or in that of the Court. It had now become a not uncommon thing for boys at
the large schools to act in regular dramatic fashion, at first in Latin,
afterward in English translation, some of the plays of the Latin comedians
which had long formed a part of the school curriculum. Shortly after the
middle of the century, probably, the head-master of Westminister School,
Nicholas Udall, took the further step of writing for his boys on the
classical model an original farce-comedy, the amusing 'Ralph Roister
Doister.' This play is so close a copy of Plautus' 'Miles Gloriosus' and
Terence's 'Eunuchus' that there is little that is really English about it;
a much larger element of local realism of the traditional English sort, in
a classical framework, was presented in the coarse but really skillful
'Gammer Gurton's Needle,' which was probably written at about the same
time, apparently by the Cambridge student William Stevenson.

Meanwhile students at the universities, also, had been acting Plautus and
Terence, and further, had been writing and acting Latin tragedies, as well
as comedies, of their own composition. Their chief models for tragedy were
the plays of the first-century Roman Seneca, who may or may not have been
identical with the philosopher who was the tutor of the Emperor Nero. Both
through these university imitations and directly, Seneca's very faulty
plays continued for many years to exercise a great influence on English
tragedy. Falling far short of the noble spirit of Greek tragedy, which they
in turn attempt to copy, Seneca's plays do observe its mechanical
conventions, especially the unities of Action and Time, the use of the
chorus to comment on the action, the avoidance of violent action and deaths
on the stage, and the use of messengers to report such events. For proper
dramatic action they largely substitute ranting moralizing declamation,
with crudely exaggerated passion, and they exhibit a great vein of
melodramatic horror, for instance in the frequent use of the motive of
implacable revenge for murder and of a ghost who incites to it. In the