Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 3).pdf/427

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in the lists of Archer and Kirkman (Greg, Masques, lxii). It can hardly have been the Jerusalem revived by Strange's in 1592 (Greg, Henslowe, ii. 155). Can any light be thrown on Fuller's story by the fact that in 1584 a 'new Play of the Destruction of Jerusalem' was adopted by the city of Coventry as a craft play in place of the old Corpus Christi cycle, and a sum of £13 6s. 8d. paid to John Smythe of St. John's, Oxford, 'for hys paynes for writing of the tragedye' (Mediaeval Stage, ii. 361; H. Craig, Coventry Corpus Christi Plays (E. E. T. S.), 90, 92, 93, 102, 103, 109)?


THOMAS LODGE (c. 1557-1625).

Lodge, who uses the description 'gentleman', was son of Sir Thomas Lodge, a Lord Mayor of London. His elder brother, William, married Mary, daughter of Thomas Blagrave, Clerk of the Revels (cf. ch. iii). He entered Merchant Taylors in 1571, Trinity College, Oxford, in 1573, whence he took his B.A. in 1577, and Lincoln's Inn in 1578. In 1579 (cf. App. C, No. xxiii) he plunged into controversy with a defence of the stage in reply to Stephen Gosson's Schoole of Abuse. Gosson speaks slightingly of his opponent as 'hunted by the heavy hand of God, and become little better than a vagrant, looser than liberty, lighter than vanity itself', and although Lodge took occasion to defend his moral character from aspersion, it is upon record that he was called before the Privy Council 'to aunswere certen maters to be by them objected against him', and was ordered on 27 June 1581 to give continued attendance (Dasent, xiii. 110). By 1583 he had married. His literary work largely took the form of romances in the manner of Lyly and Greene. Rosalynde: Euphues' Golden Legacy, published (S. R. 6 Oct. 1590) on his return from a voyage to Terceras and the Canaries with Captain Clarke, is typical and was Shakespeare's source for As You Like It. His acknowledged connexion with the stage is slight; and the attempt of Fleay, ii. 43, to assign to him a considerable share in the anonymous play-writing of his time must be received with caution, although he was still controverting Gosson in 1583 (cf. App. C, No. xxxv), and too much importance need not be attached to his intention expressed in Scylla's Metamorphosis (S. R. 22 Sept. 1589):

To write no more of that whence shame doth grow,
Or tie my pen to penny knaves' delight,
But live with fame, and so for fame to write.

He is less likely than Nashe to be the 'young Juvenal, that biting satirist, that lastly with me together writ a Comedy' of Greene's Groats-worth of Wit epistle in 1592 (cf. App. C, No. xlviii). I should not cavil at the loose description of A Looking Glass for London and England as a comedy; but 'biting satirist' hardly suits Lodge; and at the time of Greene's last illness he was out of England on an expedition led by Thomas Cavendish to South America and the Pacific, which started on 26 Aug. 1591 and returned on 11 June 1593. After his return Lodge essayed lyric in Phillis (1593) and satire in A Fig for Momus (1595); but he cannot be shown to have resumed writing for