even if we entertain the textual emendation as a possibility, the correction still leaves questions unanswered; for how then do we understand the confession of repeated theft: “he did commit [burglary] with the said cheney, sundry times heretofore, and of late the vjth day of this present moneth in the present yere at London”?

One answer might be to note the way in which the questions surrounding Udall may belong to a more generalizable set of reactions stirred by legal cases that create the desire to know what really happened precisely because that knowledge is obscured or inaccessible. To operate within the problematic of these questions requires a constant negotiation of both historical and interpretive assumptions, a negotiation complicated in this case by sexual politics since the desire for evidence, both legal and historical, is exacerbated by the nature of the charges: the case insinuates but never openly pronounces that Udall was a pedagogue turned pederast. It suggests that any way of handling these oblique cases will have to be attentive to not only the circuitousness of the material but also the multiple ways that the material can and has been interpreted. Here, I would turn to the work of two readers of Renaissance “homosexuality,” Alan Bray and Jonathan Goldberg.¹³ Though they spend little if any time on Udall, I think they contribute the most to our historical and, in different ways, theoretical understanding of the elusive category of sodomy.

Alan Bray's account of the incident occurs during his sketch of the social structures that framed sodomy—households, pedagogy, prostitution, and theater.¹⁴ He presents “evidence that homosexuality was institutionalised” in the educational system and that the “limited effect which complaints about this had” reveals how “deep-rooted the institution was.”¹⁵ This explanation accounts for why Udall seems to have escaped unscathed and goes much farther in “cutting the Gordian knot” than Edgerton's textual fudging. To paraphrase Bray, as long as hierarchic and patriarchal institutions surrounded sodomy, and as long as it didn't disturb the peace, there was little impetus to pursue it as a crime (76-77). Strangely enough, there may be something to that laughable emendation: there is no buggery until there's burglary in the sense that sodomy is rarely prosecuted on its own but follows in the wake of other crimes, to which it's added or which it symbolizes.¹⁶

Bray's analysis of Udall is brief, less than a paragraph, yet he draws a powerful conclusion from the case: “it is indicative of the degree to which homosexuality was effectively tolerated in the educational system” (52). But the word “tolerance” is tricky since what he means is a reluctance to recognize, what he calls “sluggishness” later (75-76). Bray's move to attribute “tolerance” signals the framework of his own historically determined position in a post-Stonewall generation. Slippages resembling this one are simultaneously productive and damaging for the case Bray makes. For instance, notice that the particular way he words his account of Udall actually moves it away from the institutionalized context of pedagogy: “In 1541 Nicholas Udall, who was headmaster of Eton at the time, was involved in a scandal because of the homosexual relationship he had had with one of his former pupils. The events are somewhat mysterious, but the affair seems to have come to light during an investigation by the Privy Council into the theft of some school plate in which the boy had been involved” (52; emphasis added). He distances Udall's contact with the boy, a “former” pupil whom the master “had had” an interest in. Bray's account clashes with the Privy Council records, which make it clear that the boy was currently a pupil and the “relationship” ongoing. More important, since the Privy Council may not be the final word on the case, Bray's description clashes with his own account of “homosexuality.” He wants to hold that pederastic relations occurred in school yet he simultaneously fades out the image of a headmaster buggering a pupil by portraying a more familiar scenario: the “somewhat mysterious” “events” of the “affair” involve the “scandal” of a “homosexual relationship.” I hope I'm not alone in thinking that this sounds much more like the case of Oscar Wilde than it does that of an early sixteenth-century humanist.

The extent to which Bray operates out of a particular modern configuration is felt in the little ways he skews evidence, which are unavoidable and not necessarily problematic, except as they point to something more significant: Renaissance “homosexuality” is constructed on a model particular to the twentieth century. Two interconnected paradigms are deployed: Bray's historical method alternates between cruising and outing, both involving larger assumptions. He brings them together in his advice to others who might embark on the same itinerary: “In such circumstances historians should be watchful for signs, however difficult to detect, that for someone involved in a homosexual relationship the nature of that relationship might not have been as obvious to him as it is to them” (68). But the closet this presupposes is curious: at some level he has to put them there first, though he might argue that you don't always need an id to get in.¹⁷ The individuals who have been cruised and/or outed by Bray are “practically unconscious” that they are “involved in a homosexual relationship.”¹⁸ Even though Bray's essay on friendship in this volume attempts to claim the “open path” between the sodomite and male friend, he emphatically remains in the closeted world, frequently using the language of shadow and darkness to indicate male intimacy: “the shadows on the edge of social life” (40), “that hidden road” (47), “a darker interpretation” (51), and so on.

My point is not to Bray bash but to show, as others have, that the closet model is collapsible. More important, that to place “homosexuality as the dark secret at the heart of the symbolic world” (23) is also to place “sexuality” there, a problematic move given recent historical critiques of universalism and feminist critiques of essentialism and identity. The glitches in Bray's work raise two historical and theoretical issues, both centered on the concept of misrecognition: on the one hand there's the claim that one can see clearly through the misrecognitions of the early modern subject to a real sexual identity, a displacement that is itself a misrecognition. On the other hand, there's the claim that one can see clearly through the misrecognitions of the evidence to a real sexual practice.

The problem of identity, whether identity politics or essentialism, is too large to go into for the simple point I want to make: indeed, that it is a problem in Bray's work has already been pointed out by Goldberg in his “Familiar Letters.” To review briefly, Goldberg argues that Bray's account of Renaissance “homosexuality” presupposes a “modern ‘deployment of sexuality’ (in Foucault's term)” that “the deepest secret of the self is its sexuality” (113). Goldberg radicalizes Bray's and other historicist readings by arguing that “there were no homosexuals in Renaissance England” (113). Rather, addressing homosexual acts, he argues: “Such acts do not prove their actors homosexual; likewise, texts like … [Spenser's] Januarye eclogue (or Barnfield's classical pastorals) will never tell us whether their authors slept with boys. But they may, in the very exorbitancy that I have been reading, tell us about the ‘place’ of homosexuality in Renaissance England; not least if, as Bray contends, it had no place, was not a site of recognition of sexual identity” (114). In fact, as Goldberg goes on to point out about Bray's argument, recognition is systematically blocked by the widespread circulation of stigmatized stereotypes that fostered an effective dissociation (“disconnection,” “cleavage,” “disparity” 67-68) of the “monstrous” image of a sodomite from the “everyday” practices that involved sexual acts with other men or boys. But this and Goldberg's emphasis on texts, on representation, leads us to the second problem of misrecognition. In other words, the stereotypes work to enable the very practices they mock or condemn because they provide the mechanism for systematic misrecognition, “a mechanism that required a certain amount of self-delusion” (66). However, because Bray valorizes “evidence” as traces of what really happened, what they really did, he slights most forms of representation, textual and cultural, as factually worthless, as exaggerations, “downright distortions,” and “intensely frustrating.”¹⁹ Perhaps the conflict becomes clearer if we consider the double standard Bray applies to literary texts. For example, he cites John Marston frequently as one of the many satirists who built and perpetuated the distorted image of “the sodomite.” Yet he reads other passages characterizing pederastic pedants at face value, as reflections and evidence of the real practices between masters and pupils.²⁰ The concept of misrecognition that he deploys (without using the term) does not presuppose a stable distinction between actual reality and mere representation, world and text; rather it presupposes that representation enables the world to go on as it does precisely because of the failure to translate text to world. And here I am using the language of Goldberg, who makes this argument elegantly:

It has become commonplace in certain critical practices that are called “new historicist” to argue that “love is not love” or that pastoral otium is really negotium. This essay shares with such work the desire to read texts into the world. But in describing the trick mirror that the Shepheardes Calender holds up to the world … it seems to me important not to allegorize and thematize the text so entirely that its sole function is to read the world at the expense of the text, to decide beforehand that the world is real and that the only reality that a text might have would be its ability to translate the world in terms that need to be translated back into the social, historical, or political.

(118)

Rather than engaging in a pursuit of sodomy, the untranslatable hidden behind the evidence, Goldberg pursues the “teasing play between revelation and reveiling” that “has the structure of the open secret” (115).²¹ In refusing to privilege negotium over otium, in refusing the distinction, he entertains what he implies is an erotics of the letter. And this is to lead us out of the closet that encloses Bray and frustrates the political and sexual investments of his project. Goldberg's notion of the complicities of an open secret better accounts for the case of Udall even though it may put into play problems similar to those of Bray's model. But before I pursue that point, I would turn from the supposed hard evidence of the Privy Council to the world of letters.

INDICTMENTS: DOUBTFUL LETTERS

Because interpretations of the case raise doubts about the nature of the charges and about the conclusion that Udall actually committed buggery, scholars turn to another piece of evidence that seems to reflect Udall's own point of view, a letter he wrote shortly after his dismissal in which he represents himself in need of pardon from the “singular good master” he addresses.²² More than a dozen paragraphs long, the letter is a highly crafted piece of writing, maneuvering through appropriate topoi and anecdotes, peppered with Latin and Greek citations from highly regarded authors, and anchored by various expedient tropological figures.²³ The overall aim seems clear: it is a mea culpa performance that moves from confession to ask for pardon by promising to amend. But the letter doesn't follow this straightforward trajectory and instead introduces, in its many digressions, paths leading away from its purported destination.

For instance, though the presumption of the address is a profession of guilt, the letter never delivers a confession. Udall hedges: “I trust ye shall finde that this your correpcion shallbee a sufficient scourge to make me, during my lif, more wise and more ware utterly for ever to eschewe and avoid all kindes of all maner of excesses and abuses that have been reported to reigne in me” (3; emphasis added). Udall never actually confesses to anything in particular; furthermore, he takes it all back by insisting that the allegations are precisely that, rumor, report, talk and nothing more.

He combines his bracketed confessions with equally dubious promises to mend his ways: “if ever I shallbee found again to offend in any suche kind transgressions as at this tyme hath provoked and accended your indignacion against me, I shall not oonly bee myn own judge to bee accoumpted for ever moste unworthie the favor and good will either of your maistership or of any other honest frend, but also to bee moste extremely punished to theensample of all others” (3; emphasis added). The initial qualification not only secretes the matter of his initial guilt, but it also deviously dares to be caught again and then takes the high moral ground of remorse and promised self-punishment.

But the real trick to the letter is the way he implicates his master, indicts him in the complicities of the open secret. For example, he models the language of his master's disdain on that of penetration:

Noo siknes, noo losse of worldly goodes, none ympresonyng, noo tormentes, no death, noo kind of other mysfortune could have persed my herte, or made in it soo deepe a wound as hath this your displeasure, whiche wound, if it might please your goodnes with the salve of your mercifull compassion to bryng for this oon tyme ad cicatricem, ye should not neede in all your life again to feare ne quand mea culpa vitioque recrudesecret [lest my fault and vice take root again].

(3; emphasis added)

In this economy of displeasure, one that provides undisguised rhetorical pleasure, for the master to withhold pardon is for him to become a partner in crime.²⁴ But yielding pardon, the response Udall wants and gets, means the master loses as well, not only because he gives in; in the circuitous language of the letter, for the crimes to be forgiven they cannot be forgotten. Indeed, to overlook them is to reinscribe them:

All vices of which I have been noted or to your Maistership accused, being oons by the rootes extirped, and in their places the contrary vertues with counstaunt purpose of good contynuance in the same depely planted, I trust ye wold become better maister unto me aftir myn emendyng and reformacion then if I had never in suche wise transgressed.

(4; emphasis added)

Udall sticks his master between a rock and a hard place. The language of piercing, wounds, and insemination registers sodomitical penetration that the master will further both by withholding his pardon and by delivering it. The complicities of the open secret force the master to entertain the vices of his servant in order to become a better master, the displeasure at the prodigal son acknowledged as an instrument for greater pleasure. The resonance of the scenario with more familiar practices of mastery comes from its heavy-handed moralized and scripted quality. The letter parades the prodigality of rhetorical moves available to the language of castigation:

Accepte this myn honest chaunge from vice to vertue, from prodigalitee to frugall livyng, from negligence of teachyng to assiduitee, from playe to studie, from lightnes to gravitee … persuade yourself that the same repentaunce shall still remein within my brest as a contynuall spurre or thorne to pricke and to quicken me to goodnes from tyme to tyme as often as neede shall require.

(7; emphasis added)

The letter is signed, “Your most bounden oratour and servaunte, Nicolas Udall,” and it comes, as he claims, “from the botom of my herte” (7).

If the bounds of the letter can be extended to include Udall's overall position as a humanist, both teacher and writer, vis-à-vis influential members of Tudor society, the proper relation between master and servant appears to be similar to an improper, sodomitical one. Whether patron, pedagogue, or pater, the rules apply: straight service is marked by queerer ways. The complicity, discussed by Bray in his “Signs of Male Friendship,” points to “that network of subtle bonds amongst influential patrons and their clients, suitors, and friends at court … A concept so necessary to social life was far removed from the ‘uncivil’ image of the sodomite, yet there was still between them a surprising affinity, as in some respects they occupied a similar terrain” (42). And later he asks impatiently, “What distinguished this corruption from the normal workings of friendship? What distinguished, in effect, the bribes of the one from the flow of gifts and the ready use of influence of the other?” (56). Udall's need to curry favor, throughout his career but especially at times of crisis, kept him busy dangling a sense of secrecy about what was really at the bottom of his heart. The duplicity of his every move was felt so strongly that he was also accused of being a “timeserver,” that is, a flatterer, sycophant, parasite, changing sails at every wind.²⁵ Of course it has to be pointed out that if you consider the reigns of Henry VIII through Mary, Udall was navigating in turbulent and treacherous waters.

It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that the letter of pardon brackets access to evidence of sodomy and that if Udall plays at anything he plays at (not) playing the sodomite.²⁶ The letter, with its rhetorical tricks, multilinguistic play, and exemplary anecdotes, resists all the modes it seems to engage: confession, sincerity, penance; it leaves little that can be traced as evidence. It doesn't deliver. However, if as Edgerton suggests, Udall's career had ended here, we wouldn't have to search far to find ways to wrap up the case. We might read the circumlocutions of the letter as testimony to “things fearful to name” and to the unspoken recognition of the pedant tutor's vice. However, just the opposite is the case: the very qualities of Udall's writing that might deliver this evidence are the same ones acknowledged as exemplary. More than ten years after Udall's dismissal, his former student Thomas Wilson (1523-81), in the third edition of his well-known handbook for logic, Rule of Reason (1553), singles out his master's writing as an example of writing letters that never seem to mean what they say. Wilson, that is, offers the letter for its exemplary dissimulation. Not the letter of remorse, to be sure, but another prevaricating text from Udall's hand, a literary love letter taken from Udall's comedy, Ralph Roister Doister. Two versions of a letter with nearly identical words yet nearly opposite meaning are reproduced as an “example of soche doubtful writing, whiche by reason of poincting maie haue double sense, and contrarie meaning, taken out of an entrelude made by Nicolas Vdal.”²⁷ Wilson's textbook enjoyed a wide circulation; thus the mastery of “ambiguitie,” imitated by later writers, most notably in the mechanicals' play of A Midsummer Night's Dream, was taught in the schools through the example of Udall's circumlocutions; his place as pedagogical master is restored by the techniques that he used to (not) play the pederast and by the devotion of Thomas Wilson, another Eton boy.²⁸ The master's desire is ultimately delivered by the pages of one of his boys.²⁹

Thomas Wilson would testify on his behalf in another court case a few years after his master's dismissal.³⁰ Though much is known about Wilson's career and rise to power under Elizabeth, his relation to Udall puzzles scholars as much as the Privy Council record does. A. W. Reed concludes that “the association of the two men” that his study documents “argues an attitude on Wilson's part towards his old master that is not exactly reconciled with the charge alleged in the Acts of the Privy Council” (283). Reed may wish to insinuate that the disparity signals Udall's innocence; Bray would see in this “cleavage” yet another instance of “the sheer size of the mental adjustment they required” (67). But we might argue, along with Goldberg, that the “dehiscence” marks the complicities of an open secret, complicities between a pupil and his master all the more motivated in this instance since they are inscribed in the very same pedagogical space that brought Udall before the Council. When Udall was dismissed, Wilson chose to leave Eton with his master.³¹

The recognition that Udall was an exemplar for double and doubtful writing frustrates the project of “indicting” his letters in the sense of making public accusations and prosecuting formal charges. But “indict” has another sense, from Norman French, enditer, to dictate, a sense captured by an early Tudor spelling “endite.” Letters are also “endited,” dictated, composed, produced publicly. And it is in this sense that the letter of “ambiguitie” is produced in Udall's play.

The letter trick cited in Wilson's handbook involves two scenes of reading a love token penned by Ralph Roister Doister, a braggart soldier, and sent to Dame Christian Custance, a widow betrothed to Gawain Goodluck, whose absence leaves her open to advances. In what might be called a dalliance of the letter, she refuses to read it herself, which allows it to be deferred and eventually mishandled. The letter is delivered, in its entirety, not once but twice, in the course of the play (3.4.36-67 and 3.5.49-84).³² The two versions read are meant to be exact opposites—the one a love letter intended to persuade Dame Custance to marry Roister Doister and the other an insulting, misogynist diatribe. The trick of the letter lies in its supposed punctuation. In the first reading, performed by the mischievous Matthew Merrygreek, Roister Doister's “parasite,” it is “mispointed,” mispunctuated so that its lines will be misunderstood by Custance as a scathing attack. Implicit in the double reading is the sense that the repetition of the letter yields different results, that the effects of the letter depend upon its reader and listener, including the possibility that the letter might be miscarried and mistaken.

When the letter backfires, Roister Doister takes his complaint to the source, the Scrivener, whom he thinks to be at fault. The discussion of the letter (3.5) by Roister Doister, Merrygreek, and the Scrivener reflects upon the process of writing and it articulates a theory (or possibly theories) of writing:

ROISTER Doister:
I say the letter thou madest me was not good.
SCRIVENER:
Then did ye wrong copy it, of likelihood.
ROISTER Doister:
Yes, out of thy copy word for word I it wrote.
SCRIVENER:
Then was it as ye prayed to have it, I wot,
But in reading and pointing there was made some fault.
…
[The Scrivener recites the letter.]
SCRIVENER:
Now sir, what default can ye find in this letter?
ROISTER Doister:
Of truth, in my mind, there can not be a better.
SCRIVENER:
Then was the fault in reading and not in writing;
No, nor, I daresay, in the form of enditing.
But who read this letter, that it soundeth so nought?

(3.5.35-39, 84-88)

From the Scrivener's point of view, the letter has the kind of stability one might associate with a printed copy, an exact replica. The Scrivener, like Speed reading in Two Gentlemen of Verona, asserts that the letter's “in print,” exact as it was in his copy book and could not be mistaken, unless it were corrupted in its delivery.³³ The Scrivener stands his ground on the letter's purity by staking everything on the exact reproduction of the original. He doesn't entertain the possibility that the very copy he wishes to secure might already be in question. We can see this if we ask where the letter originates and then factor in the many lines of transmission and the ambiguity these introduce. Roister Doister copies the letter so that it seems to be in his own hand. And this is confirmed by the exchange immediately following Merrygreek's misrepresentation:

ROISTER Doister:
Oh, I would I had him here, the which I did it endite!
MERRYGREEK:
Why, ye made it yourself, ye told me, by this light!
ROISTER Doister:
Yea, I meant I wrote it mine own self yesternight.
DAME Custance:
Iwis, sir, I would not have sent you such a mock!
ROISTER Doister:
Ye may so take it, but I meant it not so, by Cock!

(3.4.76-80)

It appears that however the letter was “endited,” dictated, or composed, Roister Doister manually imitates a version in a copy book, as though he were in a marginal state of literacy with the manual dexterity to wield a pen but not the literacy to write out or make up his own speech. This insinuation is made by the Scrivener, who tells Roister Doister to look “on your own fist” (3.5.43).

But when the Scrivener says there was no fault in the “enditing,” which scene of writing is meant? Roister Doister's copying or his own provision of the letter? The Scrivener seems to be the source of the original letter, which he apparently markets for prospective suitors. This is implied by Roister Doister's accusation: “Did you not make me a letter, brother?” To which the Scrivener responds, “Pay the like hire, I will make you such another!” (3.5.23-24). The letter in its original form was intended to be duplicated and intended for the duplicity of being signed by another. Though this might simplify the chain of transmission, it actually complicates the notion of both the original and the error. Roister Doister's love letter is not proper to him and he has no more access to its proper meaning than did Merrygreek or Custance (nor the Scrivener for that matter). So even though Merrygreek is blamed for the miscarriage of the letter, the potential for error in Roister Doister's imitation also is in play. Merrygreek suggests as much when he shows a suspicious interest as his master hands the letter to Madge Mumblecrust (Dame Custance's old nurse) to deliver:

MADGE:
It shall be done.
MERRYGREEK:
                                                            Who made it?
ROISTER Doister:
                                                                                                              I wrote it each whit.
MERRYGREEK:
Then needs it no mending?
ROISTER Doister:
                                                                                          No, no.
MERRYGREEK:
                                                                                                    No, I know your wit.
…
MERRYGREEK:
But are you sure that your letter is well enough?
ROISTER Doister:
I wrote it myself!

(1.4.127-28, 139-40)

These suspicions ramify to the two versions of the letter delivered in the play (the two letters printed in Wilson's guide to “ambiguitie”). We might suppose that the two versions correspond to two distinct letters, that is, to two different pages:

SCRIVENER:
How say you, is this mine original or no?
ROISTER Doister:
The selfsame that I wrote out of, so mote I go!
SCRIVENER:
Look you on your own fist, and I will look on this,
And let this man be judge whether I read amiss.

(3.5.41-44)

Although Roister Doister's page is clearly represented as distinct from the page in the Scrivener's copy book, the exchange between the parties nearly confuses the two. Although the printed texts of the two letters point them differently, there is nothing in this exchange to suggest that Roister Doister's copy and the Scrivener's are so differentiated. Rather, they appear to be “the selfsame,” transferable; these copies always differ from themselves, and from the start. The “two” letters are there at once; the “selfsame” original letter is never one and the same; the same page read in two different scenes delivers two different letters. The letter is originally a duplicate and duplicitous. The letter Merrygreek (mis)delivers inhabits the same space as the “proper” letter.

Merrygreek reads according to rhymed line endings, following the dominant pattern of speech in the play. The Scrivener reads according to the idea of proper pointing, to a notion of inflection registered on the page by graphic marks and spacing. It is impossible to tell, however, which copy of the letter the Scrivener reads “properly,” easier to suppose that both copies are unpointed, unmarked, unpunctuated, that each contains the other. True to his character type, Merrygreek delivers a letter that has a parasitical relation to the proper original, and he admits that he is at fault. But this verdict covers over the fact that the letter is duplicitous from the beginning. If the page that Merrygreek reads is graphically unpointed, it's hard to resist claiming that Merrygreek makes no mistake in pointing, for he delivers the letter according to the strong marker of rhymed couplets; to read against these would violate deeply ingrained formal and poetic rules as well as the “normative” speech of the characters in the play. In order to deliver the “proper” scribal letter, Merrygreek would have to step out of character, off of the stage and into the text of the Scrivener's letter as represented in its pointed printing. Instead he delivers a letter proper to a parasite, staying within the lines of his character type and within the line endings of the play.

There are other reasons to think that Merrygreek's “mistaken” reading is not in error. First, he delivers the “unconscious” of the letter, the strongly misogynist undercurrent that is rendered invisible by the (perhaps imaginary) graphic marks. This “unconscious” might require a more elaborate argument about the insidious violence of letters written to win over, thus overtake, rich and defenseless widows, but we can observe that it is hardly out of character for Roister Doister to deliver a misogynist letter. Indeed, he moves without a blink from wooing to assaulting. Merrygreek's account of the letter to Dame Custance later registers both:

Nay, Mistress Custance, I warrant you, our letter
Is not as we read e'en now, but much better,
And where ye half stomached this gentleman afore,
For this same letter, ye will love him now therefore;
Nor it is not this letter, though ye were a queen,
That should break marriage between you twain, I ween.

(4.3.30-35)

Second, Merrygreek's reading is true, in the ways that I've suggested, to the character of the play, in the sense that it corresponds to normative expectations of the comedy, from the character types (parasite and braggart soldier) to the classical form of plotting and the English quality of the verse.³⁴ Moreover, as a parasite he generates possibilities and alternatives by manipulating and inflecting the available material around him. In this way, in his duplicity, he comes close to the Master of Eton, whose “proper” reputation was based on his ability to translate material, to appropriate the classics and find the appropriate English form, but he also suggests the “other” Udall we have been pursuing through these letters.³⁵ Thus Merrygreek resembles Udall in more ways than one. Merrygreek's flair for generating alternatives produces a scene which bends Roister Doister's desire for a wife back toward himself. The parasite, perhaps to secure his position, suggests himself as the appropriate partner for his master; he plays the woman's part to keep his master playing his own.

PLAYING THE MAN'S PART

One scene separates the two that deliver the letters; Roister Doister has heard that the love token caused his rejection and stands alone with his parasite, who castigates him:

MERRYGREEK:
What, weep? Fie, for shame! And blubber? For manhood's sake
Never let your foe so much pleasure of you take!
Rather play the man's part, and do love refrain.
If she despise you, e'en dispise ye her again!
ROISTER Doister:
By Gosse and for thy sake, I defy her indeed!

(3.4.88-91)

That agreed, Merrygreek babbles baby talk to mock the woman and his master:

MERRYGREEK:
Canst thou not lub dis man, which could lub dee so well?
Art thou so much thine own foe?
ROISTER Doister:
                                                                                                                        Thou dost the truth tell.
MERRYGREEK:
Well, I lament.
ROISTER Doister:
                                                            So do I.
MERRYGREEK:
                                                                                          Wherefore?
ROISTER Doister:
                                                                                                                                  For this thing:
Because she is gone.
MERRYGREEK:
                                                                                I mourn for another thing.
ROISTER Doister:
What is it, Merrygreek, wherefore thou dost grief take?
MERRYGREEK:
That I am not a woman myself for your sake;
I would have you myself—and a straw for yon Gill!—
And [make] much of you, though it were against my will.(36)
…
MERRYGREEK:
And I were a woman—
ROISTER Doister:
                                                                                Thou wouldest to me seek.
MERRYGREEK:
For though I say it, a goodly person ye be.
…
ROISTER Doister:
I daresay thou wouldest have me to thy husband.
MERRYGREEK:
Yea, and I were the fairest lady in the shire,
And knew you as I know you and see you now here—
Well, I say no more.
ROISTER Doister:
                                                                                Gramercies, with all my heart.
MERRYGREEK:
But since that cannot be, will ye play a wise part?

(3.4.99-106, 109-11, 116-20)

The scene borders on transgressions in many ways: first, because it replays a sodomitical exchange, it mocks the serious charges launched by the Privy Council. Second, the imagined marriage capitalizes on the perhaps submerged implications of a master's relation to his parasite. The possibility of sodomitical relations is registered in stereotypical depictions of “private parasites,” servant boys for hire.³⁷ The model parasite in Terence is named Gnatho and inspired a range of dubious English characters named for their “insectuality” such as Moth in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost or Butterflye in Michael Drayton's Moone-Calfe:

And when himselfe he of his home can free,
He to the Citie comes, where then if he,
And the familiar Butterflye his Page,
Can passe the Street, the Ord'nary, and Stage,
It is enough, and he himselfe thinkes then,
To be the onely, absolut'st of men …
Yet, more than these, naught doth him so delight
As doth his smooth-chinned, plump-thighed catamite.(38)

Merrygreek's tendency to appropriate any position for expedience accounts for the difficulty of pinning down his motivations, especially when he entertains the idea of being Roister Doister's wife. He plays the parasite's part, but that doesn't entail playing in an “honest fashion.” “Scurrility” and scatology linger in his language, for instance, when he first appears and announces his role:

For what he saith or doth cannot be amiss.
Hold up his “yea” and “nay,” be his nown white son;
Praise and rouse him well, and ye have his heart won,
For so well liketh he his own fond fashions,
That he taketh pride of false commendations.
…
For exalt him, and have him as ye lust, indeed,
Yea, to hold his finger in a hole for a need.

(1.1.48-52, 55-56)

In this joking, he follows Udall's own translation of Terence's Gnatho, who characterizes the role of the parasite:

Suche men do I folowe at the taile, and amonge suche persones I do not so fashon my selfe, that they may laugh at me, but contrarie wise, what so ever they say or do, I shew them a mery countenance of myn owne self, & also make a great mervailing at their high wittis. What so ever they say, I comende it, that if they denie the same ageyne, that also I comêde: if a man say nay, I say nay also: if he say ye, I say yea to. And for a conclusion to be short, I maister & rule myn owne selfe, to upholde his ye and his nay, and to say as he sayth, in al maner thinges, for that is the next way now a days to get money ynough.³⁹

Udall's translation interpolates the physical description, “follow at the tail,” in his effort to find the proper English character for the Latin (consector: follow, pursue, emulate). And in translating Gnatho into Merrygreek, he has his English parasite follow a similar bodily disposition.

In act 1, scene 4, Roister Doister leans over, “one word in thine ear,” a gesture that involves imagining some physical humor that would spawn Merrygreek's response: “Back, sirs, from his tail!” (1.4.44-45). Modern editors insert a stage direction, partly to explain this, and partly because the speech prefixes in the early modern text are unclear. But they may be reacting to more than a textual anomaly or an elliptical gesture if we can gauge it by an odd joke of the next line. Roister Doister echoes Merrygreek with a twist: “Back, villains! Will ye be privy of my counsel?” (46). The joke works in a number of directions at once, including the innuendo about “privy,” activated both by tail and by a possible set of gestures, but the most uncanny is the deliberately mocking evocation of the Privy Council. Not only is it brazen for Udall to make a joking reference to a case that could have meant his death, but that he would do so in the context of men bumping around a guy's tail, clamoring to get privy to his ears seems inconceivable. Or is it? Perhaps not: if we follow Bray's arguments about unacknowledged complicities or Goldberg on the “open secret,” the “privy counsel” emerges right where we would expect it, in the midst of a sodomitical scene.

Similar jesting occurs in the seemingly gratuitous play later in the scene (1.4). Merrygreek takes the opportunity to pluck at Roister Doister's coat, reiterating “by your mastership's licence” and “by your leave” (1.4.94, 99). Finally Roister Doister erupts, “What is that?” (99). To which Merrygreek responds, “Your gown was foul spotted with the foot of a gnat” (100), the lousy parasite on whom Merrygreek's character is based. “Their master to offend they are nothing afeard” (101). Roister Doister speaks this line, but it speaks through him, saying more than he could possibly know, more both about Merrygreek's position and strangely about Udall's, if we think back on the letter to his master. And the next few lines enact a scenario analogous to the events ten years before:

MERRYGREEK:
A lousy hair from your mastership's beard.
ALL:
And sir, for nurse's sake, pardon this one offence.
We shall not after this show the like negligence.
ROISTER Doister:
I pardon you this once; and come sing ne'er the worse.

(1.4.102-5)

Though Udall may have never received his pardon with such ease, he did come to sing never the worse. Here we need only recall Tusser's generic autobiography or Udall's service to the queen as a master of Revels.

Udall's talent for the Revels envelopes his mastery at revealing and reveiling, dissembling moments in which his career surfaces as if hidden in the play. For example, when Dame Custance expresses disapproval toward her serving ladies, Tibet Talkapace says,

If ever I offend again, do not me spare.
But if ever I see that false boy any more,
By your mistresship's license, I tell you afore,
I will rather have my coat twenty times swinged
Than on the naughty wag not be avenged!

(2.4.24-28)

Once again, echoes of the letter, of appeals to the master, of the Eton boy, of promised self-punishment, of beating. Echoes then of Udall's career. “For fault but small, or none at all. / It came to pas, thus beat I was, / See Udall see, the mercie of thee, / to me poore lad.” His reputation on the line, Udall is remembered as “the best schoolmaster and the greatest beater,” pedagogue, and pedant but never pederast. The innuendo of “swinge,” to beat and to fuck, is the word missing in Tusser's poem that would link the quiet eroticism and the eruptive violence noted in the Eton boy's tribute to his master.

PLAYING THE WOMAN'S PART

To end on this note would be not to recognize my own position. The economy of the open secret still indicts the letter, still translates text into evidence of the world, a world in this case between men. The open secret, more subtle in its procedures of revealing and reveiling, still opens and shuts like a closet. The erotic play of dangling a secret deploys the erotics of textuality as an instrument for the erotics of sexuality. And this is to play along with the revelling master, to follow him to the letter.

The wise poets long time heretofore
Under merry comedies wise secrets did declare,
Wherein was contained very virtuous lore,
With mysteries and forewarnings very rare.
Such to write, neither Plautus nor Terence did spare,
Which among the learned at this day bears the bell;
These, with such other, therein did excel.

(The Prologue, 15-21)

In finding the proper English translation of Plautus and Terence, Udall echoes the familiar theory of the spirit of the letter, the kernel and shell game played with classical texts in order to render them appropriate for Christian readers. The point of claiming that there are hidden “secrets” is to shuck off all improperness, in the words of the Prologue, “avoiding all blame,” “scurrility,” “abuse,” mirth for health, the “honest fashion.” But Udall can't keep a secret. All the jokes in the play are about the dishonest fashion, the pleasure of abuse, the appeal of scurrility, mirth for mirth's sake. The secret, in short, may be that there is no secret.

If Udall can't keep a secret it might be because he does not have one. Even in the (non) place of early modern homosexuality, the open secret still assumes that there is a there there, a place not signaled yet signaling nevertheless. What happens when we pursue the secret, looking for signs that point to the bottom of Udall's heart, that confirm that he was a sodomite, and that he was brazen (or moved) enough to stage a scene between men? We might decide to continue to look for the words that might speak to his legal case. For instance, Christian Custance bemoans being accused unworthily, something repeated in Udall's letter and in his paraphrases of Terence:

O Lord, how necessary it is now of days,
That each body live uprightly all manner ways,
For let never so little a gap be open,
And be sure of this, the worst shall be spoken!
How innocent stand I in this, for deed or thought,
And yet see what mistrust towards me it hath wrought!

(5.3.1-6)

A little gap, a little pleasure, and it “hath stained my name forever, this is clear,” says the Dame (4.3.66). Udall echoes this complaint in the work he did immediately after his dismissal from Eton, especially in a translation of Erasmus's Apophthegmes. In a passage (342) about Demosthenes not giving ten thousand drachmas to stay one night with Lais, “I will not buy repentance so dear,” Erasmus writes, “Unto unhonest pleasure, repentance is a prest [ready] companion,” and Udall adds, “Yea, and one property more it hath, that the pleasure is small and is gone in a moment; the repentance great, and still enduring as long as life continueth.”⁴⁰ Or in the mouth of the Dame: “Gay love, God save it, so soon hot, so soon cold!” (4.3.38).⁴¹

But what does this reading perform? To put it in a manner that cuts both ways, what do we gain from another skeleton in the closet? I hope that I've pointed out enough of the problems to suggest that this would not be the way to go, though I concede that it has to be acknowledged as a constant temptation, one that recognizes our position as readers with particular sets of stakes and desires. In choosing another way, I don't want to minimize the importance of what the real person Nicholas Udall did. I honesty don't think there's any way to know. But I do wonder what more it would add if we did. Instead of indicting Udall, looking for evidence that proves he “played the man's part,” that he swinged his Eton boys, we might look at the case as evidence itself of other things, of the different meanings—theatrical, sexual, and social—of playing the man's part and the woman's as well. One thing the play also enacts is production of misogyny at moments when the homosocial fabric is ruptured. Always the parasite, Merrygreek plays at playing the woman's part. He pretends to be the mouthpiece for Dame Custance in order to tell Roister Doister the thoughts he's kept secret:

Now that the whole answer in my devise doth rest,
I shall paint out our wooer in colours of the best.
And all that I say shall be on Custance's mouth;
She is author of all that I shall speak, forsooth.

(3.3.1-4)

By putting the Dame in the authoring position, he de-authorizes her; she's just a cover, a shuck that can be scapegoated if necessary. His playing the woman's part allows him to dissimulate in speech, simultaneously saying nasty things directly to Roister Doister while avoiding the violence he would threaten against a man. Merrygreek has fun shoving it in his master's face, reporting to Roister Doister that he said to Custance: “‘Ye are happy,’ ko I, ‘that ye are a woman! / This would cost you your life in case ye were a man’” (3.3.37-38). Of course, this isn't true; he never said that to Custance because she never said the things he said she said. The only nugget of truth in it is that Merrygreek has in fact just performed the very act he makes up about the scene with the Dame: he has followed his own advice to her, happy that he plays the woman's part in teasing his master. The hypermasculine threat, like so many of Roister Doister's, is laughable since the joke behind the character of the braggart soldier is inability to play the man's part. If fear of retaliation doesn't work as a motivation, why then does Merrygreek play the woman's part? Even if the answer were that it's funny, we'd have to ask why. Merrygreek associates dissimulation with women: “O Jesus, will ye see / What dissembling creatures these same women be?” (3.2.39-40). And dissimulation is the dominant rule of his role as parasite. The relation of the parasite to the braggart can be differently gendered; what Merrygreek proposes to do to Roister Doister were he a woman (in the marriage scene), he's always already doing by virtue of the position he adopts toward Roister Doister. Parasites suck off their hosts.

More important than the homoerotic implications is that the parasitic relation he has to Roister Doister is structured around misogyny, on both of their parts, no matter what different things they do vis-à-vis Dame Custance. She carries all the culpability though she's never let a gap open. In the case of Merrygreek, the misogyny is often a displacement of his own parasitic relation. For Roister Doister, the play and the man, the misogyny is generated as a by-product of the circulation of homosocial energy, which at times, like that of the marriage scene, becomes homoerotic. Then it's no accident that the marriage scene occurs between the letters, for the joke of the letters is that gynophobia and gynophilia come from the same place: it just depends on how you point it. (“Ye may so take it, but I meant it not so, by Cock!”) And it's no accident that Merrygreek is the one to reveal how a love letter could be taken as hate mail, since he has tried his hand at playing both parts. Playing the woman's part means recognizing that there is no “behind” behind the letter. The two letters in the play are hinged by a scene between men. And there's nothing between them.

Notes

1. Thomas Tusser, Fiue hundred pointes of good Husbandrie (London: Henrie Denham, 1580), 85r.

2. Tusser (1523-80) begins his verse “calendar of rural and domestic economy” with forty stanzas on his life, the sixth and eighth of which are quoted above.

3. William L. Edgerton brings up the issue of “the greatest schoolmaster and the greatest beater” in his discussion of the poem and Udall's reputation in his monograph Nicholas Udall (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1965), 32.

4. Edgerton cites a poem by John Parkurst, Bishop of Norwich, that praises Udall's command of Greek and Latin letters, his talent for teaching, and his inspiring “genuine love.” Among the pupils at Eton, the two most notable are Richard Mulcaster, headmaster of the Merchant Taylor's School and author of two pedagogical works, and Thomas Wilson, secretary of state under Elizabeth and author of two rhetorical handbooks.

5. John S. Farmer, ed., The Dramatic Writings of Nicholas Udall, Comprising Ralph Roister Doister, A Note on Udall's Lost Plays, Note-Book and Word-List (London: Early English Drama Society, 1906), index. 151. In addition to the play, which some claim is the first successful reworking of Plautus and Terence into English, Udall translated Erasmus's Apophthegmes (1542) and Paraphrases upon the New Testament (1548) and Peter Martyr's A Discourse Concerning the Sacrament of the Lordes Supper (1550). His most important pedagogical contribution was a text that served as a textbook for Latin grammar and speech, Floures for Latine Spekynge (1533), line-by-line translations and glosses of Terence's Andria, Eunuchus, and Heautontimorumenos.

6. In 1527 Udall may have been implicated in a heresy hunt at Oxford, where he was lecturing in Greek and logic. He was acquainted with a group circulating Lutheran works and the banned Tyndale translation of the New Testament. The incident is recounted in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments. For Udall's involvement, see Edgerton, 23-24.

7. Harris Nicholas, Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England (London: G. Eyre and A. Spottiswoode, 1834-37), 152, 155, 157. There is no record of the amount of time Udall spent in the Marshalsea prison. With the publication of his translation of Erasmus's Apophthegmes in 1542, one might wonder if he served any time at all. Edgerton implies that he fled to a friend or patron in the North (47-48).

8. For further discussion, see Donald Mager's essay “John Bale and Early Tudor Sodomy Discourse,” in this volume.

9. Edgerton's chapter “A Turning Point” reviews the case and weighs the evidence, yet remains inconclusive. Half of the chapter is given over to a modernized reprint of a letter Udall wrote following his dismissal from Eton (41-45).

10. In his textbook Floures for Latine Spekynge the language is laden with a sense of the law. For example, he “translates” the line “Quod illum insimulat durum, id non est” as “Where as he accuseth hym, or sayeth to his charge, that he is harde or streyte, that is not so” and feels compelled to add a gloss: “Insimulare is proprely to lay to ones charge, a cryme that is not true, but a forged matter” (126v-127r). Spoken by Cremes to his son in Heautontimorumenos (2.1), the sentence concerns the harsh stance of fathers and the loose life of sons and is closer to “as to the boy pretending his father is hard, that's not so.” Udall aims for paraphrase of the spirit rather than translation of the letter, but here as elsewhere he adds a sense of his own. See the facsimile edition, Flowers For Latin Speaking, 1533 (Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1972).

11. E. R. Adair, “Rough Copies of the Privy Council Register,” English Historical Review 37 (1923): 410-22.

12. For an analysis of the ways the materiality of handwriting serves various gendered and political agendas, see Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), and Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter from the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

13. I shall focus on Bray's Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982), although his essay reprinted in this volume, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” is also useful and important. Jonathan Goldberg reviews Bray's argument in his “Colin to Hobbinol: Spenser's Familiar Letters,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989):107-26, an essay included in his Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).

14. Beginning with “the land” and demographics, Bray describes the patriarchal household as the central institution on which others are modeled. He singles out the authority of the master over those who belong to the household, especially children and servants, and suggests that the power differential similarly structures relations between teacher and pupil, client and prostitute, patron and actor (42-57). The power relations in pedagogy stand out as peculiar, though, since the position of power, the teacher or headmaster, is also one of service; the boys, or perhaps their fathers, are the clients of a school or tutor even if the boys register the lack of power (being “pressed” to perform lessons or plays, “to serve the Queere,” and so on). A paedagogus was after all an educated slave.

15. His description of schools relies on pederastic jokes about pedant tutors (51-52). As he says of other satiric caricatures, these stereotypes circulated widely in forms so standard that it is difficult to know how they might be related to any specific context. The remarkable similarity of jokes about pederastic pedants, for instance, in fourteenth-century Florence (Boccaccio) or in medieval France (Alain de Lille), simultaneously flags attention for more investigation and a warning about assuming that they are straightforward “evidence.”

16. Bray makes this point in his discussion of sodomy's relation to other “crimes” (heresy, atheism, blasphemy, sedition, drunkenness, lying) and concludes that as a sexual act it signified “hazily,” closer to “an idea like debauchery” (2-3). A discussion of the “burglary” of this case with Jonathan Goldberg helped clarify this point.

17. He argues that “there was little or no social pressure for someone to define for himself what his sexuality was” (70), but as my italics indicate, this still presupposes that he has one.

18. “Practically unconscious” refers to a notion developed by Harry Berger, Jr., in an essay on psychoanalysis and discourse. Troping on the “practical conscious” of social theory, the practical unconscious is a strategy by which the subject remains ignorant of the effects of his acts in order to continue to perform them, a strategy of misrecognition. See Berger's “What Did the King Know and When Did He Know It? Shakespearean Discourses and Psychoanalysis,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 811-62.

19. He begins his chapter “The Social Setting” with the problem of producing social history out of literary texts (33-38) and then moves on to similar problems with legal texts (38-42). His argument that court records are largely “convenient legal fictions” more concerned with “correct legal form” (38) adds even more reason to be suspicious of the Privy Council record, although he would take it in a direction opposite from that of Edgerton.

20. Immediately before the case of Udall, he quotes Marston on “some pedant-tutor in his bed / Should use my fry like Phrygian Ganymede” (52).

21. Goldberg reworks the notion of the “open secret” from D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 192-220.

22. The addressee is unclear though it is assumed that he was a patron of some sort. Edgerton mentions three names: Robert Aldridge and Richard Cox, both Eton schoolmasters, and John Udall, high in court circles and possibly a relative (46).

23. A copy of the letter, Cotton MS Titus B VIII, is printed in Sir Henry Ellis's Original Letters of Eminent Literary Men of the XVth through XVIIIth Century (London: Camden Society, 1843), 1-7.

24. For this formulation, I am indebted to Jonathan Goldberg.

25. Such a debate was carried out in the pages of Notes & Queries: William Peery, “Udall as Timeserver,” Notes & Queries 194 (1950): 119-21, 138-41, and William L. Edgerton, “The Apostasy of Nicholas Udall,” Notes & Queries 195 (1950): 223-26.

26. For more on “playing the sodomite,” see Goldberg's chapter entitled “The Transvestite Stage: More on the Case of Christopher Marlowe,” in Sodometries, 105-43.

27. For a recent publication of Wilson's 1553 edition, see Richard S. Sprague, ed., The Rule of Reason, Conteinying the Arte of Logique (Northridge, Calif.: San Fernando Valley State College, 1972), 166-67. W. W. Greg discusses and reprints Wilson's citation of the two letters in a facsimile edition of Ralph Roister Doister (London: Malone Society Reprints, 1934), v-vii. Most critics now agree that this citation works to date the play to the early 1550s. Because of Wilson's close association with Udall, critics assume he would have quoted the play in earlier editions of The Rule of Reason, and therefore argue for a more precise date, 1552. Some argue that this date explains Udall's appointment to Court Revels in 1553-54, but this reasoning simplifies the matter. Udall was already involved with members of the court as tutor, translator, and writer; and while the records show the bestowing of praise and money for entertainments under Mary, Udall held no official position in the Revels.

28. The Prologue's “mispointed” speech insults the audience, though the aristocrats in the play are delighted rather than offended (6.1.108-17). Related tricks of misreading occur in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, in Marlowe's Edward II, and in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy.

29. At work in the transmission of knowledge, through humanistic pedagogy, is the circulation of “pages,” both letters and boys. The reproduction of mastery performed in school depends upon the imitation of the master and of master texts by the pupil, who then goes on to carry these letters, goes on, as Wilson did, to be imitated himself. This “master/page dialectic” is modeled on inscriptive practices, which in turn inscribe the subject. The close proximity of pedagogic inscription and pederastic insemination is a topos found especially in the Platonic dialogues.

30. A. W. Reed, “Nicholas Udall and Thomas Wilson,” Review of English Studies I (1925): 275-83.

31. In his monograph Thomas Wilson (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986), Peter E. Medine suggests that there is “reason to suppose, furthermore, that something like an affectionate relationship developed between Wilson and the master, Nicholas Udall” (5).

32. The most accessible edition is an anthology in the New Mermaids' series, Charles Walters Whitworth, ed., Three Sixteenth-Century Comedies: “Gammer Gurton's Needle,” “Roister Doister,” and “The Old Wife's Tale” (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984).

33. Though the letter Speed reads is handwritten, he claims “this I speak in print, for in print I found it” (2.1.159). The Scrivener subscribes to the promise of “mechanical reproduction,” perhaps a fundamental assumption of his craft, but a promise never delivered by hand nor by the mechanical printing press. I argue this point in more detail in “Dispatch Quickly: The Mechanical Reproduction of Pages,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991):389-408.

34. For a discussion of Udall as “the father of English comedy,” see A. W. Plumstead, “Satirical Parody in Roister Doister: A Reinterpretation,” Studies in Philology 60 (1963): 141-54.

35. On Udall's theory of translation, or paraphrase, as a step beyond the philology of early humanism, see T. W. Baldwin, “Schoolmaster Udall Writes the First Regular English Comedy,” in Shakespeare's Five-Act Structure (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1947), 375-401.

36. There's a textual problem here: Whitworth prints “mock” while other editions have “make.” The early modern text prints “mocke,” which authorizes the Mermaid editor's choice. Since both are in the line, one heard through the other, depending on who is listening, I took the license to choose the one Roister Doister hears, the one that registers the sodomitical sense.

37. Bray, Homosexuality, 54.

38. The passage is cited in Bray, 33-34. See J. William Hebel's edition of Drayton, Works (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), 173-74, ll. 283-88, 315-16.

39. Udall's translation of Gnatho's speech in Eunuchus (2.2) in Floures, 67r-v.

40. For this point and the citations, I rely on Edgerton, 46.

41. The line, bracketed out of context, is a citation from another early English drama, Wit and Science (1540), which was a popular schoolboy play, cited and parodied in subsequent generations: “Hastye love is soone hot and soone cold.” The large number of citational lines in Roister Doister pulls together proverbial sayings with morality plays and classical drama. The references to Terence are most important since the play is envisioned as a reworking, or reiteration, of Terentian subplots in an English inflection.