_Ralph Roister Doister_, the earliest known English comedy, was written apparently about 1530, and printed some fifteen or sixteen years later. The date of the printing of a play is notoriously no test of its date of composition or acting, but only of the time when the actors had no further motive for keeping it in their own hands in manuscript--that is, when it ceased to be popular on the stage. _Ralph Roister Doister_ was the work of Nicholas Udall, headmaster of Eton and Westminster, and is full of reminiscences of Plautus. Ralph Roister Doister himself is our old friend the _miles gloriosus_ adapted to the conditions of London life in the time of Edward VI. Matthew Merrygreek, described as a “needy humorist,” is our no less familiar friend the parasite. Merrygreek feeds on the vanity and credulity of Ralph Roister Doister, who is made up of conceit, bluster, and cowardice--who thinks that every woman who sees him falls in love with him, and is of course baffled and beaten in the end. It is written in sufficiently brisk lines of no great regularity; and there are much duller plays. Ralph’s courtship of Dame Christian Custance, who will have none of him, is lively. On the whole, the play leaves the impression that Udall was more than a mere imitator of Plautus, but it is only the school exercise of a clever man.[70] [SN: _Gammer Gurton’s Needle._] “The right pithy, pleasant, and merry comedy, entitled _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_,” is believed, on good evidence, to have been written by John Still (1543?-1608), a churchman, who died Bishop of Bath and Wells. It was played at his college, Christ’s, Cambridge, in 1566, but may have been written three years earlier. However that may be, it was certainly written in his youth. Nothing could well be less academic or clerical. Though divided into five acts, it is, in fact, a farce not unlike much mediæval French comedy. The plot is one of a familiar class which will always hold the stage under new forms, and the working out is of the simplest. Gammer Gurton loses her needle, and then finds it, just where she ought to have looked for it, after upsetting the house by searching in unlikely places, and disturbing the village by unjustly suspecting her neighbours of theft. It is unquestionably too long, but it is very far from dull. There is a directness of purpose in Still which is decidedly dramatic, and with it a power of characterisation by no means contemptible. All the personages, and notably the wandering beggar, Deccon the Bedlam, have a marked truth to humble human nature. They are coarse, but not wilfully and unnecessarily coarse. There are none of those strings of mere nasty words and images which serve as foil to the poetry of the true Elizabethan comedy. Still is honestly naturalistic, neither toning down the truth of the rough talk of rude people, nor lavishing bad language from an apparent wish to startle. If he had not entered the Church, which made it indecent for him to work