denied to Still. The metre of the
play itself is very similar to that of _Ralph Roister Doister_, though the
long swinging couplet has a tendency to lengthen itself still further, to
the value of fourteen or even sixteen syllables, the central caesura being
always well marked, as may be seen in the following:--

_Diccon._ "Here will the sport begin, if these two once may meet,
Their cheer, [I] durst lay money, will prove scarcely sweet.
My gammer sure intends to be upon her bones,
With staves, or with clubs, or else with cobble stones.
Dame Chat on the other side, if she be far behind,
I am right far deceived, she is given to it of kind.
He that may tarry by it a while, and that but short,
I warrant him trust to it, he shall see all the sport.
Into the town will I, my friends to visit there,
And hither straight again to see the end of this gear.
In the meantime, fellows, pipe up your fiddles; I say, take
them,
And let your friends hear such mirth as ye can make them."

As for the story, it is of the simplest, turning merely on the losing of
her needle by Gammer Gurton as she was mending her man Hodge's breeches, on
the search for it by the household, on the tricks by which Diccon the
Bedlam (the clown or "vice" of the piece) induces a quarrel between Gammer
and her neighbours, and on the final finding of the needle in the exact
place on which Gammer Gurton's industry had been employed. The action is
even better sustained and livelier than in Udall's play, and the swinging
couplets canter along very cheerfully with great freedom and fluency of
language. Unfortunately this language, whether in order to raise a laugh or
to be in strict character with the personages, is anything but choice.
There is (barring a possible double meaning or two) nothing of the kind
generally known as licentious; it is the merely foul and dirty language of
common folk at all times, introduced, not with humorous extravagance in the
Rabelaisian fashion, but with literal realism. If there had been a little
less of this, the piece would have been much improved; but even as it is,
it is a capital example of farce, just as _Ralph Roister Doister_ is of a
rather rudimentary kind of regular comedy.

The strangeness of the contrast which these two plays offer when compared
with