Queen Mary on Dec. 3, 1554 issued a warrant on Udal's be half directing "the maister and yeomen of the office of the Revells" to ,deliver whatever Udal should think necessary for setting forth dialogues and interludes, while the exchequer was ordered to provide the money to buy them (Loseley mss. Kempe 63, and Hist. mss. Com. Rep. vii. 612). One of these interludes was probably Roister Doister; for it was in January 1553, i.e., 1554, that Thomas Wilson, master of St. Katharine's Hospital by the Tower, produced the third edition of The Rule of Reason, the first text-book on logic written in English, which contains, while the two earlier editions, published in 1551 and 1552 respec tively, do not contain, a long quotation from Roister Doister "taken out of an interlude made by Nicholas Udal." The play was entered at Stationers' Hall, when printed in 1566. Only one copy is known, which was given to Eton by an old Etonian, the Rev. Th. Briggs, in 1818, who privately printed thirty copies of it. There are strong reasons for believing that Roister Doister first appeared in 1553, and therefore could not have been written at was a chorister of St. Paul's.
Eton or for Eton boys.
Nor could it have been written at Westminster school or for Westminster boys, as argued by Professor Hales in Eng. Studien (1893) xviii. 408. For though Udal did become head master of Westminster, he only became so on Dec. 16, 1555, nearly two years after Wilson's quotation from Roister Doister appeared.
He was at Winchester in the interval, perhaps as master of the old City Grammar or High School. When the monks re-entered
Westminster, on Mary's restoration of the abbey (Nov. 21, 1556), the school did not, as commonly alleged, cease, nor had Udal ceased to be master (Shakespeare Soc. iii. xxxiv.) when he died a month later. He was buried on Dec. 23, 1556.
Roister Doister well deserves its fame as the first English com edy. It is infinitely superior to any of its predecessors in form and substance. It has sometimes been described as a mere adapta tion of Plautus's Miles Gloriosus. Though the central idea of the play—that of a braggart soldier (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 undoubtedly taken from Plautus, yet the plot and incidents, and above all the dialogue, are absolutely original, and infinitely superior to those of Plautus.
The play was printed by F. Marshall in 1821 ; in Thomas White's Old English Dramas (3 vols., 183o) ; by the Shakespeare Society, vol.
iii., the introduction to which contains the fullest and most accurate account of his life ; in Edward Arber's reprints in 1869 ; and Dodsley's Old Plays (1894), vol. iii. A. R. Moon (Times Lit. Supp. AP. 19, 1928) suggests the ascription to Udal of a lost play Ezechias acted at King's College, Cambridge, before Queen Elizabeth, on Aug. 8, 5564, eight years after Udal's death. He identifies this piece with the Tra goedia de papatu referred to by Gale (Scriptores Britanniae) as Udal's work.