Representative English Comedies

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Nicholas Udall ROISTER DOISTER Edited with Critical Essay and Notes by Ewald Flugei, Ph.D., Professor in Stanford University CRITICAL ESSAY Life. ? Nicholas Udall was born in I 506, of a good family residing in Hampshire. As a lad of fourteen he entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford, nd took his...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Nicholas Udall ROISTER DOISTER Edited with Critical Essay and Notes by Ewald Flugei, Ph.D., Professor in Stanford University CRITICAL ESSAY Life. ? Nicholas Udall was born in I 506, of a good family residing in Hampshire. As a lad of fourteen he entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford, nd took his bachelor's degree there in May, 1524.' The years of his Uni- Tsity life came at a period of great religious fermentation, and young Udall according to an old tradition, one of the young enthusiasts in whom 'manistic tilling of Erasmus had prepared the soil for Lutheran doctrines ...... .Vittenberg. We may, therefore, imagine young Udall to have beenJune he received the degree of Master of Arts from Oxford, and appears in the latter part of the same year as Magister Informator at Eton, succeeding Master Richard Coxe.1 In this capacity he received payments between the last terms, 1534 and I54I.2 one of those of whose heretical perversities Warham complains to Wolsey. Apparently Udall, as he grew older, grew if not calmer at least more cautious, and succeeded later in gaining the favour of Mary the Princess, and in retaining that of Mary the Queen. While at college, he formed a lasting friendship with John Leland, a friendship of which some poems of the latter give us a pleasing testimony.4 Leland, of almost the same age as Udall, had taken his first degree at Cambridge in 1522, and according to an old custom, he continued his studies at Oxford, where Udall's generosity won his heart. In May, 1533, a number of verses were composed by them in joint authorship, for a pageant at the coronation of Anne Boleyn.6 In the same year Udall seems to have settled at London as a teacher. He may even have contemplated becoming a monk ? like Thomas More thirty years ear...