Thomas Lodge Research Articles

“Roote out those odde rymes!”: The Unruly Matter of Early Modern Verse

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the literary-critical metaphors of late sixteenth-century England, taking as its starting point Thomas Lodge’s 1579 call to “roote out those odde rymes which runnes in euery rascales mouth.” In contrast to the humanist poetics that envisioned poetic form as geometric, even transcendent, artifice, Lodge’s language (“roote out,” “runnes”) suggests the earthbound and invasive. In this, it belongs to a cluster of early modern metaphors that figure poetic structures (rhyme, metric feet, alliteration) as material, biological forms. Moving between Lodge’s, William Webbe’s, Gabriel Harvey’s and Edmund Spenser’s “ecopoetic” metaphors, this article proposes an early modern “ecopoetics.” It argues that to recognize how such poetic structures “act as quasi agents … with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” is to reapproach early modern poiesis, centering less on the individual poet’s delimiting techne and more on how extra-human patterns and rhythms find their way onto the page.

The Matter of Virtue: Women's Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare

The Matter of Virtue: Women's Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare

Civic Catholicism, Military Humanism, and the Decline of Justice in Thomas Lodge's The Wovnds of Ciuill War (1594)

D. Alan Orr considers Thomas Lodge's The Wovnds of Ciuill War (1594) and its relationship to republican ideas during the "second" reign of Elizabeth I (ca. 1585–1603). Although Andrew Hadfield has argued that the play "contains many of the characteristics of republicanism," Lodge's marked skepticism toward Machiavellian-inspired military-humanist values suggests a more ambiguous relationship with early modern republicanism. Lodge was less the "republican," as Hadfield has asserted, than the Catholic, articulating a "civic Catholicism" in which the public observances and rituals of the "old religion" played an integral role in the maintenance of public morality, civil order, and justice.

“The Wished Aire”: Biblical Plagues and the Early Modern Playhouse

À une époque où les épidémies de peste sont fréquemment attribuées à la providence divine et associées à la mauvaise qualité de l’air, les théâtres élisabéthains sont identifiés par leurs détracteurs comme des lieux de contagion. Les dramaturges contemporains répondent à de telles accusations en les thématisant dans leur théâtre même. Ainsi, dans A Looking-Glass for London and England de Thomas Lodge et Robert Greene (c. 1589), pièce élisabéthaine tardive qui met en scène le récit des plaies bibliques s’abattant sur la cité antique de Ninive, Lodge (lui-même médecin et dramaturge) et son co-auteur Greene explorent la capacité de leur théâtre à évoquer la menace de la peste par l’intermédiaire d’effets sensoriels et d’images frappantes, avant de faire de cette atmosphère délétère « l’air désiré » de la rédemption.

A taste for art in colonial Queensland

This study arose from an encounter with some paintings (still lives, Madonnas and other religious or genre scenes of mainly seventeenth-century Northern European origin) at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2012. They were intriguing because they were part of a bequest by squatter and colonial parliamentarian Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior (1819–92), which formed the nucleus of the original Queensland Art Gallery collection when it opened in 1895. Little is known about them, but they raise questions: What part did they play in the life of the donor? Did he collect them merely to burnish his reputation? Were they hung in a town house or in the bush? How did they enter the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery and what reception did they receive? What subsequent use has been made of them? This article examines the collection and the role it played in Murray-Prior’s life, arguing that it is a coherent collection of Northern European art and more than a status symbol. Furthermore, it has much to say about a period that saw the development of art collecting and exhibiting. As such, it is the perfect foundation for an art gallery in colonial Australia.

What Was Thomas Lodge’s Josephus in Early Modern England?

What Was Thomas Lodge’s Josephus in Early Modern England?

Prosopopoeia and Maternity in Edmund Spenser and Thomas Lodge

Prosopopoeia and Maternity in Edmund Spenser and Thomas Lodge

El príncipe tirano by Juan de la Cueva as the Spanish source of Thomas Lodge’s A Margarite of America: A comparative suggestion

Lodge claimed A Margarite of America (1596) was based on a still unidentified “historie in the Spanish tong.” Although several critics have suggested that the romance’s design outlines the structure of a play, the source “historie” has never been sought in the Spanish theatre. This essay proposes Juan de la Cueva’s El príncipe tirano (1583) as the possible Spanish source text of Lodge’s Margarite. After an introduction, the plot is outlined to show, firstly, the romance’s intertextual elements already detected by scholarly criticism and, secondly, others Lodge might have borrowed from El príncipe tirano. This article will supplement current studies on Margarite by shedding new light on the plot and characters.

Catholic Translation and Protestant Translation: The Reception of Luis de Granada's Devotional Prose in Early Modern England

Through a survey of the translations produced by Richard Hopkins, Francis Meres, Thomas Lodge, and others, this essay investigates the various audiences Luis de Granada's writings had, and the different ways in which they were both received and rendered into English. The translators’ aims, and, in particular, their attitudes to the doctrinal positions they found his writings to espouse, are examined. This involves asking how Granada's works were modified for audiences of different religious persuasions within the general context of Anglo-Hispanic relations in this period, and more particularly of the place of Catholic texts in a no longer Catholic England.

Faustus Face to Face with Damnation: Another Morality Model

This article employs close textual analysis to propose as a source for the final despairing soliloquy of the protagonist of Christopher Marlowe's tragedy _Doctor Faustus_ (1592) the analogous despair of the protagonist of the neo-Latin tragedy _Mercator seu Judicium_ (1540) by the German Protestant polemecist Thomas Kirchmeyer (alias Naogeorgus). In addition, the French translation of this work by Jean Crespin, as _Le Marchant converti_ (1558), appears to have influenced the anonymous revisers of Marlowe's original tragedy (the so-called A-text), who supplied the scene (in the B-text) with a more spectacular theatrical dimension, including a gaping hell-mouth. Finally, comparison is also made with the soliloquy of the penitent Usurer in the fantastic biblical morality play, _A Looking Glass for London and England_, by Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene (1589-90), which also owes a debt to Kirchmeyer. The fact that the Usurer is finally saved by the gift of divine mercy, as also is Kirchmeyer's Mercator, intertextually throws into relief the damnation of Faustus and highlights Marlowe's problematic evocation of the question of pre-destination.

Renaissance Epyllions: A Comparative Reading of Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Thomas Lodge’s Scylla’s Metamorphosis and Francis Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus

The present paper is supposed to compare and contrast three of these masterpieces written the Renaissance period. The epyllions under study are Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander , Thomas Lodge’s Scylla’s Metamorphosis and Francis Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus . Bush believes that “the influence of Marlowe is very pronounced in the Salmacis and Hermaphroditus of 1602, which has been associated with Francis Beaumont, but, it is generally agreed, is almost certainly no this. The poem is top heavy with decorative additions, and the myth-making faculty runs wild” (213). The shared characteristic of these works is their indebtedness to Ovid’s Metamorphosis , so it is important to analyze their modifications so as to observe in what way or ways they are different from their original stories. Moreover, the paper will analyze these works based on their treatment of such elements as narration, subversive facets, intertextuality, their relation to their paintings and other important aspects of the works. At the end, the researcher is going to compare and contrast these epyllions and their paintings of the era in order to analyze their mutual influence which may affect the understanding of their readers. Keywords: epyllion, Renaissance, Marlowe, Lodge, Beaumont, intertextuality

Thomas Watson, Shadow Poet Of Edmund Spenser

ALTHOUGH scholars consider Thomas Watson (1556?–92) a minor Elizabethan poet, who, in about a dozen years, published ten books, six in Latin and four in English,1 his contemporaries extolled him as a major writer. Gabriel Harvey in Four Letters and Certain Sonnets (1592) commended Richard Stanihurst, Abraham Fraunce, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and Watson for ‘enriching, and polishing their native Tongue’. George Peele in The Honour of the Garter (1593) placed Watson in heaven ‘For his sweete Poesie’. In Cephalus and Procris (1595), Thomas Edwards ranked Watson with Spenser, Thomas Lodge, Christopher Marlowe, and Shakespeare as the writers who have enhanced Elizabeth’s reign. Finally, in Have with you to Saffron Walden (1596), Nashe praised Watson as a poet who ‘hath … few … equalls in England’.2 This litany of praise is so markedly different from modern critical evaluation of Watson that it raises the question of whether his acclaim resulted solely from a myopic contemporary perspective or whether another unacknowledged factor was also involved. C. S. Lewis aptly observed that ‘One of the uses of Watson’s work is to show that … between supreme and mediocre poetry, there can be a clear likeness’.3 I would maintain that it is Watson’s ‘likeness’ to Spenser that helped to elevate his literary standing among his contemporaries.

The Cambridge companion to Shakespeare and contemporary dramatists

1. John Lyly and the university wits: George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge and Thomas Nashe Arthur F. Kinney 2. Thomas Kyd and the Elizabethan blockbuster: The Spanish Tragedy Clara Calvo 3. 'The words of mercury': Shakespeare and Marlowe Richard Wilson 4. The dyer's hand: Shakespeare and Jonson Warren Chernaik 5. Urbane John Marston: obscenity, playfulness, co-operation Matthew Steggle 6. Thomas Dekker and the emergence of city comedy Darryll Grantley 7. Shakespeare: colleagues, collaborators, co-authors Ton Hoenselaars 8. Thomas Heywood: dramatist of London and playwright of the passions Jean E. Howard 9. George Chapman's learned drama Paul Franssen 10. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's tragicomedy as musical melodrama Catherine Henze 11. Thomas Middleton and the early modern theatre Michelle O'Callaghan 12. John Webster: collaboration and solitude Robert Henke 13. John Ford: suffering and silence in Perkin Warbeck and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore Lisa Hopkins 14. Philip Massinger: drama, reputation, and the dynamics of social history Rui Carvalho Homem 15. Richard Brome and the idea of a Caroline theatre Heather Hirschfeld 16. Troublesome histories: performance and early modern drama Elizabeth Schafer.

Renaissance historical fiction: Sidney, Deloney, Nashe

Davis's study could scarcely be more timely or invigorating. SEAN KEILEN, College of William and Mary. Williamsburg VA A majority of the fiction composed in England in the second half of the sixteenth century was set in the past. All the major prose writers of the period (Thomas Lodge, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Deloney, Robert Greene) produced historical fiction, with settings ranging from the ancient world (as in Sidney's Arcadia) to the time of Henry VIII (in Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller). Yet while studies of the historical drama of the period abound, the historical bias of prose fiction has so far escaped any sort of sustained critical consideration. Renaissance Historical Fiction is the first book-length study of this important topic. It argues for the complex ways in which these prose fictions engage with an idea of the past, and of their power to destabilize some of our dominant models for understanding the period of 'the Renaissance'. The wide range of texts discussed includes Lodge's Robin the Devil; Greene's Ciceronis Amor; John Lyly's Euphues and his England; and the anonymous Famous History of Friar Bacon. In addition, a chapter apiece is devoted to three key authors (Sidney, Deloney and Nashe) whose work best represents the imaginative richness and thematic complexity of the historical fiction of the late sixteenth century. Alex Davis is Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews.

Locrine, Selimus, Robert Greene, and Thomas Lodge

Locrine, Selimus, Robert Greene, and Thomas Lodge

Sardanapalus at the Globe 3 April 2009

Byron wrote in Don Juan that to 'trace all actions to their secret springs / Would make indeed some melancholy mirth'. This Rochefoucauldian insight is powerful but Byron was never quite so consistently pessimistic as La Rochefoucauld. At least some secret springs, surely, are without taint? The recent London production on 3 April 2009 of Sardanapalus at the restored Globe Theatre is a case in point. Someone in the Byron Society had the very bright idea that some of the Globe company might be interested in staging a version of the play as part of their 'Read not Dead' programme. They were. And what an enjoyable and instructive occasion resulted from this secret spring! These productions are in part of the Globe building that is slowly being turned into an indoor stage space since, after all, Shakespeare intended his plays both for outdoor performance and for indoor, artificially lit stagings in Blackfriars and elsewhere. The extremely enterprising 'Read not Dead' series - which has been going since 1994 - does semi-performances of rarely performed plays such as those by Thomas Lodge, or even poems such as Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander'. 'Semi-performance' means that trained actors prepare the play in full or slightly cut versions (Sardanapalus lasted for two hours and was skilfully adjusted to do so), that they read the parts rather than memorise them but know them well (the verse-speaking was mostly excellent), and that only a few basic props are employed (here there was thunder, swords, armour, a javelin stuck all too convincingly in Salemenes, flowers, a mirror, the distant sound of a trumpet, a funeral pyre and a real flame to ignite it). The actors had also well planned a series of exits and entrances and stage movements. The sense of a raging battle going on just outside the set was convincing, and also the strong sense of the deserted palace at the end of the play. I had never really registered this in simply reading the play. A simple but wonderfully effective ploy was to situate and hold Sardanapalus and his wife at opposite sides of the stage and then allow them gradually to converge as feelings revive within them, so much so that Salemenes has to use a lot of force to wrench her away into her off-stage exile. All these planned dramatic choices were intelligent and they all worked. It is hard to think that a more fully mounted production would have achieved anything superior to this though, obviously, fully memorised parts would be better if possible. The end of the play presents considerable problems. A fully fledged funeral pyre is as difficult to contrive as, nowadays, the representation of a hero or heroine who smokes. Victorian productions presumably got round this by the use of a curtain but here, wittily and movingly, Myrrha brought a lit candle to the pyre and at the moment when the text calls for ignition, both characters blew out the light, thus suggesting the end and their end. What did I learn from this production that many readings of the play have not made clear to me? One thing that I certainly had not anticipated was that the audience laughed quite a lot - not at the play but with some of Sardanapalus's quips. This play is obviously much closer to the wit of Don Juan than to the studied intensity of Marino Faliero or The Two Foscari. …

SPENSER'S ROSALIND

When Edmund Spenser used the name 'Rosalind' in The Shepheardes Calender (1579), he deliberately established a literary puzzle, one that was solved the following year with the publication of his correspondence with Gabriel Harvey. The name 'Rosalind', deliberately reused in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), is one with which he played games with his readers, teasing them about details of his life and its relationship to his work. Subsequent writers, notably Thomas Lodge, looked back to Spenser when they used the name. Spenser also influenced Romeo and Juliet, where Shakespeare's use of 'Rosaline' indicates rivalry with poets as well as dramatists.

Shakespeare & Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare & Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story Kate Pogue Stanley Wells. Shakespeare & Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story. New York: Pantheon, 2006. Pp. xv + 286. $26.00. Stanley Wells's lifetime of experience with Shakespeare's life and work is reflected in Shakespeare & Co, an illuminating, entertaining, and much needed examination of Shakespeare and his working colleagues. An emeritus professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham and chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Wells adds Shakespeare & Co. to a long list of distinguished works, including, most recently, Shakespeare: For All Time (2003), published while he was coediting The Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Works. He begins his new book by placing Shakespeare in London at the turn of the sixteenth century, aged thirty-seven, in the midst of writing Hamlet. From this vantage point, Wells orients us to those writers who influenced Shakespeare's early career (Lyly, Peele, Kyd, Greene, and Marlowe), acknowledges those who were his contemporaries (Chapman, Dekker, Jonson, Heywood, Marston, Fletcher, Middleton, and Beaumont), and looks forward to those who would follow him (Webster, Massinger, Ford). Wells "aims to place Shakespeare within his theatrical context, to chart his relationship with his fellow actors and dramatists, and to sketch the shifting reputations and lasting achievements of his fellow playwrights" (5). He succeeds admirably. The book is chockablock with insights to surprise and delight even the most experienced scholar. Wells reveals, for instance, that "whereas in the public [outdoor] theatres plays were acted without a break, in the private theatres they were customarily divided into five acts, for the practical reason that candles used for illumination had to be trimmed at frequent intervals" (17). He cites Henslowe's diary concerning little-known playwright Robert Daborne to demonstrate that a playwright normally read his new play to the company (24). This triggers images of Shakespeare first reading his plays to his colleagues, speaking the lines himself, letting the actors hear them as he heard them. Later, Wells observes that during the six weeks of Lent, performances were forbidden, thereby suggesting that late winter/early spring might have brought Shakespeare back to Stratford and given him a predictable time of year in which to write. When Wells turns to Shakespeare and the actors, revelations again abound. Generous quotations from Will Kemp's Nine Days Wonder, the autobiographical record of Kemp's jig from London to Norwich in February of 1600, bring to life the existence of the itinerate freelance performer. Wells reveals that Robert Armin (who succeeded Kemp as the primary comedian in Shakespeare's company) achieved guild status as a goldsmith, while James Burbage had been a joiner before becoming one of the most innovative theater producers of his (or any) [End Page 522] time (examples which suggest that actors have always needed a second profession to support themselves in hard times). Fine sleuthing enables Wells to trace the career of actor John Sinclo through the 1590s to the turn of the century and to establish that the man described as playing a "starved bloodhound" and "thin thing" in Henry IV, Part Two was likely the same who created Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night several years later (50). Wells contributes materially to Shakespeare studies by illuminating the lives of these theater folk and by making Shakespeare's relations with them so clear. In "Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare's Other Early Contemporaries," Wells zeroes in on Shakespeare's earliest writing colleagues. Devoting a page or two each to John Lyly, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Kyd, he takes the rest of the chapter to write in detail about the most influential playwright in London at the time: Christopher Marlowe. In describing the life and work of all these writers Wells has an unerring instinct for the telling biographical detail, the lively anecdote, and the apt quotation. Furthermore, his liberal citations from each writer's work give the reader an experience with the variety of styles surrounding the young Shakespeare as he began practicing his craft. This is especially true of...

The Literary career and legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1680

Heather Wolfe, ed. The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613-1680. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. xiv+258pp. ISBN 978 1 4039 7016 9.1. Slender though it may be, the corpus of Elizabeth Cary's literary works, or at least those works attributed to her, has provoked a large and varied range of critical responses. As Heather Wolfe comments in her introduction to this collection of essays, Cary's former image as 'a nearly forgotten playwright and eccentric Roman Catholic convert' has been replaced with a fresh evaluation of her status as an accomplished 'Renaissance woman historian, playwright, translator, and poet' (1). After a lengthy period of obscurity Cary has provoked a remarkably robust range of criticism in a relatively short space of time to which this collection of essays represents a significant contribution.2. The book is divided into four sections, each focusing upon a specific work or a certain aspect of her literary legacy. The subject of the essays in the first section is Cary's most famous work, the neo-Senecan closet play, The Tragedy of Mariam. Written during the first decade of James I's reign, Mariam is noted as the first printed example of an original dramatic work written by a female author. The first chapter, by Ilona Bell, looks at the way in which the play is influenced by contemporary traditions of lyric poetry, particularly the Petrarchan sonnet. As Bell points out, 'Cary's play is writ all in verse and in rhyme. The iambic pentameter lines, quatrains with alternating rhymes, are punctuated by occasional couplets that produce sonnets, or truncated sonnets, throughout the play' (17). Of particular interest to Bell is the way that the appropriation of poetic forms interrogates social conventions, especially relating to the social status of women. The second chapter, by Erin E. Kelly, examines Mariam's status as Christian martyr, which, as Kelly acknowledges, has become 'a critical commonplace' (35), although 'no one has discussed how Cary's depiction of Mariam fits into the complex history of martyrology' (35), an imbalance Kelly seeks to redress. She argues that Mariam diverges from the typical image of female martyrs through her failure to conform to contemporary models of feminine behaviour yet, paradoxically, it is this subversive non-conformity that seals her status as a martyr. In the third and final chapter of this section, Alison Shell looks at the relationship between Mariam and its principal source, Thomas Lodge's translation of Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews, focusing primarily upon the view of history advanced by the preface rather than the play's fidelity to the source.3. The second, and longest, section of this volume is dedicated to Cary's prose history, Edward II, written during the 1620s but not published until 1680. The first two entries in this section concentrate on the political aspects of the text beginning with Curtis Perry's reading of it against the culture of favouritism, particularly that which he labels 'the Buckingham phenomenon' (71). Mihoko Suzuki also considers the political aspects of Edward II, particularly the way in which it was influenced by, and participated in, a Machiavellian tradition of political writing which included the works of John of Salisbury and John Fortescue. The final two chapters examine the history of the text in print. Jesse G. Swan considers the critical reputation of the octavo version which, he argues, has been unjustly marginalized in favour of the longer folio version. Swan argues that the octavo text can effectively be considered as a separate work with an agenda independent to that of the folio text. …

Thomas Lodge's Amours: The Copy-Text for Imitations of Ronsard in Phillis

THE debt owed by Thomas Lodge's sonnet sequence Phillis, first published in 1593, to the sonnets of Pierre de Ronsard has been public knowledge since L. E. Kastner denounced Lodge as a plagiarist in the Athenaeum (4017 (1904), 552–3) and the Modern Language Review (ii (1907), 155–61) a hundred years ago. Ronsard's first sonnet sequence, entitled Les Amours and devoted to ‘Cassandre’, was published in Paris in 1552. It appeared again the next year in an extended form with annotations by the humanist Marc Antoine de Muret. This text was then reproduced in Basle and Rouen in 1557, becoming Book I of the Amours in the various collected editions of the Œuvres from 1560 onwards. As all the individual sonnets from Les Amours which Lodge imitates in Phillis appeared in Ronsard's original text, he could in principle have read them in any one or more of the full range of editions from the 1552 Amours to the posthumous Œuvres of 1587. Ronsard routinely revised his poems before reissuing them, however, and it is possible to determine not only which of Ronsard's sonnets Lodge used, as Kastner did, but also, by a process of elimination, to establish precisely which edition he read.