have come down to us
to see that his life was typically Elizabethan. Like Sidney and like
Raleigh, Lodge lived a varied and active life. He was born in either
1557 or 1558 of a rather prominent middle-class London family, both
his father and his mother's father having been lord mayors of the
city. He was sent to Merchant Taylors' School and afterwards to
Trinity College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1577. Of his career at
the university we know almost nothing except that among his fellow
students were John Lyly, destined to exert a powerful influence upon
his style, and George Peele, later to become a dramatist of note, to
whom Lodge may to some extent have owed his subsequent interest in the
drama.
_Early Work._ After leaving Oxford, Lodge returned to London and
entered the Society of Lincoln's Inn, in other words took up the study
of the law. Legal studies seem not to have absorbed his attention to
the total exclusion of literary work. The occasion of his first
publication was the death of his mother in 1579. In that year appeared
the "Epitaph of the Lady Anne Lodge." This is not extant, but his
reply to Stephen Gosson's "School of Abuse" has survived. Gosson's
book had been a furious attack upon the contemporary drama. Lodge's
reply was a fair sample of the literary billingsgate of that
controversial age and deserves the oblivion into which it promptly
sank. His next publication was his "Alarum against Usurers" (1584), a
book belonging to a class of tracts popular in that day in which the
characters and customs of the underworld of London were exposed to
popular execration. The impulse to engage in this journalistic kind of
work Lodge may have owed to Robert Greene, the dramatist, with whom he
at this time became intimate, and whose popular books on cony-catching
the "Alarum," in its spirit and purpose, closely resembles. Greene
certainly furnished some of the inspiration for the dramatic attempts
that followed. Lodge's play, "The Wounds of Civil War," though not
printed till 1594, may have been acted in 1587. We know that he
collaborated with Greene in "A Looking Glass for London and England,"
produced in 1592.
_Later Work and Death._ It is not, however, as a dramatist that Lodge
is remembered, but as a writer of pastoral romance. Here the
discursive and idyllic quality of his genius, both in verse and prose,
was to find complete and unhampered expression. Of the pastoral
romances that Lodge produced during t
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