Nicholas Udall (or Uvedale Udal, Woodall, or other variations) (1504 – 23 December 1556) was an English playwright, cleric, schoolmaster, the author of Ralph Roister Doister, generally regarded as the first comedy written in the English language.
Biography
Udall was born in Southampton and educated at Winchester College, then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he held a scholarship. In 1524 he was elected a probationer fellow and probably took his B.A. The felony of buggery, like all other felonies, carried a sentence of capital punishment by hanging, but Udall wrote an impassioned plea to his old friends from Cromwell's household Thomas Wriothesley and Sir Ralph Sadler, then joint king's Secretaries, and his sentence was commuted to imprisonment for just under a year, which he served in the Marshalsea. The boys in question were not prosecuted. A former pupil, the poet Thomas Tusser, later claimed that Udall had flogged him without cause. In the same year, he published Flovres for Latine Spekynge, a collection of material from his comedy and works by the Roman poet Terence put together for his pupils. This tract has sometimes been wrongly attributed to Philip Nichols.
It has been argued that Udall is the author of the dramatic interlude Respublica, which was acted before Queen Mary in 1553.
In literature
In Ford Madox Ford's trilogy of historical novels The Fifth Queen, the character Magister Nicholas Udal is a decidedly heterosexual profligate, who serves as Latin tutor to Princess Mary and to Henry VIII's fifth queen, Katharine Howard. He defends himself against charges that he was "thrown out of his mastership at Eton for his foul living" by claiming that he, a Protestant, "was undone by Papist lies."