Rosalynde | Page 2

George Peele,
later to become a dramatist of note, to whom Lodge may to some extent
have owed his subsequent interest in the drama.
Early Work. After leaving Oxford, Lodge returned to London and

entered the Society of Lincoln's Inn, in other words took up 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