Ralph Roister Doister | |
---|---|
Written by | Nicholas Udall |
Characters | Ralph Roister Doister; Matthew Merrygreeke; Dobinet Doughty; Harpax; Christian Custance; Madge Mumblecrust; Tibet Talkapace; Annot Alyface; Trupenny; Gawyn Goodluck; Tristram Trustie; Sym Suresby; Scrivener |
Date premiered | 1550s |
Place premiered | London |
Original language | English |
Genre | Comedy |
Setting | London |
Ralph Roister Doister is a sixteenth-century play by Nicholas Udall, which was once regarded as the first comedy to be written in the English language. [1]
The date of its composition is disputed, but the balance of opinion suggests that it was written in about 1552, when Udall was a schoolmaster in London, and some theorise the play was intended for public performance by his pupils—who were all male, as were most actors in that period. The work was not published until 1567, 11 years after its author's death.
Roister Doister seems to have been inspired by the works of Plautus and Terence. The title character is a variation on the "Braggart Soldier" archetype, but with the innovation of a parasitic tempter which stems from the morality play tradition. [2] By combining the structures, conventions, and styles of the ancient Greek and Roman comedies with English theatrical traditions and social types (especially the relatively new and burgeoning English middle classes), Udall was able to establish a new form of English comedy, leading directly through to Shakespeare and beyond. [3] The play blends the stock plot-elements and stock characters of the ancient Greek and Roman theatre with those of chivalric literature and the English mediaeval theatre. [4]
The play is written in five acts. The plot of the play centres on a rich widow, Christian Custance, who is betrothed to Gawyn Goodluck, a merchant. Ralph Roister Doister is encouraged throughout by a con-man trickster figure (Matthew Merrygreeke) to woo Christian Custance, but his pompous attempts do not succeed. Ralph then tries with his friends and servants (at Merrygreek's behest) to break in and take Christian Custance by force, but they are defeated by her maids and run away. The merchant Gawyn arrives shortly after and the play concludes happily with reconciliation, a prayer and a song.
Readings and stagings of the play have taken place throughout the 20th century, notably a 1910 production by the Philolexian Society of Columbia University and a 1953 presentation by Oxford University students at the Edinburgh Festival. Three adaptations of the play appeared in the 1930s, 1960s, and 1980s. [5]
Titus Maccius Plautus was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest Latin literary works to have survived in their entirety. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by Livius Andronicus, the innovator of Latin literature. The word Plautine refers to both Plautus's own works and works similar to or influenced by his.
The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment that flourished in 16th- and early 17th-century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy, in forms including the intermedio. A masque involved music, dancing, singing and acting, within an elaborate stage design, in which the architectural framing and costumes might be designed by a renowned architect, to present a deferential allegory flattering to the patron. Professional actors and musicians were hired for the speaking and singing parts. Masquers who did not speak or sing were often courtiers: the English queen Anne of Denmark frequently danced with her ladies in masques between 1603 and 1611, and Henry VIII and Charles I of England performed in the masques at their courts. In the tradition of masque, Louis XIV of France danced in ballets at Versailles with music by Jean-Baptiste Lully.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1552.
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker was the last of the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett, published in London on 17 June 1771, and is considered by many to be his best and funniest work. It is an epistolary novel, presented in the form of letters written by six characters: Matthew Bramble, a Welsh Squire; his sister Tabitha; their niece Lydia and nephew Jeremy Melford; Tabitha's maid Winifred Jenkins; and Lydia's suitor Wilson.
Nicholas Udall was an English playwright, cleric, schoolmaster, the author of Ralph Roister Doister, generally regarded as the first comedy written in the English language.
Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber was a comedic sketch on the American television show Saturday Night Live which first aired on April 22, 1978. The title character was a barber surgeon played by comedian Steve Martin, a frequent host of the show. The central gag revolved around Theodoric's belief in bloodletting as a solution to his patients' maladies. The character was brought back in a sequel, "Theodoric of York, Medieval Judge" on November 4 of the same year, in which Theodoric applied the same unenlightened methods to jurisprudence.
A Yorkshire Tragedy is an early Jacobean era stage play, a domestic tragedy printed in 1608. The play was originally assigned to William Shakespeare, though the modern critical consensus rejects this attribution, favouring Thomas Middleton.
John Still was Master of two Cambridge colleges and then, from 1593, Bishop of Bath and Wells. He enjoyed considerable fame as an English preacher and disputant. He was formerly reputed to be the author of an early English comedy drama, Gammer Gurton's Needle.
Rule a Wife and Have a Wife is a late Jacobean stage comedy written by John Fletcher. It was first performed in 1624 and first published in 1640. It is a comedy with intrigue that tells the story of two couples that get married with false pretenses.
The Servant of Two Masters is a comedy by the Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni written in 1746. Goldoni originally wrote the play at the request of actor Antonio Sacco, one of the great Harlequins in history. His earliest drafts had large sections that were reserved for improvisation, but he revised it in 1789 in the version that exists today. The play draws on the tradition of the earlier Italian commedia dell'arte.
PLS, or Poculi Ludique Societas, the Medieval & Renaissance Players of Toronto, sponsors productions of early plays, from the beginnings of medieval drama to as late as the middle of the seventeenth century.
Summer's Last Will and Testament is an Elizabethan stage play, a comedy written by Thomas Nashe. The play is notable for breaking new ground in the development of English Renaissance drama. The literary scholar George Richard Hibbard says "No earlier English comedy has anything like the intellectual content or the social relevance that it has."
The Decameron, subtitled Prince Galehaut and sometimes nicknamed l'Umana commedia, is a collection of short stories by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). The book is structured as a frame story containing 100 tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men; they shelter in a secluded villa just outside Florence in order to escape the Black Death, which was afflicting the city. Boccaccio probably conceived of the Decameron after the epidemic of 1348, and completed it by 1353. The various tales of love in The Decameron range from the erotic to the tragic. Tales of wit, practical jokes, and life lessons contribute to the mosaic. In addition to its literary value and widespread influence, it provides a document of life at the time. Written in the vernacular of the Florentine language, it is considered a masterpiece of early Italian prose.
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television. Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the epic and the lyrical modes ever since Aristotle's Poetics —the earliest work of dramatic theory.
Fulgens and Lucrece is a late 15th-century interlude by Henry Medwall. It is the earliest purely secular English play that survives. Since John Cardinal Morton, for whom Medwall wrote the play, died in 1500, the work must have been written before that date. It was probably first performed at Lambeth Palace in 1497, while Cardinal Morton was entertaining ambassadors from Spain and Flanders. The play is based on a Latin novella by Buonaccorso da Montemagno that had been translated into English by John Tiptoft, 1st Earl of Worcester and published in 1481 by William Caxton. The play was printed in 1512–1516 by John Rastell, and was later only available as a fragment until a copy showed up in an auction of books from Lord Mostyn's collection in 1919. Henry E. Huntington acquired this copy, and arranged the printing of a facsimile. The play is an example of a dramatised débat.
Hazel M. Neilson-Terry was an English actress. A member of the theatrical dynasty the Terry family she had a successful stage career, and also made some cinema films. Among her roles was Ophelia in Hamlet opposite her cousin John Gielgud.
Love for Love is a Restoration comedy written by English playwright William Congreve. It premiered on 30 April 1695 at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre. Staged by Thomas Betterton's company the original cast included Betterton as Valentine, William Smith as Scandal, John Bowman as Tattle, Thomas Doggett as Ben, Samuel Sandford as Foresight, William Bowen as Jeremy, John Freeman as Buckram, Anne Bracegirdle as Angelica, Elizabeth Bowman as Mrs Foresight, Elizabeth Barry as Mrs Frail, Elinor Leigh as Nurse and Abigail Lawson as Jenny.
The Interlude of the Student and the Girl is one of the earliest known secular plays in English, first performed c. 1300. The text is written in vernacular English, in an East Midlands dialect that suggests either Lincoln or Beverley as its origin, although its title is given in Latin. The name of its playwright is unknown. Only two scenes, with a total of 84 lines of verse in rhyming couplets, are extant and survive in a manuscript held by the British Library, dated to either the late twelfth or very early thirteenth century. Glynne Wickham provides both the original text and a rendering in modern English in his English Moral Interludes (1976). In tone and form, the interlude seems to be the closest play in English to the contemporaneous French farces, such as The Boy and the Blind Man, and is related to later English farcical plays, such as the anonymous Calisto and Melibea and John Heywood's The Foure PP. It was most likely performed by itinerant players, possibly making use of a performing dog. In Early English Stages (1981), Wickham points to the existence of this play as evidence that the old-fashioned view that comedy began in England with Gammer Gurton's Needle and Ralph Roister Doister in the 1550s is mistaken, ignoring as it does a rich tradition of medieval comic drama. He argues that the play's "command of dramatic action and of comic mood and method is so deft as to make it well-nigh unbelievable" that it was the first of its kind in England.
L’Étourdi ou les Contretemps, also known in English as The Bungler, is a five-act theatrical comedy by the French playwright Molière. After premiering in Lyon in 1655, it appeared at the Théâtre du Petit-Bourbon in Paris in November 1658. The plot follows a servant's schemes to help his wealthy employer win the affections of a poor young woman.
Jack Juggler is an anonymous sixteenth-century comic interlude, considered to be one of the earliest examples of comedy in English alongside Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton's Needle. The play is believed to have been written sometime between 1553 and 1561 and was first published in 1562. The author of the play is uncertain, however it has been proposed to be the work of the London schoolmaster, Nicholas Udall. As the full title indicates, the play was most likely performed by a troupe of child-actors possibly at court during the Christmas season. The plot is an adaptation of a section of the play Amphitryon by the Roman comic playwright Plautus.