SOURCE: Norland, Howard B. “Roister Doister and the ‘Regularizing’ of English Comedy.” Genre 18, no. 4 (1985): 323-34.

[In the following essay, Norland examines Ralph Roister Doister in light of its innovation and mode of story telling.]

Roister Doister is traditionally considered to be “the first regular English comedy.”¹ This designation seems to result primarily from the play's observance of the five-act structure and its perceived imitation of Latin comedy. It is not, of course, the first English comedy; England's first extant secular play, Medwall's Fulgens and Lucres, performed more than fifty years earlier, has a better claim to that title. And it is not the first play in England to use the five-act structure; Grimald's Archipropheta, composed in 1546-47, adopted it. It may also not be the first English play to imitate Latin comedy; Jacke Juggeler which announces in its prologue its indebtedness to Plautus's “first commedie,” Amphitruo, may precede Roister Doister by a year or two. Roister Doister may be the most fully developed comedy to be produced in England before the reign of Elizabeth; however, it is not as “regular” a comedy nor as “English” as Baldwin and other critics believed.

Though some earlier scholars thought the play was written during Nicholas Udall's tenure as headmaster of Eton between 1534 and 1541,² it is now generally accepted that the play was completed between 1551 and 1553. This is based on the fact that Roister Doister's mispunctuated letter is included in Thomas Wilson's third edition of Rule of Reason in 1553 as an example of ambiguity, but the letter is not included in the editions of 1551 and 1552.³ It is also in this reference to the play that Udall, Wilson's former schoolmaster, is identified as the author of Roister Doister. The question still remains as to whether the play was performed before the end of Edward VI's reign or after Mary came to the throne. Scheurweghs and Edgerton argue that the play was presented to young Edward in late 1552; Edgerton specifically sets the first performance in September 1552 at Windsor Castle.⁴ However, Baldwin and later Bevington believe the play was performed after Mary's coronation, perhaps as a part of the Christmas festivities in 1553.⁵The Annals of English Drama simply notes that the auspices of the play are unknown,⁶ but recent scholars generally assume the play was produced by choristers, perhaps from Bishop Gardiner's school, because of the five songs and mock-requiem in the play.⁷ The music and mirth, emphasized in the prologue and manifested throughout the play, point to a festive occasion, if not the celebration of the Lord of Misrule, perhaps a presentation at court.

The subject of the play, Roister Doister's wooing of Christian Custance, would be especially appropriate for Mary, whose marriage with Philip of Spain was negotiated in the fall of 1553. The attentions of unwelcome suitors, which Mary must have inevitably faced as an unmarried princess and queen, are here dispelled with laughter. This is not to suggest that Udall is singling out Edward Courtney, whom Udall tutored in the Tower, or any other contemporary candidate for Mary's hand. Udall, who also apparently wrote Respublica for Mary's court at about the same time, was much too adept at making his way in the new reign to create unnecessary enemies.⁸ Rather the wooer is created from literary precedents; the wooing is reduced to burlesque; and in the resolution, as at the end of Respublica, reconciliation prevails. Perhaps the humorous treatment of wooing led to the licensing of the play in 1566/67 and a possible revival for Elizabeth, the object of many suits during her earlier years as queen.

Whatever the particular occasion for composition or performance, the prologue indicates a self-conscious design for the play as it reveals its author's critical perspective. In the first fourteen lines the word “mirth” appears eight times in a defense of mirth as the appropriate effect of comedy because it lifts spirits and promotes good fellowship, but the prologue also emphasizes that the mirth the audience is about to witness is without abuse and is “vsed in an honest fashion” (8), for it is “mixed with vertue in decent comlynesse” (13)⁹. Assuring spectators that the play will not offend, the prologue expresses a moral aim. This joining of profit with pleasure is to be expected from the old schoolmaster Udall, well versed in Horace's principle of “utile et dulce.” Udall, also a translator of Terence, a standard school author taught in the second through the fourth forms at Eton,¹⁰ expresses in the third stanza of the prologue his orientation toward classical comedy:

The wyse Poets long time heretofore
          Vnder merrie Comedies secretes did declare,
Wherein was contained very vertuous lore,
          With mysteries and forewarnings very rare.
Suche to write neither Plautus nor Terence dyd spare,
Whiche among the learned at this day beares the bell.
These with such other therein dyd excell.

(16-22)

This stress on the didactic message of Latin comedy reflects Udall's grounding in the commentaries on Terence by Donatus and Renaissance humanists published with the texts of the plays in sixteenth century editions. Melanchthon especially emphasized the moral implications in his commentaries first published in 1525 and reprinted in many later editions including the influential De Roigny edition published in Paris in 1552.¹¹ The identification of “secretes,” “mysteries” and “forewarnings very rare” in the “vertuous lore” could refer to the intrigue upon which many of Plautus's and Terence's plots depend, but Udall adds that these two authors “with such other therein dyd excell.” He does not identify what other authors he had in mind, but in the context of ancient comedy that Udall is considering, the only other extant classical comic dramatists were Menander, whose works were known only in fragments, and Aristophanes, who was recommended by Erasmus to be read before Homer and who was identified as a model of comedy by Vives.¹² However, because the earlier part of the prologue had repudiated “scurilitie” (5), a quality particularly associated with Aristophanes, Udall may have deliberately avoided naming the Greek dramatist. Certainly the didactic purpose of the “Comedie … Which against the vayne glorious doth inuey” (25), as explained in the last stanza of the prologue, resembles Aristophanic satire more than the intrigue comedies of Plautus and Terence. The identification of Roister Doister's “humour,” which “the roysting sort continually doth feede” (26), suggests the dramatic emphasis is on comic exposure rather than the knot of errors characteristic of Latin comedy.¹³

Udall's adoption of the classical five-act three-part structure, explained by Donatus in his commentary on Terence, has long been recognized by scholars of early Tudor drama. Acts I and II introduce the principal characters and the principal action, the wooing of Custance, in accordance with the functions of the protasis. The division between Acts I and II appears arbitrary with the first act being approximately twice the length of the second. Act III begins the epitasis, “the business of the play” according to Ben Jonson,¹⁴ as Roister Doister's suit to Christian Custance and her response are dramatically portrayed. Acts III and IV, which are nearly equal in length, are clearly divided at the beginning of the fourth act by the complication that Custance's fidelity may be misperceived. Act IV ends with Roister Doister's ludicrous attempt to revenge Custance for spurning him, a climax to the wooing plot that compares to Renaissance commentators' designation of the summa epitasis or catastasis in Terentian comedy.¹⁵ Act V resolves the complication regarding Custance's virtue and provides reconciliation for the opposing parties, which is the function of the catastrophe in Donatus's structural analysis. Latin comedy as interpreted by Donatus and Renaissance humanists clearly served as the external model for Roister Doister, though as Udall's old schoolmaster at Oxford, Vives, believed, the classics should be regarded not as masters but as guides;¹⁶ and Udall took as his guides not only Plautus and Terence but also Aristophanes as he adapted classical materials to a contemporary context.

Plautus's Miles Gloriosus and Terence's Eunuch have traditionally been perceived to be the sources of Roister Doister, yet as Maulsby pointed out at the beginning of this century, Udall's indebtedness to Roman drama has been exaggerated.¹⁷ Hinton may be right in seeing The Eunuch as the essential source of the play, Roister Doister¹⁸, but Terence's popular comedy was more a source of inspiration than a model of imitation for Udall. The motif of an unwanted lover threatening violence after being spurned may owe something to Thraso's response to Thais in The Eunuch, but the differences in the circumstances of the two plays are very great. Thais is, of course, a wily prostitute who had entertained the braggart soldier on many occasions, and she rejects him only to protect the girl given her by Thraso earlier when she realizes the girl is in fact freeborn and the sister of a Roman gentleman. When Thraso prepares his attack, he means to recover the girl and punish Thais. Thais's counterpart in Roister Doister is an exemplar of feminine virtue, whose “courage, charity, and firm materialism” were, Bevington believes, meant to please the newly crowned Mary.¹⁹ Christian Custance, whose name suggests piety and constancy, engages in battle only for sport as she helps to create the liveliest comic scene of the play. In The Eunuch the threatened battle does not in fact occur.

The character of Roister Doister may have been suggested by Thraso and may owe something to Plautus's Miles Gloriosus, but the braggart soldier was so well-known a comic type that “Thraso” had become an insulting epithet traded by religious polemicists, including Luther and Thomas More.²⁰ This familiar stock character of Roman comedy may have as early as the sixteenth century merged with the swaggering heroes of folk drama. Certainly the exploits recounted by St. George and his rivals in the hero combat texts savor of the type, and in the wooing folk plays the braggart is cast as a wooer, as in Roister Doister.²¹ Udall may have observed contemporary representations of the bragging suitor before his creation of Roister Doister, and if Udall is responsible for the short interlude, Thersites, as some scholars believe,²² he had previously drawn a caricature of the cowardly braggart. However, the most distinctive aspect of Roister Doister's character is his image as a mock-hero of chivalric romance who is compared to “Sir Launcelot du lake” and “greate Guy of Warwike” (I.ii.188-89) as well as to classical and biblical heroes. In his role as the love-sick knight, he recalls Chaucer's Troilus, as Plumstead notes,²³ but the parody also pokes fun at contemporary sonneteers who had rediscovered Petrarch's love poems. Roister Doister is a complex portrait created from both ancient and contemporary sources.

Matthew Merrygreek has traditionally been linked to Gnatho, the parasite in The Eunuch, whose name like Thraso's had become generic for his character type. In his introductory soliloquy, Merrygreek identifies himself as a parasite who lives off “Lewis Loytrer,” “Watkin Waster,” “Dauy Diceplayer,” and other such idlers, but his “chiefe banker, / Both for meate and money, and [his] chiefe shootanker” (I.i.19-30) is Roister Doister. He thus establishes his relationship with his host as a parasitical one. Yet as the play proceeds his manipulation of Roister Doister more closely resembles the role of the witty slave of Roman comedy than the parasite. His energy and propensity for mischief may suggest the vice of the morality, but he lacks sinister intent. His motivation is sport, and like the comic servants of the cycle plays he promotes laughter at the expense of fools. His essential relationship to Roister Doister is that of guller to gull, and the effect of his words and actions is to expose the folly of his host. In the words of the prologue he “feeds” the “humour” of Roister Doister, thus fulfilling the play's purpose: “against the vayne glorious [to] inuey” (25). This role as an instrument of satire may be inspired by Aristophanes whose works along with Terence's were popular sellers in Oxford in 1520, when Udall was an undergraduate there, according to sales records of John Dorne.²⁴ The name Merrygreek usually glossed simply as “merry fellow,” though “a Greek” also meant a “cheat” or “sharper” (OED), may allude to the Aristophanic connection, for Merrygreek is indeed more Greek than Roman.

An examination of the action of the play reveals that Aristophanic comic exaggeration prevails over Terentian intrigue. The precedent for misinterpreting Christian Custance's loyalty may be found in Terence, where misunderstandings of actions and characters' identities are often the foundations of the plots, but in Roister Doister this misapprehension is introduced only at the beginning of Act IV and is quickly resolved in Act V. It becomes hardly more than a momentary consideration as the play focuses on Roister Doister's gulling.²⁵ Gulling is, of course, a motif in Roman comedy as the witty slave in aiding his young master misleads and diverts the hard fathers, grasping pimps, and foolish rivals. However, when Syrus misdirects Demea and ironically praises his “well-beloved” son, Ctesipho, in The Brothers, or when Gnatho flatters Thraso in The Eunuch, these actions are but means to an end, which is the triumph of youthful desire over constraining or blocking forces. Gulling is, however, often a primary action in folk tales and folk drama as well as in farce. Perusal of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the chapbooks of “merry tales” associated with Tarlton, and farces such as Heywood's Johan Johan, demonstrates how pervasive and how central gulling as a comic motif is in popular entertainment in late Medieval and early Renaissance England. Many native literary and dramatic precedents of gulling plots were available to Udall, but most were more comic than satiric. Aristophanes offered a model of a satiric structure which often depended on gulling and which also employed the mode of burlesque. Aristophanes' fools like Strepsiades, justifiably beaten by his son with his newly learned logic in The Clouds, and Cinesias, teased by his sex-striking wife in Lysistrata, are comic butts, but most important they demonstrate the satiric point of the action. The satiric design coupled with the burlesque mode, which distinguishes Udall's gulling plot from both Roman and contemporary precedents, could have been found in Aristophanes.

The didactic purpose—“against the vayne glorious [to] inuey”—expressed in the prologue to Roister Doister determines the design of the play. The character of Roister Doister is described by Merrygreek in his opening monologue as the image of vainglory in the realms of both combat and love, for not only is Roister Doister a cowardly boaster as a swordsman, but also he believes that any woman who looks at him must love him. Merrygreek then explains how easily he can manipulate Roister Doister. The play thus opens with an exposition of the roles of Roister Doister as an object of ridicule and Merrygreek as the ridiculer. However, Roister Doister's first words indicate another dimension as he declares, “Come death when thou wilt, I am weary of my life” (I.ii.71). This melancholic association of death with love, anticipated in Merrygreek's description of Roister Doister's despair if his love is not returned, introduces the burlesque treatment of the lover that prevails throughout the play. Merrygreek's later identification of Roister Doister with “sir Launcelot du lake” and the “tenth Worthie” (I.ii.188 and 196) is extended into a parody of the hero of the popular romances. After purposely mistaking the old toothless Madge Mumblecrust as Roister Doister's new love, Merrygreek contends that Roister Doister

… killed the blewe Spider in Blanche pouder lande
… he bet the king of Crickets on Christ masse day,
… he wrong a club
Once in a fray out of the hande of Belzebub.
… He conquered in one day from Rome, to Naples.

(I.iv.471-88)

This iteration of Roister Doister's imaginary feats is significantly similar to the boasts of St. George and other combatants in the folk drama texts collected in the last two centuries.²⁶ Whether the sixteenth century versions of the folk plays burlesqued popular romance and provided a model for Udall is not known.

The burlesque spirit becomes more fully developed in Roister Doister as the action proceeds. After Roister Doister's tokens of love are refused by Christian Custance, Merrygreek reports that she has called Roister Doister “such a calfe, such an asse, such a blocke” (III.iii.900) that Roister Doister determines to “go home and die” (931). This prompts the most extensive parody of the play as Merrygreek takes Roister Doister at his word and proceeds with the death service. Scholars have suggested several possible sources for the mock-funeral here, including Skelton's Philip Sparrow and the poem “On the Death of the Duke of Suffolk, May 3, 1450,” in which parts of the service are put in the mouths of Henry VI's courtiers²⁷; but it appears that the precedent in Aristophanes has been overlooked. At the end of the agon in Lysistrata, Lysistrata, furious with the Magistrate whom she has been debating, tells him “'tis time [he] were dead … an urn shall be bought,” and she will bake him a funeral cake. Her attendant women offer fillets to wear and a chaplet for his hair, and the metaphor continues with Lysistrata shouting, “What are you waiting for? / Charon is staying, delaying his crew, / Charon is calling and bawling for you.”²⁸ This does not, of course, re-enact a funeral service in detail, but it employs in parodic form several elements associated with the rites of death in the ancient Greek world.

The death service is elaborated in Roister Doister, but the comic exaggeration is Aristophanic. The mock requiem printed at the end of the extant text of the play appears to have been inserted at different points in the dialogue in performance so that the lines of the Catholic rites, accompanied by Merrygreek's sermonizing, are occasionally interrupted by conversations between Merrygreek and Roister Doister for comic effect. Following Merrygreek's recitation of the Psalmodie praying for Christ's mercy and expressing woman's cruelty,²⁹ Roister Doister moans, “Heigh how, alas, the pangs of death my hearte do breake.” Merrygreek rebukes him, “Holde your peace for shame sir, a dead man may not speake,” and then continues, “Nequando: What mourners and what torches shall we haue” (III.iii.938-40). The service proceeds with an alternation of solemn ritual and impromptu intrusions that break the illusion of the funeral. When Roister Doister responds, “None,” to the above question, Merrygreek intones:

Dirige: He will go darklyng to his graue,—
Neque lux, neque crux, neque mourners, neque clinke,
He will steale to heauen, vnknowing to God I thinke.
A porta inferi, who shall your goodes possesse?

(III.iii.941-44)

The effect of this elaborate burlesque that concludes with the peal of bells is to satirize the lover, whose metaphor of “dying for love” is acted out literally. The Catholic rites are not themselves satirized, as E. S. Miller notes³⁰; Udall merely uses them as a means to ridicule the posturing lover, which is further elaborated in Roister Doister's mispunctuated letter.

This letter, an example of ambiguity in Wilson's Rule of Reason and a precedent for the mechanicals' mispunctuated prologue to their Pyramus and Thisbe play in Midsummer Night's Dream, inverts a well-established convention of love. Dependence on a scrivener to provide an expression of love indicates not only Roister Doister's vacuous mind but also the emptiness of the convention. Whether Roister Doister is responsible for mispunctuating the love letter as he copied it or whether Merrygreek purposely misreads it—and evidence in the play supports both interpretations³¹—the letter when read to Custance turns compliment into insult and promises misery rather than joy in marriage:

… If ye mynde to bee my wyfe,
Ye shall be assured for the tyme of my lyfe,
I will keepe ye ryght well, from good rayment and fare,
Ye shall not be kepte but in sorowe and care.
Ye shall in no wyse lyue at your owne libertie,
Doe and say what ye lust, ye shall neuer please me,
But when ye are mery, I will be all sadde,
When ye are sory, I will be very gladde.
When ye seeke your heartes ease, I will be vnkinde,
At no tyme, in me shall ye muche gentlenesse finde.

(III.iv.1089-98)

The lover's honey-tongued promises of marital bliss become a warning against marriage. The mockery of the letter is interpreted by Custance to be directed against her, though in the context it is the wooer Roister Doister rather than the wooed who is mocked as well as the love convention he is representing. Roister Doister's response to Custance's angry dismissal of his suit is to weep, and another convention—that of the unrequited lover—is ridiculed, but it is Roister Doister's secondary response, revenge prompted by Merrygreek, that provides the burlesque climax for the vainglorious lover.

Dame Custance and the audience are prepared for the burlesque battle by Merrygreek, who insists that all is done in “mockage” for “pastance” and “sport” (IV.vi.1573-89), and as a result Custance joins with Merrygreek in Roister Doister's final exposure. She initially flees in supposed terror when Roister Doister approaches in battle array, which prompts a manifestation of hubris, but when she returns with her household of women ready for the fight, Roister Doister's true colors are shown. The scene quickly turns into a battle of the sexes as Roister Doister decked out with a cooking pot for a helmet is urged on by Merrygreek who purposely misdirects his blows on Roister Doister's head. Roister Doister and his men ignominiously flee before the courageous women in a farcical display of male cowardice that resembles more the confrontation of old men and old women in Aristophanes' Lysistrata than Terence's Eunuch, for Thraso leaves the field without doing battle. In Lysistrata the boasting chorus of old men threaten the old women with torches, but they are quickly dispersed when the women extinguish the men's phallic torches as well as their courage. In Lysistrata this confrontation between the male and female halves of the chorus reduces the conflict between the sexes to absurdity and foreshadows the feminine victory at the end of the play. In Roister Doister the burlesque battle makes the vainglorious lover even more ludicrous as it demonstrates the independence and courage of Christian Custance. As in Lysistrata, the burlesque action compliments women at the expense of the men, a judgment not to be missed by the newly crowned Mary, England's first ruling queen, or by her sister Elizabeth, if indeed the licensing of the play in 1566/67 signalled a royal revival.

The reconciliation that follows Roister Doister's comic exposure may be comparable to the typical endings of Terence's comedies, but in spirit it is more like the conclusion of Respublica. The Eunuch, Udall's supposed source, ends with a cynical accommodation of Thraso's fleshly appetites as Phaedria agrees to share Thais's favors with his rival. However, in Udall's play the chastened but not changed Roister Doister seeks to salvage his honor in a Falstaffian manner, as he pleads courtesy rather than instinct as the source of his cowardice: “… by the auncient lawe of armes, a man / Hath no honour to foile his handes on a woman” (V.vi. 1974-75). He is then invited to sup by his rival Gawin Goodluck, and he joins his new-made friends in song. The serious threat to Custance's reputation is quickly dismissed as forgiveness and good fellowship prevail in the spirit of Misericordia, who directs the resolution of Respublica, and in the spirit most appropriate for the festive occasion on which Roister Doister was first performed. The prayer for the queen and the “commontie” with which the play ends may indicate the presence of the queen at the performance, and the appeal that “God graunt hir as she doth, the Gospell to protect, / Learning and vertue to aduaunce, and vice to correct” (V.vi. 1999-2000) echoes the role of Nemesis (symbolizing Queen Mary) at the end of Respublica. Regardless of how one might feel about the militant Protestant Udall's accommodation to the new Catholic reign, one must remember Mary's role in translating Erasmus's Paraphrase of the gospel John under the direction of Udall in the late 1540's. This may be a gentle reminder by Udall of their earlier association as well as an appeal to be prudent and judicious, which is also the message of Respublica. If the play were revived for Elizabeth, the advice would be appropriate to her as well, for like Mary she was perceived as “the protector of the faith,” though the faith had changed, and the other royal missions to advance learning and virtue and to correct vice would be as much her responsibility as queen as it was Mary's.

In either case the play provides a message along with the entertainment as the prologue had promised, but in merging profit and delight in accord with Horace's advice, Udall has developed a structural satire “against the vayne glorious” that may owe more to Aristophanes than was earlier realized. Udall's adoption of the burlesque mode in his integration of native elements with classical models anticipates the major traditions of Elizabethan comedy, for both Shakespeare's romantic parody and Jonson's humour comedies develop motifs explored by Udall. Roister Doister is a more innovative experiment in comic form than its conventional designation as “the first regular English comedy” suggests.

Notes

1. T. W. Baldwin among others makes this designation in Shakspere's Five-Act Structure. Shakspere's Early Plays on the Background of Renaissance Theories of Five-Act Structure from 1470 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1947), p. 380.

2. J. Q. Adams in a note to his edition of the play in Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), continues to favor Udall's Eton years as the period of composition (p. 423).

3. See A. W. Reed, “Nicholas Udall and Thomas Wilson,” Review of English Studies [RES], 1 (1925), 282.

4. Nicholas Udall's Roister Doister, ed. G. Scheurweghs (Louvain: Librairie Universitaire, 1939), Materials for the Study of Old English Drama, 16, lv-lx; and William L. Edgerton, “The Date of Roister Doister,” Philological Quarterly [PQ,], 44 (1965), 555-60.

5. Baldwin, Five-Act Structure, p. 381; and David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics. A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 121.

6. Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama 975-1700, rev. S. Schoenbaum (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 30.

7. See Baldwin, Five-Act Structure, p. 381; Edgerton, “Date of Roister Doister,” p. 559; and Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics, p. 121.

8. Udall's adaptation to Mary's reign is the subject of considerable controversy. See especially William Peery, “Udall as Timeserver,” N & Q, 194 (1949), 119-21 and 138-41; W. L. Edgerton, “The Apostasy of Nicholas Udall,” Notes & Queries [N & Q,], 195 (1950), 223-26; and W. L. Edgerton, “Nicholas Udall in the Indexes of Prohibited Books,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology [JEGP], 55 (1956), 247-52.

9. Roister Doister, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford: The Malone Society Reprintings, 1935). All subsequent references are to the text of this edition.

10. T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), I, 641.

11. De Roigny's “variorum” edition, which Baldwin notes would incorporate most of the structural analysis of Terence (Five-Act Structure, p. 398), would have been available to Udall during his composition of Roister Doister, but as a veteran schoolmaster and former translator of Terence, he clearly knew earlier editions with their commentaries as well.

12. Erasmus, De ratione studii, trans. Brian McGregor, Collected Works (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974-), 24, 669; and Vives, De disciplinis in Opera omnia, ed. Gregorio Mayans de Siscar (Valencia, 1782-90), VI, 364. See my articles: “Vives' Critical View of Drama,” Humanistica Lovaniensia, 30 (1981), 103; and “The Role of Drama in Erasmus' Literary Thought,” Acta Conventus Bononiensis, Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies (Binghampton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1985), 549-57.

13. Donatus in his commentaries on Terence's plays emphasizes error as the basis of the comic intrigue plots.

14. See the summary of Act III in Jonson's “Argument” prefacing The New Inn.

15. See Marvin T. Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), pp. 119-22.

16. De disciplinis in Opera, VI, 7.

17. D. L. Maulsby, “The Relation Between Udall's Roister Doister and the Comedies of Plautus and Terence,” Englische Studien, 38 (1907), 251-77.

18. J. S. Hinton, “The Source of Roister Doister,” Modern Philology [MP], 11 (1913-14), 273-78.

19. Tudor Drama and Politics, pp. 121-24.

20. See my article, “The Role of Drama in More's Literary Career,” Sixteenth Century Journal [SCJ], 13:4 (1982), 73.

21. St. George, or King George, as he is sometimes called, typically introduces himself with an account of his exploits; other combatants and wooers often follow the same pattern.

22. See Three Tudor Classical Interludes, ed. Marie Axton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), pp. 2 and 5-10.

23. A. W. Plumstead, “Satirical Parody in Roister Doister: A Reinterpretation,” Studies in Philology [SP], 60 (1963), 142.

24. Ian Lancashire, Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558 (Toronto-Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1984), p. xxiv.

25. Robert R. Willson in ‘Their Form Confounded.’ Studies in the Burlesque Play from Udall to Sheridan (The Hague: Mouton, 1975) says the “testing of Custance [is] more of an occasion for rhetorical posturing than a crucial focus of the action” (p. 20).

26. Beelzebub appears in several of the folk plays carrying a club or a frying pan.

27. Udall's Roister Doister, ed. Scheurweghs, p. lxx.

28. Aristophanes, III, trans. B. B. Rogers (London: William Heineman, 1924), 11. 599-607.

29. The text indicates the insertion of the Psalmodie printed at the end of the text with the note “vt infra” following line 937.

30. “Roister Doister's ‘Funeralls,’” SP, 43 (1946), 56-57.

31. Note Merrygreek's admission that he read the letter “in a wrong sense for daliance” (IV.vi. 1581). See also A. W. Plumstead, “Who Pointed Roister's Letter?” N & Q, n.s. 10 (1963), 329-31.