Thomas Lodge’s Life and Works: A Mutual Looking- Glass for the Elizabethan Age

Thomas Lodge was born in 1558, an especially significant year for England as Queen Elizabeth I ascended the throne. Lodge’s private life goes along with the rise of his nation, and his literature is the mirror of an ever-changing and constantly evolving society. His artistic production is indeed particularly vast and varied: during his long life he wrote more than twenty works as well as several translations. He was a strong supporter of translations, theatre, poetry, creativity: his first published work in 1579 is the so-called Reply to Gosson, a pamphlet opposing puritan critics like Stephen Gosson, anticipating Philip Sidney’s most famous Defense. Lodge wrote prose romances, dramas, sonnets, satires, epistles, treatises, at the same time exploiting, creating, and renovating this wealth of genres. Very often, Lodge proves to be a pioneer and source of inspiration for contemporary authors, like William Shakespeare, who uses his Rosalynde to compose As You Like It. Above all, however, Lodge is (and was) known for his Scillaes Metamorphoses, the first example of an Elizabethan epyllion which gives rise to a very fashionable, again used by Shakespeare for his Venus and Adonis. Nevertheless, Lodge did not obtain the desired celebrity among his contemporaries. The aim of this paper is to show how Lodge’s wide-ranging literary output is the mirror of his never-quenched thirst for approval – his continuously changing and renovating genres being a need to please fickle readers and to satisfy their wayward tastes. This paper wants to demonstrate how Lodge was able to do so by means of his manifold art of writing. Hopefully, this is a way to allow this incredibly complex and underevalued writer to be acknowledged the artistic dignity he deserves.