Nicholas Udall
born December 1505?, Southampton, Hampshire,
Eng.
died December 1556, Westminster
English playwright, translator, and schoolmaster
who wrote the first known English comedy, Ralph
Roister Doister.
Udall was educated at the University of Oxford,
where he became a lecturer and fellow. He became
a schoolmaster in 1529 and was teaching in
London in 1533 when he wrote “ditties and
interludes” for Anne Boleyn’s coronation. In
1534 he published Floures for Latine Spekynge
Selected and Gathered out of Terence . . .
Translated into Englysshe (dated 1533). That
same year he became headmaster of Eton College,
but he was later dismissed for sexually abusing
his pupils.
From 1542 to 1545 Udall seems to have been in
London, engaged in work as a translator. In 1542
he published a version of Erasmus’ Apopthegmes;
and he was employed by Catherine Parr, who
shared his enthusiasm for the Reformation, to
take charge of a translation of Erasmus’
paraphrase of the New Testament. The first
volume, containing the Gospels and Acts, was
published in 1548; the Gospel According to Luke
was translated by Udall, and the Gospel
According to John was translated by Princess
Mary (later Queen Mary I).
In 1549 Udall became tutor to the young
Edward Courtenay; in 1551 he obtained a prebend
at Windsor, and in 1553 he was given a living in
the Isle of Wight. Meanwhile he had become
famous as a playwright and translator. Even
under Queen Mary, his Protestant sympathies did
not cause him to fall into disfavour at court;
various documents refer to his connection with
plays presented before the queen. He became a
tutor in the household of Stephen Gardiner,
bishop of Winchester, and in December 1555 was
appointed headmaster of Westminster.
Although Udall is credited in John Bale’s
catalog of English writers with “many comedies,”
the only play extant that can certainly be
assigned to him is Ralph Roister Doister.
This must have been written, and probably was
performed, about 1553. The play marks the
emergence of English comedy from the medieval
morality plays, interludes, and farces. It is
modeled on Terence and Plautus: its central
idea—of a braggart soldier-hero, with an
impecunious parasite to flatter him, who thinks
every woman he sees falls in love with him and
is finally shown to be an arrant coward—is
derived from Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus. The
incidents, characters, and colloquial idiom,
however, are English. It was probably written as
a Christmas entertainment to be performed by
Udall’s pupils in London. The anonymous
interludes Jacke Jugeler and Thersites are also
sometimes attributed to him.
