LODGE, THOMAS (c. 15581625)

This article appears in Volume V16, Page 861 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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LODGE, THOMAS (c. 15581625) , English dramatist and miscellaneous writer, was born about 1558 at West Ham. He was the second son of Sir

Thomas

Lodge

, who was lord mayor of London in 15621563. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and Trinity College, Oxford; taking his B.A degree in 1577 and that of M.A. in 1581. In 1578 he entered Lincoln's
play of A Looking Glasse for London and England (printed in 1594). He had already written The Wounds of Civile War. Lively set forth in the Tragedies of Marius and Scilla (produced perhaps as early as 1587, and published in 1594), a good second-rate piece in the half-chronicle fashion of its age. Mr F. G. Fleay thinks there were grounds for assigning to

Lodge

Mucedorus and Amadine, played by the Queen's Men about 1588, a share with Robert

Greene

in George a

Greene

, the Pinner of Wakefield, and in Shakespeare's 2nd part of Henry VI.; he also regards him as at least part-author of The True Chronicle of King Leir and his three Daughters (1594); and The 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. That Lodge is the "

Young

Juvenal " of Greene's Groatsworth of Wit is no longer a generally accepted hypothesis. In the latter part of his lifepossibly about 1596, when he published his Wits Miserie and the World's Madnesse, which is dated from Low Leyton in Essex, and the religious tract Prosopopeia (if, as seems probable, it was his), in which he repents him of his " lewd lines " of other dayshe became a Catholic and engaged in the practice of medicine, for which

Wood

says he qualified himself by a degree at Avignon in 1600. Two years afterwards he received the degree of M.D. from Oxford University. His works henceforth have a sober cast, comprising translations of Josephus (1602), of Seneca (1614), a Learned Summary of Du Bartas's Divine Sepmaine (1625 and 1637), besides a Treatise of the Plague (1603), and a popular

manual

MANUAL

, which remained unpublished, on Domestic Medicine. Early in 16o6 he seems to have left England, to escape the persecution then directed against the Catholics; and a

letter

LETTER (through Fr. lettre from Lat. littera or litera, letter of the alphabet; the origin of the Latin word is obscure; it has probably no connexion with the root of linere, to smear, i.e. with wax, for an inscription with a stilus)

from him dated 1610 thanks the English

ambassador

AMBASSADOR (also EMBASSADOR, the form sometimes still used in America; from the Fr. ambassadeur, with which compare Ital. ambasciatore and Span. embajador, all variants of the Med. Lat. ambassiator, ambassiator, ambasator, &c., derived from Med. Lat. amba

in Paris 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 in 1625 nothing further concerning him remains to be noted.
Lodge's works, with the exception of his translations, have been reprinted for the Hunterian Club with an introductory essay by Mr Edmund Gosse. This preface was reprinted in Mr Gosse's Seventeenth Century Studies (1883). Of Rosalynde there are numerous modern editions. See also J. J. Jusserand, English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare (Eng. trans., 1890) ; F. G. Fleay, Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama (vol. ii., 1891). (A. W. W.)

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