It is also free from obscenity; but it lacks nothing in wit on that account, nor the situations in humour. Viewed as a whole, it is a simple and unaffected picture of English rural life--the scene with its setting as well as its figures. And these are coloured from experience, forerunners, indeed, of many in our better-known comedy: the young squire given over to the chase, horses and dogs and the horn at break of day (much to the discomfort of the slumbering environment),--the careless elder born,--victim and butt of his unnatural mother and her wily younger son; the doting father, duped; the clown; the pert and pretty maid; the aged nurse. Consider, in addition, the more subtle characteristics of the _Jacob and Esau_,--the family resemblances, the racial policy with its ripe and ruddy upper layer of morals, the romantic touch, the sometimes genuine pathos, the naïve domestic revelations, the loves in low life, the unaffected charms of dialogue and verse,--and one must acknowledge that this play, no matter what its origin and name, is at least as indicative of the maturing of English drama as either of the plays with which I have placed it in comparison. Of these _Gammer Gurtons Nedle_ was the first to gather the threads of farce, moral interlude, and classical school play into a well-sustained comedy of rustic life. Mr. Henry Bradley has ingeniously shown that in all probability it was a Christ's College play, written by William Stevenson during his fellowship of 1559 to 1560. There may, indeed, be reason for believing that it was composed as early as the author's first fellowship, 1551-54.[77] In this play the unregulated seductions of earlier days are brought under the curb of the classical manner and form: the native element already evident in _Noah's Flood_ and the _Shepherds' Plays_, the _Judicium_, the _Conversion of St. Paul_, the _Johan_, and the _Pardoner_, and about this same time in the _Contract betweene Wit and Wisdome_ (parts of which suggest forcibly the manner of this same Stevenson); the rollicking humour of the Vice turned Bedlem, the pithy and saline interchange of feminine amenities; the Atellan, sometimes even Chaucerian, laughter,--not sensual but animal; the delight in physical incongruity; the mediæval fondness for the grotesque. If the situations are farcical, they at any rate hold together; each scene tends towards the climax of the act, and each act towards the _denouement_. The characters are both typical and individual; and though the conception is of less significance than that of _Roister Doister_, the execution is an advance because it smacks less of the academic. _Gammer Gurton_ carries forward the comedy of mirth, but hardly yet into the rounded comedy of life.