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Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets

Thomas Lodge

by Carole Moses

Other literary forms

Thomas Lodge wrote widely in genres other than poetry. His first prose work was A Reply to Gosson (1580), an answer to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse (1579). His prose romances include The Delectable History of Forbonius and Prisceria (1584), Rosalynde: Or, Euphues Golden Legacy (1590), Euphues Shadow (1592), and A Margarite of America (1596). Other prose works encompass miscellaneous subject matter: a biography, The Famous, True, and Historical Life of Robert Second Duke of Normandy (1591); an invective in dialogue form, Catharos (1591); and a historical narrative, The Life and Death of William Long Beard (1593). An Alarum Against Usurers (1584), an exposé of contemporary money lenders, has the strong moral message of A Looking Glass for London and England (pr. c. 1588-1589), the play that Lodge wrote with Robert Greene. In about 1586, The Wounds of Civill War, another play he had written, was produced. His pamphlets on philosophical and religious topics include The Diuel Coniured (1596), Prosopopeia (1596), and Wits Miserie and Worlds Madnesse (1596). His later works are translations (The Flowers of Lodowicke of Granado, 1601; The Famous and Memorable Works of Josephus, 1602; The Works, both Morall and Natural, of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 1614; A Learned Summary upon the Famous Poem of William of Saluste, Lord of Bartas, 1625) and medical works (A Treatise on the Plague, 1603; The Poore Mans Talentt, 1621).

Achievements

Thomas Lodge’s poetry displays a facility in versification that, by itself, would mark him as a poetic talent. His experiments with verse forms—quatrains and couplets in Scillaes Metamorphosis, sonnets of ten to thirty-two lines ranging from tetrameters to hexameters in the poems appended to Scillaes Metamorphosis, poems mixing long and short lines in the miscellanies, and iambic pentameter couplets in the satires—show him to be much concerned with the craft of poetry, even when his experiments are not successful. He shows the same eagerness in trying new types of poems and subject matter, and his works range from sonnets to verse epistles, complaints, satires, eclogues, lyrics, and Ovidian narrative. His debt to the Romans in his verse epistles, satires, and Ovidian narrative is one that later writers also incurred, and Lodge to a great extent introduced these literary forms into English. Not all his works are equally successful, and his facility at versification and image making sometimes produces trivial or precious poems; nevertheless, he did point the way to later poetic development in English literature.

Biography

Thomas Lodge’s biography is sketchy. The existing evidence prompted early biographers to portray him as a dissolute rake—disinherited by his family and jailed for debts—but more recent writers have been kinder. Although his mother was apparently worried about Lodge’s stability, she also favored him in her will above her other sons. Furthermore, even though there are ample records of suits and countersuits involving Lodge and various creditors, some of his problems seem to have been caused by naïveté, such as neglecting to get receipts and then being sued for ostensibly unpaid debts.

Lodge was born probably in 1558, since on taking his bachelor’s degree in 1577 he would most likely have been eighteen or nineteen. Moreover, in a lawsuit with his brother William in 1594, he lists his age as being about thirty-six. In A Treatise on the Plague, he talks about London as if it were his birthplace, and presumably it was. His father was a prosperous grocer who became city alderman and, in 1562, Lord Mayor of London. As a child, Thomas Lodge may have been a page in the household of Henry Stanley, fourth earl of Derby: A Fig for Momus opens with a dedication to Stanley’s son, William, and reminds him of the time his “noble father in mine infancie . . . incorporated me into your house.” If this reference is to a lengthy period of time spent in Stanley’s household, he surely would have met the famous people of his day and acquired the attributes—and education—of a gentleman.

Lodge’s affluence, however, was not to continue. By the time his father had finished his term as Lord Mayor, he declared bankruptcy, a victim of financial problems caused by England’s war with France and the 1563 outbreak of the plague. When Thomas Lodge entered the Merchant Taylor’s School in 1571, he was one of a group of students who were admitted as the sons of poor men, paying reduced tuition. In 1573, Lodge entered Trinity College, Oxford. After taking his degree, he entered the Inns of Court in 1578.

His relationship with his parents at this period is problematical. When his father died in 1584, Thomas Lodge was not mentioned in his will. By this time, Lodge had written pamphlets—his A Reply to Gosson—and perhaps had converted to Catholicism. Trinity College, which had been founded during Mary’s reign, still reflected strong Catholic influences, and Lincoln’s Inn also had strong Catholic affinities, numbering among its members many recusants. In 1581, Lodge had been called before the Privy Council to answer charges, perhaps stemming from his religion. His literary activity and new religion might have displeased his father enough to cause him to disinherit his son; on the other hand, his mother’s will, made in 1579, had already left him a large estate, which perhaps accounts for his father’s reluctance to leave him any more. Yet even his mother’s intentions are open to speculation. She stipulated that Lodge was not to receive his bequest until he was twenty-five, prompting some biographers to believe that she doubted her son’s stability. She also included a proviso that Lodge would receive a yearly allowance only if he stayed at Lincoln’s Inn and conducted himself “as a good student ought to do.” If his behavior displeased her executors, they were to distribute his bequest among her other sons; Lady Anne seems to have felt the need to exercise special control over this particular son. Early biographers tended to see Lodge at this period as a profligate and debt-ridden young man. This view, however, is based partly on Gosson’s attack on Lodge’s character, which is hardly a credible source. Lodge’s youthful degeneracy seems to have been exaggerated in early accounts of his life.

Sometime between 1585 and 1588, Lodge made a sea voyage, a venture he was to repeat in 1591 with Sir Thomas Cavendish. This latter voyage shows the perils to which the Elizabethan sense of adventure could lead: The expedition was plagued with bad weather, a mutinous crew, and widespread disease. Throughout his life, Lodge had published regularly, no matter what he did on a day-to-day basis; in 1597, however, he turned to the study of medicine and from then on produced only translations or works on medicine. He took his medical degree from the University of Avignon and probably practiced for a while in Belgium. He later returned to England and, in 1602, had his degree from Avignon registered at Oxford, a formality that would, perhaps, have attracted English clients. During the plague of 1603, Lodge worked tirelessly, even publishing a treatise on the disease with the intent of discrediting quack doctors who were profiting from people’s fear and ignorance.

In 1604, Lodge married the widow of an Elizabethan spy who had formerly been a Catholic working for the pope. Although this man eventually became an atheist, his wife remained loyal to her religion, receiving a pension from Gregory XIII. Lodge’s marriage to her—along with his own earlier conversion—apparently brought him under suspicion by the government, and the Royal College of Physicians denied him permission to practice in London. By 1605, Lodge was again practicing in Belgium. Finally, with the help of the English ambassador to France, he was allowed to return to England and, in 1610, entered the Royal College of Physicians. The plague again swept through London in 1625 and Lodge was made plague-surgeon. He died in 1625, presumably a victim of that disease.

In many ways Lodge’s life exemplifies the variety of experience that a Renaissance man might have. While born to wealth, he was often involved in litigation over debts, whether incurred through real want or only through carelessness. A writer of delicate sonnets, he was also an adventurer who undertook two sea voyages. Although he was not persecuted for his religion as actively as some, his fortunes still rose and fell as his beliefs changed. Finally, the rather heedless young man acquired over the years a moral depth that caused him to work assiduously as a doctor throughout the plague years while others were fleeing London.

Analysis

Perhaps Thomas Lodge’s most famous work is the prose romance Rosalynde, the source for William Shakespeare’s As You Like It (pr. c. 1599-1600) and a lively piece of writing by itself. Although the prose narrative of Rosalynde lies outside the bounds of this analysis, it does contain lyrical poems that, for their excellence, rival the best of Lodge’s work. Their beauty was appreciated by Lodge’s contemporaries, and many reappeared in England’s Helicon (1600). Containing simple and even homely images and language, they explore the paradoxes of the Petrarchan lover without being excessive; as usual, Lodge is a master of metrics and many of these lyrics are presented as songs. “Rosalynds Madrigal” is an especially good example of Lodge’s success as a lyricist. The poem alternates long and short lines in the first quatrain of each stanza; the stanzas close with four consecutive rhyming lines and a final line that may or may not rhyme with one of the lines in the first or second quatrain. Lodge’s craftsmanship is evident in the way he can alternate long and short lines and use intermittently rhyming final stanza lines to achieve a musical effect. The homely images—love builds a “neast” in Rosalynd’s eyes—also give the poem a certain lightness of tone. Many of the poems he wrote for the miscellanies show the same light touch and metrical skill:

My bonnie Lasse thine eie,

So slie,

Hath made me sorrow so:

Thy Crimsen cheekes my deere,

So cleere,

Hath so much wrought my woe.

Phillis with the Tragical Complaynt of Elstred

When Lodge’s lyrics fail, they do so because they lack lightness and are not really profound enough to carry their serious, heavy tone; often they simply catalog the complaints of the Petrarchan lover and use balanced euphuistic lines to achieve a stately emphasis. Such emphasis seems misplaced, however, since the situations Lodge describes are often derivative. The sonnets in Phillis with the Tragical Complaynt of Elstred vary in quality. Some of them have the light touch of Rosalynde, although even in these Lodge is not consistent. Sonnet 13 opens by comparing Cupid to a bee: “If I approach he forward skippes,/ And if I kisse he stingeth me.” The images describing love become more conventional as he goes along—tears, fire—and the poem ends with a conventional statement of constancy: “But if thou do not loue, Ile trulye serue hir,/ In spight of thee, by firme faith deserue hir.” Sonnet 37, containing heavy hexameter lines, lacks even the intermittently light tone of Sonnet 13.

The Phillis with the Tragical Complaynt of Elstred sequence closes with a long medieval complaint, “The Complaint of Elstred.” Although hardly an inspired poem, it does show Lodge’s affinities with pre-Renaissance verse. “Truth’s Complaint over England” is also medieval in feeling and recounts Truth’s lament over the condition of Lodge’s England. Lodge’s concept of satire seems mixed in his early works. “Truth’s Complaint over England” achieves its social criticism through moralizing sentiments reminiscent of medieval complaint; Lodge’s A Reply to Gosson, however, seems to show an awareness of different satiric possibilities. Confusing the etymology of satire and satyr—as most Renaissance writers did—Lodge gives a history of drama in which he asserts that tragedy evolved from satyr plays. The widely accepted Renaissance belief was that these plays allowed the playwright to scourge his audiences for their vices by having a satyr denounce them. In this way English writers came to think of satire as a harsh, uncouth form: Juvenal as opposed to the more urbane Horace. Lodge himself follows Scillaes Metamorphosis by a poem titled “The Discontented Satyr,” a paean to discontent, the best emotion one can feel in a corrupt age.

A Fig for Momus

By the time he wrote A Fig for Momus, Lodge seems to have adopted this harsher Juvenalian mode of satire. This series of poems opens with a satire of flatterers and hypocrites, and Lodge is at his best in the imaginary characters and situations he evokes. Meeting an innkeeper with “a silken night-cap on his hed,” the narrator is told that the man has had “An ague this two months.” The narrator comments sardonically that “I let him passe: and laught to heare his skuce:/ For I knew well, he had the poxe by Luce.” Lodge’s second satire—incorrectly labeled the third—urges parents to set good examples for their children. The piece owes a special debt to Juvenal’s Satire 14 on the same subject, and, if much of it seems simply moral preaching, the sheer number of vices that he catalogs keeps the poem moving. Perhaps Lodge’s fourth satire offers his most memorable and bitter character study: a miser, old and decrepit, but still concerned with amassing a greater fortune. The gruesomely realistic description of the man shows Lodge at his best. His fifth satire opens with a paraphrase of Juvenal’s Satire 10, although his debt to Horace is also apparent in his description of the contented life. If this satire is less bitter and harsh than his others, it is perhaps because of the influence of Horace. In addition to introducing Juvenal into English literature, Lodge made one other lasting contribution to English satire: He was the first to use the epigrammatic pentameter couplet.

If A Fig for Momus does not seem, as a whole, the bitter invective that the satiric elements might lead one to expect, it is because Lodge has interspersed other genres: eclogues and verse epistles. His eclogues offer little new to English literature—Alexander Barclay, Barnabe Googe, Edmund Spenser, and Michael Drayton had already worked in this form—and their general theme of human corruption is not developed in an interesting way. Furthermore, their poetry, compared to Spenser’s masterpiece in this genre, is noticeably deficient, Lodge’s verse epistles, however, were the first to appear in English and, although they are uneven, the best of them have a lightness and wit that are typical of Lodge. The epistle “To his Mistress A. L.” opens with a buildup in the first two lines that the following ones humorously deflate: “In that same month wherein the spring begins,/ And on that day when Phoebe left the twinnes/ (Which was on Saturday, the Twelfth of March)/ Your servant brought a letter seal’d with starch.” The letter turns out to be a request for information on how to lose weight, and the epistle cites various learned authorities on the subject, concluding that it is better to be “fat, slicke, faire” than “leane, lancke, spare.” The epistle titled “In praise of his Mistris dogge” opens wittily enough with a request that his mistress “for a night . . . grant me Pretties place,” and then proceeds to a canine history, ending with a pun: “Thus for your dog, my doggerell rime hath runne.”

Scillaes Metamorphosis

If Lodge introduced the verse epistle into English, he was also one of the first to write Ovidian narrative, a literary type that would later appear in Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598), Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593), Drayton’s Endimion and Phoebe (1595), and John Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image and Certain Satires (1598). Ovid had, of course, been known before Lodge: Arthur Golding’s translation of the Metamorphosis (1567) was a standard Elizabethan treatment of the Roman poet. Yet Golding allegorizes Ovid to make his eroticism acceptable; Lodge is far from finding any allegory in his source.

Scillaes Metamorphosis is noteworthy for its elaborate images and conceits: Lodge has taken Ovid’s 143 lines and expanded them to nearly 800. To the original story of Glaucus’s love for the disdainful Scilla, Lodge adds an opening frame story in which the narrator, also a rejected lover, walks along the shore “Weeping my wants, and wailing scant reliefe.” Finally, he meets Glaucus, the sea god, and hears his story. As Glaucus recounts Scilla’s disdain to a group of nymphs, Venus appears with Cupid. Cupid cures Glaucus’s lovesickness with an arrow and then shoots Scilla, who immediately falls in love with Glaucus, who now rejects her. Knowing her case to be hopeless, Scilla finally curses all men, whereupon she is beset by the personifications Furie, Rage, Wan-hope, Dispair, and Woe, who transform her into a flinty isle.

If one could sum up Lodge’s handling of Ovid in one word, it would be “embroidery.” Whenever Lodge can stop for a lengthy and sensuous description, he does. Some of these are very successful, such as the description of Venus after she has found the wounded Adonis: It ends with Lodge’s touching lines “How on his senseless corpes she lay a crying,/ As if the boy were then but new a dying.” The story of Venus and Adonis itself shows Lodge’s leisurely narrative pace, since it is interpolated in the main story of Glaucus. Glaucus’s description of Scilla is also leisurely and sensuous. Ovid simply says that she was sine vestibus when Glaucus saw her; Lodge’s Glaucus minutely recounts her physical beauty, dwelling on her hair, cheeks, nose, lips, neck, breasts, and arms.

The flaws in Lodge’s poem—and it is by no means of uniform quality—have to do in part with this massing of description and detail. Lodge does not seem to have any awareness that his poem cannot sustain the same high pitch stanza after stanza: Glaucus’s laments, for example, all begin to sound alike. Lodge has partially dealt with this problem in the frame story at the beginning of the poem, the very place where the reader is unlikely to need a rest from the high pitch of the poem. Nevertheless, Lodge does offer an interesting double perspective on Glaucus that the rest of the poem might have done well to develop. After the narrator spends four stanzas crying and groaning over an unrequited love, Glaucus appears and berates the narrator’s love-sickness in stanzas that almost bristle with moral advice. After counseling the narrator, however, Glaucus falls into exactly the same error and even faints while describing his own hopeless love. This humorous contradiction between Glaucus’s words and actions lends an ironic perspective to the story that the rest of the poem does not explore. Indeed, the personifications from medieval allegory who transform Scilla seem totally out of place in Lodge’s poem, as if he had not really decided what the dominant tone of Ovidian narrative should be.

His verse form is also ill-chosen, although he does the best he can with it. Composed of stanzas consisting of a quatrain (abab) and a couplet (cc), the poem has difficulty moving forward: The couplets are always stopping the flow of action. In one sense this hardly matters, since Lodge is more concerned with leisurely description than with fast-paced narrative action. The poem, nevertheless, is a narrative, however leisurely, and the recurring couplets do present a problem. Lodge almost seems to feel that this is so and usually manages to begin a new clause as the couplet begins, avoiding at least the awkwardness of the self-contained couplet having to continue the lines before it.

Hardly any of Lodge’s long poems are unqualified successes, although they all have striking passages and show much facility of versification. That he was an experimenter is evident in the number of new poetic forms he introduced into English; experimenters cannot always produce perfect products. Nevertheless, music and lightness of tone mark many of Lodge’s best works and make him a considerable figure in the development of Renaissance poetry.

Bibliography

Donno, Elizabeth Story. “The Epyllion.” In English Poetry and Prose, 1540-1674, edited by Christopher Ricks. New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1986. A leading authority on Elizabethan narrative poetry, Donno illuminates the conventions and qualities that characterize the forms. Places Lodge clearly against his cultural background. The thorough index demonstrates Lodge’s manifold activities, and the bibliography covers all major works.

Holmes, John. “Thomas Lodge’s Amours: The Copy-Text for Imitation of Ronsard in Phillis.” Notes and Queries 53, no. 1 (March, 2006): 55-58. In 1904, L. E. Kastner denounced Lodge as a plagarist for similarities in his work to the sonnets of Pierre de Ronsard. Holmes examines what Lodge’s debt is to Ronsard and compares their works.

Lodge, Thomas. Rosalind: Euphues’ Golden Legacy Found After His Death in His Cell Silexedra (1590). Edited by Donald Beecher. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1997. Beecher provides an informative introduction to the work that served as the basis for Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Bibliographical references, index.

Ostriker, Alicia, and Leslie Dunn. “The Lyric.” In English Poetry and Prose, 1540-1674, edited by Christopher Ricks. New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1986. Ostriker and Dunn divide the field here, the former taking verse written independently, the latter lyrics written for music—a division first made during the Elizabethan period. Lodge is covered in both categories. The index demonstrates more of his diversity, and the bibliography collects the primary sources.

Rae, Wesley D. Thomas Lodge. New York: Twayne, 1967. A critical biography of Lodge that includes a chronology, an index, and a detailed bibliography.

Ryan, Pat M. Thomas Lodge, Gentleman. Hamden, Conn.: Shoestring Press, 1958. Ryan’s book is a study of Lodge’s life and work, intended for students and general readers.

Walker, Alice. The Life of Thomas Lodge. Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1978. A biography of the life of Thomas Lodge.

Citation Types

Type

Format

MLA 9th

Moses, Carole. "Thomas Lodge." Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets, edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman, Salem Press, 2011. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSPBIC_11180160000161.

APA 7th

Moses, C. (2011). Thomas Lodge. In R. M. Reisman (Ed.), Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.

CMOS 17th

Moses, Carole. "Thomas Lodge." Edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman. Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2011. Accessed September 15, 2025. online.salempress.com.

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