Thomas Lodge | |
|---|---|
| Born | c. 1557 West Ham,East London, England |
| Died | September 1625 (aged 66–67) Old Fish Street,City of London, England |
| Spouses |
|
| Issue | Mary |
| Father | Sir Thomas Lodge |
| Mother | Anne Luddington |
Thomas Lodge (c. 1557 – September 1625) was an English writer and medical practitioner whose life spanned theElizabethan andJacobean periods.[1]
Thomas Lodge was born about 1557 inWest Ham, the second son ofSir Thomas Lodge,Lord Mayor of London,[2][3] by his third wife Anne (1528–1579), daughter of Henry Luddington (died 1531), a Londongrocer.[b][c]
The year before he was born his father had transferred the ownership the manors ofHawkstone andSoulton toSir Rowland Hill, publisher of theGeneva Bible and a fellow Lord Mayor. The Lodge family continued some form of association with those manors, and it has been suggested that this was part of the inspiration of Lodge junior's literary output.[15]
He was educated atMerchant Taylors' School andTrinity College, Oxford; taking his BA in 1577 and MA in 1581. In 1578 he enteredLincoln's Inn, where, as in the otherInns of Court, a love of letters and a crop of debts were common.[2]
Lodge, disregarding the wishes of his family, took up literature. When the penitentStephen Gosson had published hisSchoole of Abuse in 1579, Lodge responded withDefence of Poetry, Music and Stage Plays (1579 or 1580),[16] which shows a certain restraint, though both forceful and learned. The pamphlet was banned, but appears to have been circulated privately. It was answered by Gosson in hisPlayes Confuted in Five Actions; and Lodge retorted with hisAlarum Against Usurers (1584)—a "tract for the times" which may have resulted from personal experience.[17] In the same year he produced the first tale written by him on his own account in prose and verse,The Delectable History of Forbonius and Prisceria, both published and reprinted with theAlarum.[2]
From 1587 onwards he seems to have made a series of attempts at play writing, though most of those attributed to him are mainly conjectural. He probably never became an actor, andJohn Payne Collier's conclusion to that effect rested on the two assumptions that the "Lodge" ofPhilip Henslowe's manuscript was a player and that his name was Thomas, neither of which is supported by the text.[18]
Having been to sea with Captain Clarke in his expedition toTerceira and theCanaries, Lodge in 1591 made a voyage withThomas Cavendish toBrazil and theStraits of Magellan, returning home by 1593.
During the Canaries expedition (circa 1586),[19] to beguile the tedium of his voyage, he composed his prose tale ofRosalynde: Euphues Golden Legacy, Found After His Death In His Cell At Silexedra, (1590). This subsequently furnished the story ofShakespeare'sAs You Like It.
The novel, which in its turn owes some, though no very considerable, debt to the medievalTale of Gamelyn (unwarrantably appended to the fragmentary Cookes Tale in certain manuscripts ofGeoffrey Chaucer's works), is written in theeuphuistic manner, but decidedly attractive both by its plot and by the situations arising from it. It has been frequently reprinted.
The nameEuphues is taken from a work byJohn Lyly, itself taken fromRoger Ascham'sThe Scholemaster, which describes Euphues as a type of student who is:
apte by goodnes of witte, and appliable by readines of will, to learning, hauving all other qualities of the mind and partes of the bodie, that must an other day serue learning, not trobled, mangled, and halfed, but sounde, whole, full & hable to do their office[20]
Before starting on his second expedition he had published a historical romance,The History of Robert, Second Duke of Normandy, surnamedRobert the Devil; and he left behind him for publicationCatharos Diogenes in his Singularity, a discourse on the immorality ofAthens (London). Both appeared in 1591. Another romance in the manner ofLyly,Euphues Shadow, the Battaile of the Sences (1592), appeared while Lodge was still on his travels.[2]
In the latter part of his life—possibly about 1596, when he published hisWits Miserie and the World's Madnesse, which is dated fromLow Leyton in Essex, and the religious tractProsopopeia (if, as seems probable, it was his), in which he repents him of his "lewd lines" of other days—he became aCatholic and engaged in the practice of medicine, for whichWood says he qualified himself by a degree at Avignon in 1600. Two years afterwards he received the degree of M.D. from Oxford University.[21]
Early in 1606 he seems to have left England, to escape the persecution then directed against the Catholics; and a letter from him dated 1610 thanks the English ambassador inParis for enabling him to return in safety. He was abroad on urgent private affairs of one kind and another in 1616. From this time to his death nothing further concerning him remains to be noted.[21]
Lodge while practising medicine in London lived first in Warwick Lane, afterwards in Lambert Hill, and finally in Old Fish Street in the parish of St Mary Magdalen. He died in Old Fish Street in 1625, apparently in the Roman Catholic communion (seebelow).[22] He may have been buried inSt Mary Magdalen Old Fish Street, demolished in 1893, but documentary evidence is lacking.
Lodge's known dramatic work is small in quantity. In conjunction withRobert Greene he, probably in 1590, produced in a popular vein the odd but far from feeble play,A Looking Glass for London and England (published 1594).[23] He had already writtenThe Wounds of Civil War (produced perhaps as early as 1587, and published in 1594), a good second-rate piece in the half-chronicle fashion of its age.[21] Darren Freebury-Jones has advanced arguments that Lodge co-wroteSelimus with Greene.[24]
Fleay saw grounds for assigning to LodgeMucedorus and Amadine, played by theQueen's Men about 1588, a share with Robert Greene inGeorge a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, and in Shakespeare's 2nd part ofHenry VI; he also regards him as at least part-author ofThe True Chronicle ofKing Leir and his three Daughters (1594); andThe Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England (c. 1588); in the case of two other plays he allowed the assignation to Lodge to be purely conjectural.[2]
That Lodge is the "Young Juvenal" of Greene'sGroats-Worth of Wit is no longer a generally accepted hypothesis.[21]
His second historical romance, theLife and Death of William Longbeard (1593), was more successful than the first. Lodge also brought back with him from the new worldA Margarite of America (published 1596), a romance of the same description interspersed with many lyrics. Already in 1589 Lodge had given to the world a volume of poems bearing the title of the chief among them,Scillaes Metamorphosis, Enterlaced with the Unfortunate Love of Glaucus, more briefly known asGlaucus and Scilla. To this tale Shakespeare was possibly indebted for the idea ofVenus and Adonis. In a lost work, theSailor's Kalendar, he must in one way or another have recounted his sea adventures.[2]
If Lodge, as has been supposed, was the Alcon inColin Clout's Come Home Again, it may have been the influence ofEdmund Spenser which led to the composition ofPhillis, a volume ofsonnets, in which the voice of nature seems only now and then to become audible, published with the narrative poemThe Complaynte of Elsired in 1593.A Fig for Momus, on the strength of which he has been called the earliest English satirist, and which contains eclogues addressed toSamuel Daniel and others, an epistle addressed toMichael Drayton, and other pieces, appeared in 1595.[2][d]
After Lodge received his M.D. from Oxford University, his works from then on take on a more serious note, comprising translations ofJosephus (1602), ofSeneca (1614), aLearned Summary ofDu Bartas's Divine Sepmaine (1625 and 1637). He also wrote medical literature including theTreatise of thePlague (1603),The poore Mans Talentt (c. 1623),[26] and a popular manual, which remained unpublished, onDomestic Medicine.[21]
Lodge seems to have married his first wife Joan in or before 1583,[22] when, "impressed with the uncertainty of human life", he made a will.[27] That his family viewed his conduct at the time with disfavour may be inferred from the absence of his name from his father's will in 1583.[28] Lodge and Joan had a daughter Mary.[22] He married secondly Jane, widow of Solomon Aldred, at one time a Roman Catholic agent ofFrancis Walsingham in Rome.[22]
Attribution
This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Ward, Adolphus William (1911). "Lodge, Thomas". InChisholm, Hugh (ed.).Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 16 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 860–861.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Lee, Sidney (1893). "Lodge, Thomas (1558?–1625)". InLee, Sidney (ed.).Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 34. London:Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 60–66.
"Lodge, Thomas",A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, 1910 – viaWikisource
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