Udall's position appears clearly if one compares his work with _Gammer Gurtons Nedle_ on the one hand, and--regarding them as a type--with Heywood's farces on the other. The good taste and higher art of _Roister Doister_ are at once evident: the play is free from the undeniable vulgarity of _Gammer Gurton_, and in delineation of character is distinctly superior. The plot, simple as it is, is never as meagre as in the clever dialogues of Heywood; and as much as Udall surpasses Heywood in construction of the plot, I think he surpasses him in delineation of character. For even if, as Ward says,[318] in Heywood's witty plays, the "personified abstractions" of the moralities have been entirely superseded by "personal types," these personal types have not yet matured into individual persons, into men of flesh and blood, as they have in Udall's play. I take, of course, for granted Udall's absolute superiority over that category of interludes which--bastards of the "Moralities"--seem to have had no other purpose than to introduce dogmatical moralizations, seasoned perhaps with a tavern scene or with some other farcical coarseness, and at best ending with an "unmotived" conversion of the sinner or sinners. =Plot and Characters.=--Udall's plot is so simple that its development becomes clear at a glance; it consists of the unsuccessful wooing of Ralph Roister Doister for the hand of Dame Christian Custance, evolved amid various entanglements, and ultimately unsuccessful, not so much because Custance is at the time of Roister's first advances already engaged to another man, as because Roister's folly is so enormous that no success can be possible.