Nicholas Udall Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Nicholas Udall

An Oxford-trained classical scholar, Nicholas Udall belongs to the second generation of English humanists. His works consistently reflect his trust in English as a language rich and flexible enough to transmit the subtleties of the classics and truth of the Bible to a modern reader. Although his fame in his own century rested securely on sensitive and accurate translations of Terence and Erasmus, he is known today chiefly as the "father of English comedy." Typical of his century, Udall acknowledged his hand in his Latin translations, writing prefaces for them and carefully superintending their publication; but his surviving plays were printed posthumously and anonymously. It is therefore perhaps inevitable that the playwright whose one legitimate comedy, Ralph Roister Doister, brought the Roman five-act structure to the English stage should in the twentieth century have accumulated a little family of unattributed "classical" interludes. John Bale, writing in 1557, praised Udall's "Comodias plures" but did not name them.

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