Early life Thomas Lodge was born about 1557 in
West Ham, the second son of
Sir Thomas Lodge,
Lord Mayor of London, by his third wife Anne (1528–1579), daughter of Henry Luddington (died 1531), a London
grocer. , a manor on the edge of the
Forest of Arden the Lodge family were associated with and lived at before transferring the freehold to 'Old' Sir Rowland Hill The year before he was born his father had transferred the ownership the manors of
Hawkstone and
Soulton to
Sir Rowland Hill, publisher of the
Geneva Bible and a fellow Lord Mayor. The Lodge family continued some form of association with those manors, and it has been suggested that this was part of the inspiration of Lodge junior's literary output. He was educated at
Merchant Taylors' School and
Trinity College, Oxford; taking his BA in 1577 and MA in 1581. In 1578 he entered
Lincoln's Inn, where, as in the other
Inns of Court, a love of letters and a crop of debts were common.
Early literary work Lodge, disregarding the wishes of his family, took up literature. When the penitent
Stephen Gosson had published his
Schoole of Abuse in 1579, Lodge responded with
Defence of Poetry, Music and Stage Plays (1579 or 1580), which shows a certain restraint, though both forceful and learned. The pamphlet was banned, 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)—a "tract for the times" which may have resulted from personal experience. In the same year he produced the first tale written by him on his own account in prose and verse,
The Delectable History of Forbonius and Prisceria, both published and reprinted with the
Alarum. From 1587 onwards he seems to have made a series of attempts at play writing, though most of those attributed to him are mainly conjectural. He probably never became an actor, and
John Payne Collier's conclusion to that effect rested on the two assumptions that the "Lodge" of
Philip Henslowe's manuscript was a player and that his name was Thomas, neither of which is supported by the text. Having been to sea 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.
Writing Shakespeare source material During the Canaries expedition (circa 1586), to beguile the tedium of his voyage, he composed his prose tale of
Rosalynde: Euphues Golden Legacy, Found After His Death In His Cell At Silexedra, (1590). This subsequently furnished the story of
Shakespeare's
As You Like It. The novel, which in its turn owes some, though no very considerable, debt to the medieval
Tale of Gamelyn (unwarrantably appended to the fragmentary Cookes Tale in certain manuscripts of
Geoffrey Chaucer's works), is written in the
euphuistic manner, but decidedly attractive both by its plot and by the situations arising from it. It has been frequently reprinted. The name
Euphues is taken from a work by
John Lyly, itself taken from
Roger Ascham's
The Scholemaster, which describes Euphues as a type of student who is: apte by goodnes of witte, and appliable by readines of will, to learning, hauving all other qualities of the mind and partes of the bodie, that must an other day serue learning, not trobled, mangled, and halfed, but sounde, whole, full & hable to do their office
Later works and later life Before starting on his second expedition he had published a historical romance,
The History of Robert, Second Duke of Normandy, surnamed Robert the Devil; 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. In the latter part of his life—possibly 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 days—he 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. Early in 1606 he seems to have left England, to escape the persecution then directed against the Catholics; and a letter from him dated 1610 thanks the English ambassador 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 nothing further concerning him remains to be noted. Lodge while practising medicine in London lived first in Warwick Lane, afterwards in Lambert Hill, and finally in Old Fish Street in the parish of St Mary Magdalen. He died in Old Fish Street in 1625, apparently in the Roman Catholic communion (see
below). He may have been buried in
St Mary Magdalen Old Fish Street, demolished in 1893, but documentary evidence is lacking. ==Dramatic works==