A note on Elizabethan authorship and Stephen Greenblatt's new biography of Christopher Marlowe, which I have not read

Stephen Grennblatt’s biography of Christopher Marlowe, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Christopher Marlowe, was just published.  I did not know this book, which has been prominently reviewed, was coming.  I perhaps should have hooked my Christopher Marlowe reading to it.  For what purpose I do not know.

There is no possible way that I will buy Greenblatt’s book, but I might read it if my library buys a copy, which I suppose they will at some point.  Marlowe’s life could hardly be more interesting.  My grumpiness is more with the current practice of biography, which glosses over the use of evidence in ways with which I have difficulty.

For example.  A piece about Greenblatt’s book in Harvard Magazine, “Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival” (8/8/2025), written by Nina Pasquini, begins with a grotesque error:

He was a radical, the inventor of blank verse, a master of internal monologue, and a victim of murder.

Marlowe did not invent blank verse.  How could the author get this idea.  Because Greenblatt said it:

But the play’s most revolutionary element was formal: the use of “this hallucinatory blank verse, which Marlowe basically invented,” Greenblatt says.

Stephen Greenblatt knows more about Gorboduc and Henry Howard’s Aeneid translation than I do, and knows what the word “invented” means, yet this is the standard.  Or perhaps the emphasis is on "hallucinatory," in other words Marlowe invented blank verse as written by Marlowe.  Gorboduc's blank verse is not hallucinatory.

In the actual book, which I looked at in a bookstore, in the three pages tagged with “blank verse” in the index, Greenblatt says nothing about “invention” but instead argues that Marlowe’s use of blank verse in the two Tamburlaine plays was so successful, artistically and commercially, that it set blank verse as the standard for tragedy and history plays.  Which seems true to me.  Eh, the book is probably good.  Please read it and let me know.

Still, the evidence.  In two weeks I will put up something about Dido, Queen of Carthage, which I think of as Marlowe’s first play.  Maybe it is, maybe it is not.  Published in 1594, soon after Marlowe’s death, the title page says:

Written by Chriftopher Marlowe, and

Thomas Nafh. Gent.

Thomas Nashe is a writer of high interest, an imaginative satirist, but heck if I can hear him anywhere in Dido.  Some scholars with better ears than me agree, some do not.  Maybe Nashe edited the play for publication?  Maybe he wrote my favorite scenes in imitation of Marlowe?  Who knows.

I think there was a lot more co-writing and script doctoring in the London theater than we will ever know.  Publishing was changing rapidly, and the notion of authorship was changing as quickly, so evidence for authorship claims, authorship in our post-Romantic sense, is chaotic.  I take The Workes of Ben Jonson (1616), the first Folio if not the First Folio, as one extreme, Jonson getting his own plays and poems into print in a way that clearly says “These are mine, I wrote these.”  But my impression now is that there is more non-Shakespeare than we will ever know in Shakespeare’s plays, especially the earlier ones, and similarly more Shakespeare in plays we attribute to other writers.  Scenes, lines, even words.

In an issue of Sandman, Neil Gaiman has Shakespeare and Jonson jointly improvise the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot song and teach it to a boy to spread around London.  The first line is Shakespear’s (“remember, remember”), the second Jonson’s.  Shakespeare thinks the song will quickly be forgotten; Jonson thinks it will last a hundred years.  A little parable about publication there.  But I think it gets at the practice of the time pretty well.  All of these writers knew each other.  Many worked together professionally, but how many more workshopped passages with each other at the tavern?

I will try to keep a light hand about authorship.  But at some point I have to make my choice, just like the biographer does.  He has to tell the story of Christopher Marlowe’s career as a spy.  I would prefer the story of why we think he might have been a spy.  Most people would not.

Next week: please join me in reading Dido, Queen of Carthage.  It is a fine piece of poetry.  The week after that I will begin writing on the two Tamburlaine plays.

I am in France right now so who knows when I might respond to comments.  Please go over to my Twitter to see photographs of my traveling companions.

Visiting imaginary museums with André Malraux

 

André Malraux’s Les Voix du silence (The Voices of Silence, 1951) is a synthetic, imaginative art omnihistory, an application (successful) to be Charles de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, and at the same time an implicit apology for his brief career as a looter of Cambodian art.  Terrible, terrible.  Please see his 1930 novel La Voie royale (The Royal Way) for the fascinating details.

Actually Malraux, a true con man, likely thought he did nothing wrong and was not apologizing in any way.  I am just trying to give him credit.

The first fifth of the book, “Le Musée Imaginaire” / “The Imaginary museum,” for some reason retitled “Museum Without Walls” by Stuart Gilbert in his 1953 translation, is in particular a terrific piece of imaginative art criticism.  Inspired by the great improvements in the reproduction of artworks and the flood of high quality art books, Malraux constructs, and argues we are all free to construct, a museum in our heads, or our libraries, containing all art from all time, in a way that was never possible before.

Not that Giotto or Fra Angelico did not do all right with their much smaller museum.  Malraux has interesting things to say about that.  Perhaps knowing everything about everything is not good for art.

But in the meantime Malraux juxtaposes works freely across time and space, with productive results:

This 13th century French angel and 4th century Gandharan Buddha are on pp. 158-9 of the French text, pp. 160-1 of the English.  About forty percent of Les voix du silence is illustrations, so if you enjoy this kind of thing there is a lot more to see.

I was doing a little “imaginary museum” exercise back in this piece about visiting actual Paris museums.  Malraux was obviously as inspired by the variety of the collections in the ever-growing range of Paris museums.  Think how exciting the Paris museum world must have been just after the war, with civilization coming back to life, and the collections coming out of hiding.

The rest of the book is not so original, I do not think, although I would be interested in what a historian of art history thinks of it.  The third of the book titled “La Création Artistique” / “The Creative Process” is a wide-ranging study of high-level creativity that is knowledgeable and open-minded.  His idea of creativity is more formalist than most people's, although not mine. I just have doubts about how original it is.  That “imaginary museum” stuff, that is Malraux’s.

Let’s have some prose and see Malraux’s extremely French mix of insight, lyricism, clarity, and hot air.  I read this book in French, but since the online edition had, ironically, terrible reproductions, I also used an English edition for the illustrations.  So I will use Gilbert’s translation, not mine.

Malraux is writing about the difficulty of fitting objects like Melanesian masks into our art appreciation frame.  “[A]fter seeing a hundred New Ireland figures, we prefer to isolate two or three and toy with the illusion that they are the work of some great mythical sculptor (of no time, yet a little of ours).”

Those colors of the New Hebrides, intense or muted, are employed by dressmakers and theatrical designers; indeed when a great number of these figures are brought together in a museum, we have a sudden feeling of being invited to se a haute couture of Death.  These glittering ghosts really belong to poetry, which is why the Surrealists make so much of them.  But Surrealism, far from proposing to further culture, repudiates it in favor of the dream.  Our artistic culture, however, does not repudiate the dream, but seeks to annex it to itself.  Our Middle Ages, too, suggest to us what the festival deriving from the prehistoric ages may have been; but once his Carnival was over, medieval man fell to building cathedrals, and his rulers had not “ancestors” but forebears.  (575 English)

Gilbert’s decisions, when I took a look, often puzzled me.  He has a tendency to over-expand.  But he has a heck of a task.  That last clause in French is:

… mais son Carnaval terminé, il construisait des cathedrals, et ses chefs n’avaient pas d’ancêtres, ils avaient des aïeux. (573)

… but his Carnival having ended, he was building cathedrals, and his rulers did not have ancestors, they had ancestors.  (me, trying to be literal)

You see the expansion, a simple “il” turning into “medieval man,” and “fell to” fussily solving a verb issue.  But I have no idea what subtlety separates “ancêtres” from “aïeux” – I think they are synonyms – so I have no idea what Malraux is trying to say.  My translation is obviously wrong.  Gilbert at least takes a shot at it, even adding some extra quotation marks, although I do not think he knows either.  He had to do this on page after page.

If this all sounds interesting but maybe too full of hot air, the big sections are available separately.  Just read the “Museum Without Walls” section, which is also available as its own book, and see how that goes.

In the old days I would have written about this rich, enjoyable, exasperating book for a week.

 

 

The Tragedie of Gorboduc - To see the hugy heaps of our unhaps

King Gorboduc, his head heavy from wearing the crown of England, divides his kingdom between his two sons.  One son quickly murders the other; the grieving mother (!) murders the surviving son; the outraged populace rises to murder the queen and poor, hapless King Gorboduc; England collapses into civil war. 

This sounds so exciting!  And look at all of those hints of later plays, of the history plays and King Lear.  The Tragedie of Gorboduc (1562, pub. 1565) is not exciting.  It is static and anti-dramatic.  It barely has characters. The action is presented in the dumb shows that lead each act, and in messenger speeches.  The play is mostly a mix of political speeches, advice to the king and so on, and messenger speeches.

The model is Seneca curiously mixed with English morality plays.  Seneca’s characters declaim in long set-speeches, but with an emotional intensity, building to pathos or horror, that is absent in Gorboduc, which was written by a couple of lawyers, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, for a performance before an audience of lawyers.  The warning about the dangers of a weak monarchy are the real point, the real plot, of the play.  No surprise that it was published relatively soon after its performance, that a particular audience wanted the text.

I know this sounds dull, and I do not know how it would be to sit through the play, but I found it highly readable.  I am now used to theater more undramatic than this, all kinds of crazy anti-plays, and I will note that the most produced play in America last season was Heidi Schrek’s What the Constitution Means to Me (2017).

A few scenes get close to later drama.  The queen has a two-page soliloquy about murdering her own son where she would, in Seneca or Racine, whip herself up into a frenzy.  Maybe we in the audience are horrified or somehow sympathetic:

Never, O wretch, this womb conceived thee;

Nor never bode I painful throes for thee.

Changeling to me thou art, and not my child,

Nor to no wight that spark of pity knew.

Ruthless, unkind, monster of nature’s work…  (IV.1, 67-71)

The queen is more a type than a character – she has barely been on stage before this scene – and the ideas in this speech do not really develop.  But I can see the future in it.  I can imagine Marlowe or Shakespeare reading it and wanting to fix it.  I can also imagine a less anarchically commercial English theater developing in a more Racine-like direction.

Gorboduc is the first published English play written in blank verse.  This is really why we read it.  Henry Howard’s partial translation of The Aeneid in blank verse had been published just a few years earlier.  The whole point of the exercise is that Roman poetry did not rhyme, so how can that be duplicated in English and still be interesting poetry?  Howard’s Virgil was a success, wonderful stuff, and I am not surprised that these two educated lawyers borrowed it for their pseudo-Seneca.  Their blank verse is competent, and they were right, it creates a kind of speech that sounds natural but lends itself to elaboration, that is pleasant to hear and read and not so bad for an actor to memorize.  Sackville and Norton great virtue is clarity, but they have their poetic moments:

And ye, O gods, send us the welcome death,

To shed our blood in field, and leave us not

In loathsome life to linger out our days,

To see the hugy heaps of our unhaps,

That now roll down upon the wretched land…  (V.ii, 105-10)

Almost an Anglo-Saxon poetic quality in those lines.  Compared to what Marlowe or Webster or Shakespeare will do with blank verse, sure, sure, no comparison.

I read Gorboduc in a 1974 collection titled Minor Elizabethan Tragedies which reprints a 1910 volume titled Minor Elizabethan Drama.

Next week I will glance at Stephen Greenblatt’s new biography of Christopher Marlowe (which I have not read) and poke at the idea of authorship. Then in two weeks we will begin reading Christopher Marlowe with what feels to me like the early, even unformed, Dido, Queen of Carthage.

The magician becomes a bureaucrat - what Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World is about

The Kingdom of This World (1949), Alejo Carpentier, tr. by Pablo Medina (2017).

What is this novel about.  It is about the Haitian Revolution, although not in the sense that it is a substitute for reading The Black Jacobins (1938).

It is about – I am looking at the translator’s Afterword – “the clash of cultures and races; it is a book about overwhelming social injustice; it is, above all, a book about the good and the evil that people will inflict on one another” (133).  True up to the last item; I do not know where in the novel anyone is inflicting good.  There is certainly plenty of evil.  “Like Mark Twain before him, Carpentier tackles slavery head-on and in so doing helps us to understand the awful legacy of racial discrimination with which our society still struggles.”  I doubt anyone reading this post of mine will improve their understanding of racial discrimination at all by reading The Kingdom of This World, but maybe some readers at a much earlier point in their education will?

The novel is about the failures of Surrealism, and it is also a positive argument for a particular kind of post-Surrealism that Carpentier calls “the marvelous real.”  Let’s look at the novel’s prose.  I’m on the second page here:

While his master was being shaved, Ti Noël was able to study carefully the four wax heads propped on the shelf by the entrance.  The wigs’ curls framed the fixed faces before spreading into a pool of ringlets on the red runner.  Those heads seemed as real – and as dead, given their motionless eyes – as the talking head that a traveling charlatan had brought to the Cap years before as a ploy to help him sell an elixir that cured toothaches and rheumatism.  By charming coincidence, the butcher shop next door displayed the skinned heads of calves, which had the same waxy quality.  (4)

I want to quote the entire page, I enjoy it so.

… Ti Noël distracted himself  by thinking that the heads of white gentlemen were being served at the same table as the discolored veal heads…  All they needed was a bed of lettuce or radishes cut in the shape of fleur-de-lys as adornment.

The novel is more or less written like this.  The point of view moves around.  There is, for example, an amusing digressive section starring Josephine Bonaparte.  Ti Noël becomes the protagonist because, essentially, he survives the violence.  Let’s see what happens to him at the end of the novel.

Tired of risky transformations, Ti Noël used his extraordinary powers to change himself into a goose and thus live among the birds that had taken residence in his domain.  (128)

Humans transforming into animals is one of the novel’s running themes.  Why, I see an example up above, way back on page 4.  Now, even within the realm of fiction it is not likely that Ti Noël transformed into a goose.  Sadly, he is rejected by the other “real” geese, because “no matter if he tried for years, he would never have access to the rites and roles of the clan” (129).

Ti Noël believes he becomes a goose, though, and given how narrative works, what is the difference between him believing he is a goose and actually being a goose.

I think you may be able to detect a little bit of Revolutionary political symbolism in the earlier passage, and the story of the geese has a parable-like quality.  The entire ending, the last three chapters, is full of marvelous symbolic writing, all with this Surrealist character, things transforming into other things, or things in illogical places for logical reasons.  Real and also marvelous.

I might have figured out Carpentier’s argument with Surrealism from the novel itself, but in the Preface he openly says all this.

By dint of wanting to elicit the marvelous at every turn, the magician becomes a bureaucrat.  Invoked by means of the usual formulas that make of certain paintings a monotonous junk pile of rubbery clocks, tailor’s mannequins, or vague phallic monuments, the marvelous never goes beyond an umbrella or a lobster or a sewing machine or whatever, lying on a dissection table inside a sad room in a rocky desert.  Imaginative poverty, Unamuno used to say, is the consequence of learning codes by heart (xiv-v).

Although there are some recognizable targets in this passage, only poor Yves Tanguy is directly attacked for his “troubling imaginative poverty” in “painting the same stony larvae under the same gray sky for twenty-five years” (xv).  The de-bureaucratizing solution, by the way, is to go to America, Haiti for example, and write about what is actually there.  “For what is the story of all of the Americas if not the chronicle of the marvelous and the real?” (xx).  Americans still believe in magic and miracles.

I will note that in the last two paragraphs of his Afterword, Medina takes up these more aesthetic ideas.  He also translated that Preface.

I will also note that, although I have not read the older translation or compared it to the Spanish at all, Medina’s translation seemed wonderful, energetic and clear.  Brightly lit, like freshly restored baroque architecture.

Carpentier’s subsequent novel, The Lost Steps (1953), strongly recommended to fans of the Pixar movie Up (2009), is also about aesthetics, Modernism versus Romanticism, say.  It is too long since I read Explosion in a Cathedral (1962) to argue that it is mostly about books, really, but now I wonder.

Carpentier praises Wilfredo Lam in the Preface so I put a contempory Lam painting, La Jungla (1943), up above.

Gammer Gurton's Needle - it would have made thee beshit thee / For laughter

 

Gammer Gurton loses her needle (solution to the mystery: distracted by her cat she forgets it in her servant Hodge’s pants).  A wandering stranger uses the hubbub to sow chaos for some reason, which gives the play a kind of plot, which for something like this is just a way to give the gags some order.  The stranger wants chaos but of course  so do we, the readers, the audience.  That is the point of comedy.

Such is Gammer Gurton’s Needle.  I date it near but somewhat after Ralph Roister Doister, so mid-1550s.  It was possibly printed in 1563 and certainly printed in 1575.  There we go.  The authorship is a total hash.  The author is one or another Cambridge don, writing a holiday entertainment performed by and for an audience of teenage boys.

They presumably found it hilarious.

Tib.  See, Hodge, what’s this may it not be within it?

Hodge. Break it, fool, with thy hand, and see an thou canst find it.

Tib. Nay, break it you, Hodge, according to your word.

Hodge.  Gog’s sides! Fie! It stinks; it is a cat’s turd!  (Act !, Scene v)

As a character says later, “An thadst seen him, Diccon, it would have made thee beshit thee / For laughter” (IV.iii).  Gammer Gurton’s Needle is rather more earthy than the English comedies that would follow it.  The student of Shakespeare soon learns that anything that looks like a dirty joke probably is.  Such is true here, too.

Gammer.  For these and ill luck together, as knoweth Cock, my boy,

Have stuck away my dear neele, and robber me of my joy,

My fair long straight neele, that was mine only treasure;

The first day of my sorrow is, and last end of my pleasure!  (I.iv)

The play has an outstanding cat, Gib, who sadly never appears on stage, such were the limits of mid-16th century theatrical special effects.  In Act III, scene iv, for example, Gib “stands me gasping behind the door, as though her wind hath faileth” – has she swallowed the lost needle!  The characters debate what to do – “Groper her, ich say, methinks ich feel it; does not prick your hand?” – but the cat stays behind the door the whole time.

Whoever the author was, he knew how to have some fun with the language, which is again in rhyming couplets but with more North English rural dialect.

My guts they yawl-crawl, and all my belly rumbleth;

The puddings cannot lie still, each one over other tumbleth.  (II.i.)

Or these two old ladies screaming at each other:

Gammer.          Thou wert as good as kiss my tail!

Thou slut, thou cut, thou rakes, thou jakes! Will not shame make thee hide thee?

Chat.  Thou scald, thou bald, thou rotten, thou glutton!  I will no longer chide thee,

But I will teach thee to keep home.  (III.iii)

And the humor deepens when I remember that these are two teenage boys dressed as old women shouting these lines for an audience of teenage boys.  This is what we call classic humor.

Next week I switch to tragedy, with Gorboduc (1561) by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, written and performed for young lawyers and full of important lessons and Classical learning and so on.  It will be a tonal shift.

What I Read in August 2025 - But good ale down your throat hath good easy tumbling

I have been learning a lot about Elizabethan literature.  Next month we will see what good it does me.  I am enjoying myself.  The title quotation is from Ralph Roister Doister.

I plan to put up a post about Marlowe’s first – probably his first – play, Dido, Quen of Carthage, on September 29, and in the meantime will write about some plays preceding Marlowe.

 

FICTION

Ralph Roister Doister (1552, perhaps), Nicholas Udall – enjoyed over here.

The Loved One (1948), Evelyn Waugh – amusing and minor.  Waugh briefly visited Los Angeles and imagined Disneyland (as a cemetery), just a few years before it was built.  Perceptive.

The Kingdom of This World (1949), Alejo Carpentier – Outstanding debut novel about the Haitian Revolution.  Or about the failures of Surrealism.  I should write a longer note on this one.

Franny and Zooey (1955 / 1957 / 1961), J. D. Salinger – I enjoyed Nine Stories (1953) and enjoyed “Franny” (1955) all right but boy “Zooey” (1957) was a real nerve saw.  I am amazed that New Yorker readers had so much patience for Salinger’s dialectical Buddhist fiction.

The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965), Samuel R. Delany – I found Delany’s first novel, The Jewels of Aptor (1962), creative but clumsy and I suppose this novel, his fifth, is the same, but the level of creativity is even higher.  It was mostly written over four days and sometimes feels like it, but it is overflowing with exciting conceits.  The basis of the plot is literary criticism, the interpretation of the title ballad.  To do literary criticism, the protagonist must visit ruined spaceships and befriend a space monster. Delany was – let me go look this up – 22, 23 years-old.

 

POETRY

The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954), William Carlos Williams

The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (1948-89), Yehuda Amichai

Every Sound Is Not a Wolf (2025), Alberto Rios

 

PURSUIT OF THE SUBLIME / MADNESS

Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8000-meter Peak (1951), Maurice Herzog – enjoyed back here.

 

IN FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE

Os Escravos (1865), Castro Alves – Three abolitionist poems by a Brazilian teenager who wanted to be Victor Hugo and/or Byron and died young after introducing Romanticism to Brazilian poetry.  I have little idea how good these poems are, but this is pretty exciting.

Les voix du silence (1951), André Malraux – A work of imaginative art criticism by French literature’s great con man, in effect his successful application to be French Minister of Culture.  I really should write a longer note about this book, some of which is highly interesting.

Um estranho em Goa (2000), José Eduardo Agualusa – An Angolan writer’s autofiction about a visit to Goa, a place about which I knew nothing, which is why I read the book. Plus it is at my language level, plus it is a reasonable length, plus, I suppose, many other things.  The travel writing aspects were of high interest, the fiction less so, but fine.  I hope the plot line where Agualusa halfheartedly tries to buy, mostly out of morbid curiosity, the living heart of the local saint is fiction.  Some of Agualusa’s books have been translated into English recently but not this one.  I hope to read another someday.

 

 

Ralph Roister Doister, among the first regular English comedies - Then to our recorder with toodleloodle poop

Ralph Roister Doister (written c. 1550, published 1567) once had the distinction of being the first comedy in English.  Please see this 1911 edition of the play calling it “the first regular English comedy.”  I do not know what 19th century critics meant by “regular” but this was a 19th century idea, as scholars began to work seriously on figuring which plays survived from the 16th century, that Ralph Roister Doister was the first English comedy.  It is not the first, regular or otherwise.  Let’s return to this issue.

A braggart soldier type (“I am sorry God made me so comely, doubtless,” Act I, Scene ii), the title character, decides, urged on by a parasite type, Matthew Merrygreek, to woo a widow, who is engaged and not very interested.  The big comic misunderstanding involves the mispunctuation of a love letter.  The result is a battle between the widow and her maids, armed with their “tools” (for sewing and weaving and so on) versus Roister Doister, a pail on his head, and his idiot servants.  Perhaps there is a goose involved:

Tibet Talkapace:                                   Shall I go fetch our goose?

Dame Custance:  What to do?

TT:  To yonder captain I will turn her loose:

An she gape and hiss at him, as she doth at me,

I durst jeapord my hand she will make him flee.  (IV. viii)

The battle scene is a bit vague, with lots of room for whatever gags the director can think of.  As you see, the play is written in competent rhyming couplets.

The braggart soldier, and more or less the plot is from Miles Gloriosus (2^nd cent. BCE) by Plautus.  The parasite is from English morality plays.  The servants, the goose, the songs, the names, and the whole tone of the thing are likely from English popular plays, whatever touring groups were performing at fairs.

The names are wonderful.  Tristram Trusty, Margery Mumblecrust, Tibet Talkapace.  I’ve remembered Ralph Roister Doister’s name since I first saw it in some potted history of English theater nearly forty years ago.  The first English comedy should be titled Ralph Roister Doister.

The domestic detail is also a delight.  Here are the maids early on, at work:

Margery Mumblecrust: Well, ye will sit down to your work anon, I trust.

Tibet Talkapace: Soft fire maketh sweet malt, good Madge Mumblecrust.

MM: And sweet malt maketh jolly good ale for the nones.

TT: Which will slide down the lane without any bones.   [Sings.

Old brown bread-crusts must have much good mumbling,

But good ale down your throat hath good easy tumbling.  (I.iii)

The play is slackly paced giving plenty of its time to watching the maids sew and sing.  It is not exactly digressive, but like a musical.  Let’s stop and have a song or whatever:

With every woman he is in some love’s pang.

Then up to our lute at midnight, twangledom twang;

Then twang with our sonnets, and twang with our dumps,

And heigho from our heart, as heavy as lead lumps;

Then to our recorder with toodleloodle poop,

And the howlet out of an ivy bush should whoop…  (II.i)

Nicholas Udall, the likely author, was a schoolmaster.  He likely wrote this play for performance by his schoolboys.  Maybe he was the first schoolmaster to rewrite a Plautus play for his students, although I doubt it.  He may have been the first to make his rewritten Plautus so inventively English.  It could easily be much, much less English.  The Englishness is the best part.

The title character is a direct ancestor of Falstaff, although, remembering the pail on Roister Doister’s head, the Falstaff of Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff in the laundry basket.

The play is also a little step towards the creation of the professional boy’s companies, the aspect of Elizabethan theater I find hardest to imagine.  Fourteen year-old boys performing plays at the level of The Alchemist, how did that work?  But I can imagine them doing Ralph Roister Doister.

Next Monday I will write about another early boy’s comedy, and is it ever, Gammer Gurton’s Needle.