LODGE, THOMAS (c. 1558-1625), 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 1562-63. He was educated at Merchant Taylor's 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 Inn. When the penitent Stephen Gosson had (in 1579) published his Schoole of Abuse, Lodge took up the glove in his Defence of Poetry, Music and Stage Plays (1579 or 158o; reprinted for the Shakespeare Society, 1853), which shows a certain restraint, though neither deficient in force of invective nor backward in display of erudition. The pamphlet was prohibited, but appears to have been circulated privately. It was answered by Gosson in his Playes Confuted in Five Actions; and Lodge retorted with his Alarum Against Usurers (1584, reprinted ib.)—a "tract for the times" which no doubt was in some measure indebted to the author's personal experience. He was called before the Privy Council in 1581 to answer for certain matters brought against him.
In 1583 he produced The Delectable History of Forbonius and Prisceria, both published and reprinted with the Alarum. In his tales he follows the lead of Greene and Lyly.
Having, in the spirit of his age, "tried the waves" with Captain Clarke in his expedition to Terceira and the Canaries, Lodge in 1591 made a voyage with Thomas Cavendish to Brazil and the Straits of Magellan, returning home by 1593. During the Ca naries expedition, to beguile the tedium of his voyage, he composed his prose tale of Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie, which, printed in 159o, afterwards furnished the story of Shakespeare's As You Like It. The novel, which in its turn owes some debt to the mediaeval Tale of Gamelyn, is written in the euphuistic man ner. It has been frequently reprinted. Before starting on his second expedition he had published an historical romance, The History of Robert, Second Duke of Normandy, surnamed Robert the Divell; and he left behind him for publication Catharos, Diogenes in his Singularity, a discourse on the immorality of Athens (London). Both appeared in 1591.
Another romance in the manner of Lyly, Euphues Shadow, the Battaile of the Sences (1592), appeared while Lodge was still on his travels. His second historical romance, the Life and Death
of William Longbeard (1593), was more successful than the first. Lodge also brought back with him from the new world A Mar garite of America (published 1596), a romance of the same de scription interspersed with many lyrics. Already in 1589 Lodge had given to the world a volume of poems bearing the title of the chief among them, Scillaes Metamorphosis, Enterlaced with the Unfortunate Love of Glaucus, more briefly known as Glaucus and Scilla (reprinted with preface by S. W. Singer in 1819). To this tale Shakespeare was possibly indebted for the idea of Venus and Adonis. Some readers would perhaps be prepared to give up this and much else of Lodge's sugared verse, fine though much of it is in quality, largely borrowed from other writers, French and Ital ian in particular, in exchange for the lost Sailor's Kalendar, in which he must in one way or another have recounted his sea adventures. If Lodge, as has been supposed, was the Alcon in Colin Clout's come Home Again, it may have been the influence of Spenser which led to the composition of Phillis, a volume of sonnets, published with the narrative poem, The Complaynte of Elstred, in 1593. A Fig for Momus, on the strength of which he has been called the earliest English satirist, and which contains eclogues addressed to Daniel and others, an epistle addressed to Drayton, and other pieces, appeared in 1595.
Lodge's ascertained dramatic work is small in quantity. In conjunction with Greene he, probably in 159o, produced in a popular vein the odd but far from feeble play of A Looking Glasse for London and England (printed in 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 a good second-rate piece in the half-chronicle fashion of its age. Various critics have assigned to Lodge a share in Mucedorus and Amadine, played by the Queen's Men about 1588, in George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, in Shakespeare's 2nd part of Henry VI., and in The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England (c. 1588).