Among the unforgotten of these dwellers on the threshold of the Elizabethan drama is "Ralph Roister Doister," by Nicholas Udall (1505-1556) (of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, later headmaster of Eton, and next of Westminster; he died in the reign of Mary Tudor). The Vice, so to speak, or clever buffooning parasite, of the piece is Matthew Merrygreek, who in a long rhyming prologue describes his own way of life and his intention to befool the braggart Ralph Roister Doister. Ralph enters melancholy, he is in love: he has met the lady at supper, but forgets her name. She is rich (says Matthew), a widow, and betrothed to another man. Ralph is a fatuous ass, like Malvolio, and thinks all women in love with him. Merrygreek fools him to the top of his bent, and presents the lady with a forged love-letter from Ralph, who is drubbed by the maid-servants and generally disgraced, while the true love of the heroine returns from a voyage to be happy with her. There is plenty of noise, singing, and beating, and some intrigue in the case of the genuine wooer and his suspicious jealousy. Gammer Gurton's Needle. The equally renowned "Gammer Gurton's Needle," was acted sixteen years after "Ralph Roister Doister," at Christ's College, Cambridge. It is usually attributed to John Still (born 1543) a member of Christ's, Master of Arts in 1565, and later Master of that College, Vice-Chancellor of the University, and finally Bishop of Bath and Wells (died 1608). As Vice-Chancellor, Still was a stickler for Latin plays at Cambridge, which were more educational but not so popular as dramas in English. The plot turns on the loss of a needle by old Gammer Gurton, the suspicion, raised by a wag, that another old woman has stolen it; the search for the needle; combats about the needle, and the final discovery of that implement in the seat of a man's breeches. A sturdy beggar, Diccon, is "the Vice," and sets Gammer Gurton and another gammer to a scolding match. Hodge, a servant, with his broad dialect, and insistent demand for the needle, that a large and unseemly hole which ventilates his breeches may instantly be patched, has perhaps the most comic part, and when somebody slaps Hodge and drives the needle (which had stuck in his breeches), into a safe part of his person, the joy of a Cambridge audience knew no limits. The play is thoroughly rustic, the language is of an amazing breadth, and no doubt the drama made abundant mirth among the Cantab wits. Members of the sister University, where poets have been rare in comparison with these glories of Cambridge, need not covet Still, unless he wrote the famous drinking song in the Second Act, "Back and Side go bare, go bare!" The Bishop of Bath and Wells probably looked back with mingled feelings on the jolly, noisy achievement of his youth, which has made him immortal, for all have heard of "Gammer Gurton's Needle". It is written in rhyming lines of from fourteen to sixteen syllables. "Gorboduc."