Born, in London, 1558(?). At Merchant Taylors’ School, March, 1570 to 1573(?). To Trinity College, Oxford, as Servitor, 1573(?); B.A., 8 July 1577; M.A., 3 Feb. 1581. Student of Lincoln’s Inn, 26 April 1578. Devoted himself to literature. Married (i.) Joan——, 1583. Tragedy, “The Wounds of Civill War,” produced, 1587(?); “A Looking Glasse for London and England” (written with Greene), produced 8 March 1592. Possibly wrote other plays with Greene. Visited Canaries, 1588–89(?); South America, 1591–93. Moved from London to Low Leyton, Essex, 1596; began to study medicine. M.D., Avignon, 1600. M.D., Oxford, 25 Oct. 1602. Licentiate, College of Physicians, 1610. Practised in London. Travelled frequently on Continent. Married (ii.) Jane Aldred. Died, in London, Sept. (?) 1625. Works: “Defence of Plays,” 1580(?); “An Alarum against Usurers,” 1584; “Scillaes Metamorphysis,” 1589 (later edn., called: “A most pleasant historie of Glaucus and Scilla,” 1610); “Rosalynde” (anon.), 1590; “Robert, second Duke of Normandy,” 1591; “Catharos” (anon.), 1591; “Euphues Shadow” (anon.), 1592; “Phillis,” 1593; “Life and death of William Longbeard” (anon.), 1593; “The Wounds of Civill War,” 1594; “A Looking Glasse for London” (with Greene), 1594; “A Fig for Momus” (anon.), 1595; “The Divel Conjured” (anon.), 1596; “A Margarite of America,” 1596; “Wits Miserie,” 1596; “Prosopopeia,” 1596; “Paradoxes” (anon.), 1602; “A Treatise of the Plague,” 1603. He translated: Josephus’ Works, 1602; Seneca’s Works, 1614; “A Learned Summary of Du Bartas,” 1625. Collected Works: ed. by E. Gosse, with memoir, 1878–82.

Rosalynde, 1590

  Placing Lodge’s novel by the side of other productions of the same class, we cannot hesitate to declare it a very amusing and varied composition, full of agreeable and graceful invention (for we are aware of no foreign authority for any of the incidents), and with much natural force and simplicity in the style of the narrative. That it is here and there disfigured by the faults of the time, by forced conceits, by lowness of allusion and expression, and sometimes by inconsistency and want of decorum in the characters, cannot be denied. These are errors which the judgment and genius of Shakespeare taught him to avoid; but the admitted extent and nature of his general obligations to Lodge afford a high tribute to the excellence of that “original,” which Steevens pronounced “worthless.”

  The last work of fiction of any importance which distinctly bears the impress of euphuism…. It is probably the only work of fiction of Elizabeth’s time which could be read through at the present day without impatience.

  Lodge was a true poet, though his path was on the lower slopes of Parnassus, and his “Rosalynde” has much natural beauty that is in some sense heightened by the artifices of its style.

  If Sidney had no followers in the line of ideal fiction, he had at least a rival with the novel readers of the time in the person of Thomas Lodge. The latter’s “Rosalind,” which appeared about the same time as the “Arcadia,” resembles the latter in its essence, being an attempt to fuse in one narrative the best features of the heroic and pastoral school of fiction. It is possible that Lodge may have received some useful hints from the efforts of Sidney, but at all events his story is more compact, more logical, and consequently more readable. Certain situations of the romances of chivalry are here repeated and the pastoral notion of the heroine’s disguise in man’s dress plays a prominent part in the plot.

  Lodge’s (Thomas) “Rosalynde,” 1598. Longman (1815), £20 (imperfect). Heber, £5, 10s. Ouvry (1882), £63.

General

  To the Gentlemen Readers, Health. Gentlemen, after many of mine owne labours that you have courteouslie accepted, I present you with Euphues shadowe, in the behalfe of my absent friend, M. Thomas Lodge, who at his departure to sea upon a long voyage, was willing, as a generall farewell to all courteous Gentlemen, to leave this his worke to the view, which if you grace with your favours eyther as his affected meaning, or the worthe of the worke requires, not onely I for him shall rest yours, but what laboures his Sea studies affords, shall be, I dare promise, offered to your sight, to gratifie your courtesies, and his pen, as himselfe every waye yours for ever. Farewell.

  Lodge and Greene are the only imitators of Lyly who have atoned for affectation of style by any felicity of genius or invention.

  As a poet, Lodge is to be placed in a rank superior to Greene, and in some respects inferior to Kyd. Greene’s love of natural beauty was overlaid by a mass of affectation and conceit, which rarely allowed it to appear, and to a certain degree he was imitated by Lodge, with whom he was intimate, and with whom he wrote one dramatic performance. The love of natural beauty in Lodge, however, breaks through the fanciful allusions and artificial ornaments with which he endeavoured to adapt himself to the taste of the time.

  One of the best poets of the age.

  His lines [“Wounds of Civil War”] possess not the slightest approach to flexibility; they invariably consist of ten syllables, with a pause at the end of every line—“each alley like its brother;” the ocasional use of the triplet is the only variety. Lodge’s tragedy has the appearance of a most correct and laboured performance; and the result is that of insufferable tediousness.

  In considering Lodge’s literary character, it may be remarked that he belongs to a class of writers, the Greenes, Lylys, Marlowes, and Peeles, displaying poetical and dramatic genius, not indeed of the highest order, but from the versatility of their talents, and the early period in which they flourished, as the precursors of our greater English dramatists, not likely to be soon forgotten.

  Lodge’s love-poems have an exquisite delicacy and grace: they breathe a tenderer and truer passion than we find in any of his contemporaries. His sonnets are more loose and straggling, slighter and less compactly built, than Constable’s or Daniel’s; but they have a wonderful charm of sweet fancy and unaffected tenderness. His themes are the usual praises of beauty and complaints of unkindness; but he contrives to impart to them a most unusual air of sincere devotion and graceful fervour. None of his rivals can equal the direct and earnest simplicity and grace of his adoration of Phyllis, and avowal of faith in her constancy…. There is a seeming artlessness in Lodge’s sonnets, a winning directness, that constitutes a great part of their charm. They seem to be uttered through a clear and pure medium straight from the heart: their tender fragrance and music come from the heart itself. If the poet’s design was to assume a pastoral innocence and simplicity, he has eminently succeeded. There are many conceits in his sonnets, but they are expressed so simply and naturally that they take on the semblance of half-earnest beliefs…. It may, however, be acknowledged that Lodge’s nature was not specially fitted for the sonnet form of composition; he was not sufficiently patient and meditative to elaborate intricate stanzas. His lines have on them the dewy freshness of an impulsive gush,—a freshness off which the dew has not been brushed by the travail of thought; and the opening of his sonnets in many cases leads us to expect better things than we find as we proceed when the leading idea has been hammered out into a quatorzain…. Lodge’s “Fig for Momus” is often amusing, but the satire is not very pungent. He was much too good-natured a man to be a satirist: he was not capable even of smiling spite, much less of bitter derision.

  All the sonnets in the “Phillis,” a work of the most tantalizing inequality, suffer more or less from Lodge’s caprices of style; so that while only a necessary discretion is exercised in limiting the selection to a single sonnet, it has been too frequently at a sacrifice of beauties which one would fain pluck from their commonplace environment.

  Lodge was the least boisterous of the noisy group of learned wits who, with Greene and Marlowe at their head, invaded London from the universities during the close of Elizabeth’s reign…. In some respects Lodge is superior to most of the lyrical poets of his time. He is certainly the best of the Euphuists, and no one rivalled him in the creation of a dreamy scene, “out of space, out of time,” where the loves and jousts of an ideal chivalry could be pleasantly tempered by the tending of sheep. His romances, with their frequent interludes of fine verse, are delightful reading, although the action flags, and there is simply no attempt at characterisation. A very courtly and knightly spirit of morality perfumes the stately sentences, laden with learned allusion and flowing imagery; the lovers are devoted beyond belief, the knights are braver, the shepherds wiser, the nymphs more lovely and more flinty-hearted than tongue can tell…. Among all the Elizabethans, no one borrowed his inspiration more directly from the Italians than Lodge…. As a satirist Lodge is weak and tame; as a dramatist he is wholly without skill; as a writer of romances we have seen that he is charming, but thoroughly artificial. It is by his lyrical poetry that he preserves a living place in literature. His best odes and madrigals rank with the finest work of that rich age. In short pieces of an erotic or contemplative character he throws aside all his habitual languor, and surprises the reader, who has been toiling somewhat wearily through the forest of Arden, by the brilliance and rapidity of his verse, by the elan of his passion, and by the bright turn of his fancy. In his best songs Lodge shows a command over the more sumptous and splendid parts of language, that reminds the reader of Marlowe’s gift in tragedy; and of all the Elizabethans Lodge is the one who most frequently recalls Shelley to mind.

  Lodge, indeed, as it seems to me, was one of the not uncommon persons who can always do best with a model before them. He euphuised with better taste than Lyly, but in imitation of him; his tales in prose are more graceful than those of Greene, whom he copied; it at least seems likely that he out-Marlowed Marlowe in the rant of the “Looking-Glass for London,” and the stiffness of the “Wounds of Civil War,” and he chiefly polished Sidney in his sonnets and madrigals. It is not to be denied, however, that in three out of these four departments he gave us charming work.

  If Lodge cannot be considered a man of genius, he is certainly a writer of very remarkable gifts.

  Of all Lodge’s multifarious writings, his contributions to the drama form the least valuable portion.

  For this name or ideal, or whatever Phillis represented in the poet’s thought, he has poured forth a passion that has an air of sincerity, an artless freshness, a flute-like clearness of tone, as rare as delightful. It is the very voice of the oaten pipe itself, thin, clear, and pure. The touches of seriousness are impossible to mistake…. In spite of its defects, the lax structure of the sonnet-form, the obscurities and needless blurring, and the disappointing inequalities, “Phillis” takes a high place among the sonnet-cycles.

  Lodge has suffered the fate of all poets who have thought of their style before their subject. He had a graceful fancy, a fine taste, and a tuneful ear, but his mind was not possessed by any idea of universal interest. He was first inspired to write by the atmosphere of prevailing Euphuism; most of his compositions—plays, novels, histories, sonnets, and satires—are steeped in this fashionable manner. For many of the subjects he attempted he had no turn. His dramas are written with a heavy hand; his satires are of that general kind which awakens no fear, and therefore no interest. The sonnet had long ceased to yield any fresh store of conceits; and the only novelties that Lodge could introduce into it for the glorification of his Phillis were double rhymes and fresh mechanical combinations of sound.