Lodge

Lodge, THOMAS, English dramatist, romance-writer, and poet, was born at West Ham about 1556. After studying at Trinity College, Oxford, he entered at Lincoln's Inn, but seems to have led a wild and rollicking life, using his pen occasionally, as in a duel with Gosson, against whom he defended stage-plays in a couple of pamphlets (edited by D. Laing for the Shakespeare Society in 1853). In 1589-91 he varied his life by taking part in two sea-expeditions against the Spaniards, in the neighbourhood of the Azores and Canary Islands. On the first of these voyages he wrote an euphuistic romance, Rosalynde (1590; reprinted in Hazlitt's Shakespeare's Library, vol. ii., and again, separately, in 1887), which supplied England's great dramatist with the chief incidents, and even more than the chief incidents, of As You Like It. Lodge himself wrote two second-rate dramas, The Wounds of Civil War (1594; reprinted in Hazlitt's Dodsley's Select Collection of Old Plays, vol. vii.), and A Looking-glass for London and England (1594), written in collaboration with Robert Greene (q.v.), another dissipated author. He was generally stated to have been a player, until the point was effectively disproved by C. M. Ingleby in 1868. But he is believed to have taken a medical degree at Avignon, and to have written a History of the Plague (1603). He died himself of the plague in 1625. Of his remaining writings we may mention A Fig for Monus (1595; reprinted in Sir A. Boswell's Frondes Caducee, 1817); translations of Seneca (1614) and Josephus (1602); Life of William Longbeard (1593); History of Robin the Divell, Wits Miserie, and Glaucus and Silla (poems, one of which suggested the plan of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, 1589). See the Works, edited by Gosse (4 vols. 4to, 1884).