Thomas Lodge
born c. 1557, London?, Eng.
died 1625, London
English poet, dramatist, and prose writer
whose innovative versatility typified the
Elizabethan age. He is best remembered for the
prose romance Rosalynde, the source of William
Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
He was the son of Sir Thomas Lodge, who was
lord mayor of London in 1562. The younger Lodge
was educated at Merchant Taylors’ School and at
Trinity College, Oxford, and he studied law at
Lincoln’s Inn, London, in 1578. Lodge’s earliest
work was an anonymous pamphlet (c. 1579) in
reply to Stephen Gosson’s attack on stage plays.
His next work, An Alarum Against Usurers (1584),
exposed the ways in which moneylenders lured
young heirs into extravagance and debt. He then
engaged in varied literary activity for a number
of years. His Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589), an
Ovidian verse fable, is one of the earliest
English poems to retell a classical story with
imaginative embellishments, and it strongly
influenced Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.
Lodge’s Phillis (1593) contains amorous sonnets
and pastoral eclogues from French and Italian
originals. In A Fig for Momus (1595), he
introduced classical satires and verse epistles
(modeled after those of Juvenal and Horace) into
English literature for the first time. Aside
from Rosalynde: Euphues Golden Legacie (1590),
which provided the plot for Shakespeare’s
comedy, Lodge’s most important romance was A
Margarite of America (1596), which combines
Senecan motives and Arcadian romance in an
improbable love story between a Peruvian prince
and a daughter of the king of Muscovy. His other
romances are chiefly notable for the fine lyric
poems scattered through them. Lodge continued to
write moralizing pamphlets such as Wits Miserie,
and the Worlds Madnesse (1596), and in 1594 he
published two plays: The Wounds of Civill War
and (with Robert Greene) A Looking Glasse for
London and England.
To escape poverty Lodge took part in
unprofitable freebooting voyages to the Canary
Islands in 1588 and to South America in 1591. In
1597 he became a Roman Catholic, and he
graduated in medicine from the University of
Avignon in 1598. He received another M.D. degree
from Oxford in 1602 and thereafter practiced
medicine in London and in Brussels, where he
took refuge as a recusant following exposure of
the Gunpowder Plot (1605). He was back in
England by 1612, became a distinguished
physician in London, and died there while
fighting the plague in 1625. His later works
include A Treatise of the Plague (1603) and two
major translations: The Works of Lucius Annaeus
Seneca (1614) and The Famous and Memorable Works
of Josephus (1620), both of which went through
many editions.
Much of Lodge’s work before 1600 was
surreptitious translation, but in this regard he
shows a real talent for creative selection and
assimilation from classical, French, and Italian
sources. His reputation remains based chiefly on
his poetry and his romances. Of his pamphlets,
Wits Miserie and the Alarum are memorable for
their cameos of London life, reminiscent of the
writings of Thomas Nashe.
