Rosalynde | Page 2

the study of the law. Legal studies seem not to have absorbed his attention to the total exclusion of literary work. The occasion of his first publication was the death of his mother in 1579. In that year appeared the "Epitaph of the Lady Anne Lodge." This is not extant, but his reply to Stephen Gosson's "School of Abuse" has survived. Gosson's book had been a furious attack upon the contemporary drama. Lodge's reply was a fair sample of the literary billingsgate of that controversial age and deserves the oblivion into which it promptly sank. His next publication was his "Alarum against Usurers" (1584), a book belonging to a class of tracts popular in that day in which the characters and customs of the underworld of London were exposed to popular execration. The impulse to engage in this journalistic kind of work Lodge may have owed to Robert Greene, the dramatist, with whom he at this time became intimate, and whose popular books on cony-catching the "Alarum," in its spirit and purpose, closely resembles. Greene certainly furnished some of the inspiration for the dramatic attempts that followed. Lodge's play, "The Wounds of Civil War," though not printed till 1594, may have been acted in 1587. We know that he collaborated with Greene in "A Looking Glass for London and England," produced in 1592.
Later Work and Death. It is not, however, as a dramatist that Lodge is remembered, but as a writer of pastoral romance. Here the discursive and idyllic quality of his genius, both in verse and prose, was to find complete and unhampered expression. Of the pastoral romances that Lodge produced during the next decade "Rosalynde" is by far the most important. The author wrote it, he tells us, while he was on a freebooting expedition to the Azores and the Canaries, "when every line was wet with a surge, and every humorous passion counterchecked with a storm." The immediate success of "Rosalynde" encouraged Lodge to continue the writing of romances. The best known of those that followed, and one of the prettiest of his stories, is "A Margarite [i.e. pearl] of America." This was written while Lodge was engaged in another patriotic raid under Captain Cavendish against the Spanish colonies of South America. The romance is in no sense American, and owes its title solely to the fact that it was written, or, as Lodge claims, translated from the Spanish, while Lodge's ship was cruising off the coast of Patagonia. Lodge certainly knew Spanish; and during the month that the expedition lingered at Santos in Brazil, he spent much of his time in the library of the Jesuit College. Possibly this was the beginning of his leaning toward Catholicism. At all events, he later became a Roman Catholic and wrote in support of that faith at a time when to be other than a Protestant in England was extremely dangerous. Sometime previous to 1600 he took a degree of doctor of medicine at Avignon and wrote among other medical treatises one on the plague. Of this disease, it is said, he died in 1625.
Source of "Rosalynde": "The Tale of Gamelyn." Lodge did not invent the plot of "Rosalynde." The story is based upon "The Tale of Gamelyn." This is a narrative in rough ballad form, written in the fourteenth century and formerly attributed to Chaucer. Indeed all the copies of it that have been preserved occur in the manuscripts of the "Canterbury Tales" under the title "The Coke's Tale of Gamelyn." From the "Tale" Lodge borrowed and adapted the account of the death of old Sir John of Bordeaux, the subsequent quarrel of his sons, the plot of the elder against the younger by which the latter was to be killed in a wrestling bout, the wrestling itself, the flight of the younger accompanied by the faithful Adam to the Forest of Arden, and their falling in with a band of outlaws feasting. Yet from the "Tale" Lodge took hardly more than a suggestion. All the love story was his own. Original also, so far as we know,[1] was the story of the two kings, and the pastoral element--for "Rosalynde" is a pastoral romance.
[Footnote 1: It has been conjectured that Lodge drew upon some Italian novel for the material that he did not find in "The Tale of Gamelyn." There seems, however, no ground for denying to Lodge credit for some originality; for the novel, if it ever existed, has been lost.]
Form: A Pastoral Romance. As a pastoral romance it belongs to the class of books of which Sidney's' "Arcadia" is the most famous representative in English. The "Arcadia" was published in 1590--the same year as "Rosalynde"--though it had been written some ten years earlier. The literary genus to which they belong is a very old one. The