Background
He was born about 1558, probably in London, where in 1562 his father was lord mayor. Lodge's life and writings show typical Elizabethan versatility.
(Edited with Introduction and Notes by Edward Chauncey Bal...)
Edited with Introduction and Notes by Edward Chauncey Baldwin Ph.d. Professor of English Literature at the University of Illinois
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He was born about 1558, probably in London, where in 1562 his father was lord mayor. Lodge's life and writings show typical Elizabethan versatility.
Graduated from Oxford in 1577, he studied law at Lincoln's Inn. Later he went to Avignon about 1596 to study medicine, which he practiced with distinction.
He joined two expeditions to the New World, and finally, debt-ridden through attempts to live by his pen, and in difficulties due to his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church, went to Avignon about 1596.
From 1579 to 1596 Lodge essayed many forms of literature: a defense of poetry; moralistic pamphlets, among them An Alarum Against Usurers (1584) and Wit's Misery and the World's Madness (1596); drama, including the Wounds of Civil War (c. 1588) and Looking Glass for London and England (c. 1590, with Robert Greene); narrative and lyric poems; the earliest avowed verse satire in English, A Fig for Momus (1595); and prose tales and romances.
He translated the works of Josephus (1602) and the philosophical works of Seneca (1614). Scilla's Metamorphosis (1589), the first of many English poems to tell a classical story with imaginative coloring, unquestionably influenced Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. Some of Lodge's other poetry appears in Phillis (1593), a sequence of sonnets and pastorals, and the rest is scattered through the pages of his romances. Though his lighter pieces are notably musical and charming, Lodge's poems are so frequently imitated from Italian and French sources that he seems more translator than creator.
He wrote several romances in the Euphuistic style of John Lyly and the pastoral manner of his friend Robert Greene. Rosalynde, Euphues' Golden Legacy (1590), is the most important, both because of its intrinsic merit and because it supplied Shakespeare with the plot of As You Like It. A Margarite of America (1596) is the latest.
(Edited with Introduction and Notes by Edward Chauncey Bal...)
Lodge seems to have married his first wife Joan in or before 1583. Lodge and Joan had a daughter Mary. He married secondly Jane, widow of Solomon Aldred.
