UDALL, NICHOLAS, a celebrated master of Eton and Westminster schools, and author of Ralph Royster Doyster, the first regular English comedy known in the language, was born in Hampshire in 1506. Passing through Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he took his degrees, first of B.A. in 1524, and subsequently of M.A. in 1534. During his college life, he had given symptoms of a leaning to the Lutheranism of the day, which is said for a time to have kept him out of Eton. On being elevated to the mastership of that famous institution, he gained a celebrity for his severity. Warton tells us that Thomas Tusser, the poet, "was next sent to Eton school, where, at one chastisement, he received fifty-three stripes of the rod from the severe but celebrated master, Nicholas Udall." (Warton's English Poetry, viii. 248.) But Udall was busy with his pen as well as his rod. He published Flowers for Latyne Spekyng, selected and gathered out of Terence, and the same translated into Englyshe, London, 1533. He wrote translations of some of the works of Erasmus; some Latin plays; and, to crown all, he is the earliest writer on record of the regular English comedy divided into acts and scenes. He seems to have executed a considerable number of dramatic compositions, or "interludes," as he calls them, which were in all probability put together for the amusement of his pupils on St Andrew's day. None of these plays have come down to us, save some thirty-five lines in Wilson's Arte of Logike, 1567, and the Ralph Royster Doyster, which was only discovered in 1818, although it must have been printed as early as 1566, and it even may have been written fifteen or twenty years before. For, in Wilson's Rule of Reason, printed in 1551, the earliest year assigned for the printing of Gammer Gurton's Needle, this play of Udall's is mentioned as being then in circulation. Udall was appointed to a canonry at Wind-
sor in the early part of the reign of Edward VI. He died in 1564.