Thomas Lodge
Thomas Lodge (* around 1558 in West Ham ; † September 1625 in London ) was an English writer, poet and playwright of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages.
Life
Thomas Lodge was probably born in West Ham in 1558 as the second son of Sir Thomas Lodge, the Lord Mayor of London (1562-1563). He received his education at the Merchant Taylors' School in Northwood and at Trinity College in Oxford . From 1578 he studied at Lincoln's Inn , but soon began - contrary to the wishes of his family - his work as a writer and poet. From 1586 to 1592 Lodge embarked on sea voyages; from 1588 to 1588 he took part in a pirate voyage to the Canary Islands , then from 1591 to 1593 to South America . Between 1600 and 1602 he completed a medical degree in Avignon and Oxford and then practiced as a doctor, initially on the continent, where he stayed for a long time after his conversion to Catholicism and the Gunpowder Plot on November 5, 1605, before returning to England in 1611.
plant
In 1580 the first publication of Lodge appeared, the short pamphlet A Defense of Poetry, Music and Stage Plays , which contained a reply to Stephen Gosson's The School of Abuse (1579). A series of didactic-moralizing treatises , satires and sermons such as An Alarm against Usurers (1584), The Lamentable Complaint of Truth over England (1584), Catharos (1591), The Devil Conjured (1596) and Wit's Misery (1596) followed. .
With his Versepyllion Scillae's Metamorphosis (1589), which stands in the Ovid tradition and was reprinted as Gaucus and Scilla in 1610 , Lodge advanced to become one of the first exponents of the erotic petty poses that were coming into fashion in the early 1590s .
During the heyday of English sonnet art , his sonnet cycle Phyllis appeared in 1593 with various creative imitations, inspired by models by the French poets and lyricists Pierre de Ronsard and Philippe Desportes .
Already on his first sea voyage in 1590, the romance Rosalynde, or Euphues 'Golden Legacie (Ger. Rosalinde or Euphues' golden legacy ) was written in prose form , which not only Shakespeare as a source for his comedy As you Like It (German as you like it ) served, but at the same time made an essential contribution to the development of the English novel by combining the medieval pastoral poetry with a rhetorically formed narrative and dialogue style, such as was found in the works of the English Renaissance writer John Lylys . Rosalynde is also characterized by the combination of witty antitheses with a multitude of classical and mythological allusions. The work, first printed in 1590, appeared in numerous new editions in the following years and was extremely popular with contemporary readers.
Three other prose romances that Lodge wrote have been largely forgotten today, as have his dramatic work.
The Roman drama The Wounds of Civil War , written around 1586, shapes the harrowing clashes between Gaius Marius and Sulla , in order to warn contemporary England in a dramatic form of the impending dangers of discord and civil war.
In collaboration with Robert Greene , Lodge probably wrote the drama A Looking Glass for London and England around 1590 , which was printed in 1594. This work is even more haunting in its moral appeal: the setting is Nineveh , which - conceived on the model of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great - is ruled by a tyrant. The city is shown as a reservoir of the vice fornication, usury, gluttony, avarice, arrogance, corruption and contempt for God that pervade all levels of society. Only the fiery speech of the prophet Jonas , who is spat on the stage by a whale, brings about the last minute rescue from the wrath of God through a grace to which the prophet only reluctantly bows.
Lodge's literary work not only encompasses all genres, but also proves to be quite multifaceted. In retrospect, Lodge can be seen as one of the last English Renaissance humanists , whose concern was to pass on the cultural heritage of antiquity to his own time. This is equally evident in his two important translations, The Famous and Memorable Works of Josephus (1602) and The Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (1614).
Web links
- Thomas Lodge - Works on Internet Archive
- Thomas Lodge - Biography entry in Encyclopædia Britannica from 1911 on studylight.org
Individual evidence
- ↑ The Little Encyclopedia. Volume 2. Encyclios, Zurich, p. 65
- ↑ On the biographical and critical information in the article, see the remarks by Uwe Baumann on Thomas Lodge in: Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , pp. 357f.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lodge, Thomas |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | English poet and playwright |
| DATE OF BIRTH | around 1558 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | West Ham |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 1625 |
| Place of death | London |