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History of English Literature

Notes Having been to sea with Captain Clarke in his expedition to Terceira and the Canaries, Lodge in 1591
made a voyage with Thomas Cavendish to Brazil and the Straits of Magellan, returning home by
1593. During the Canaries expedition, to beguile the tedium of his voyage, he composed his prose
tale of Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie, which, printed in 1590, afterwards furnished the story of
Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The novel, which in its turn owes some, though no very considerable,
debt to the medieval Tale of Gamelyn (unwarrantably appended to the fragmentary Cookes Tale in
certain manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer’s works), is written in the euphuistic manner, but decidedly
attractive both by its plot and by the situations arising from it. It has been frequently reprinted.
Before starting on his second expedition he had published a historical romance, The History of
Robert, Second Duke of Normandy, surnamed Robert the Devil; and he left behind him for publication
Catharos Diogenes in his Singularity, a discourse on the immorality of Athens (London). Both
appeared in 1591. Another romance in the manner of Lyly, Euphues Shadow, the Battaile of the
Sences (1592), appeared while Lodge was still on his travels.
Lodge’s known dramatic work is small in quantity. In conjunction with Robert Greene he, probably
in 1590, produced in a popular vein the odd but far from feeble play, A Looking Glass for London
and England (published 1594). He had already written “The Wounds of Civil War” (produced
perhaps as early as 1587, and published in 1594, and put on as a play reading at the Globe Theatre
on 7 February 1606), a good second-rate piece in the half-chronicle fashion of its age. Fleay saw
grounds for assigning to Lodge Mucedorus and Amadine, played by the Queen’s Men about 1588,
a share with Robert Greene in George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, and in Shakespeare’s 2nd
part of Henry VI; he also regards him as at least part-author of, The True Chronicle of King Leir
and his three Daughters (1594); and The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England; in the case
of two other plays he allowed the assignation to Lodge to be purely conjectural. That Lodge is the
“Young Juvenal” of Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit is no longer a generally accepted hypothesis. In
the latter part of his life—possibly about 1596, when he published his Wits Miserie and the World’s
Madnesse, which is dated from Low Leyton in Essex, and the religious tract Prosopopeia (if, as
seems probable, it was his), in which he repents him of his “lewd lines” of other days—he became
a Catholic and engaged in the practice of medicine, for which Wood says he qualified himself by
a degree at Avignon in 1600.

Did u know? In 1602, Thomas Lodge received the degree of M.D. from Oxford University.

5.5 George Peele

George Peele (born in London and baptized 25 July 1556 – buried 9 November 1596), was an
English dramatist. His pastoral comedy The Arraignment of Paris was presented by the Children
of the Chapel Royal before Queen Elizabeth perhaps as early as 1581, and was printed anonymously
in 1584. In the play, Paris is arraigned before Jupiter for having assigned the apple to Venus. Diana,
with whom the final decision rests, gives the apple to none of the competitors but to a nymph
called Eliza, a reference to Queen Elizabeth I.
His play Edward I was printed in 1593. This chronicle history is an advance on the old chronicle
plays, and marks a step towards the Shakespearean historical drama. Peele is said by some scholars
to have written or contributed to the bloody tragedy Titus Andronicus, which was published as the
work of Shakespeare. This theory is in part due to Peele’s predilection for gore, as evidenced in The
Battle of Alcazar (acted 1588-1589, printed 1594), published anonymously, which is attributed with
much probability to him. The Old Wives’ Tale (printed 1595) was followed by The Love of King
David and fair Bethsabe (written ca. 1588, printed 1599), which is notable as an example of
Elizabethan drama drawn entirely from Scriptural sources. F. G. Fleay sees in it a political satire,
and identifies Elizabeth and Leicester as David and Bathsheba, Mary, Queen of Scots as Absalom.
Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes (printed 1599) has been attributed to Peele, but on insufficient
grounds. Other plays attributed to Peele include Jack Straw (ca. 1587), The Wisdom of Dr. Doddypoll
(printed 1600), The Maid’s Metamorphosis (printed 1600), and Wily Beguiled (printed 1606) —
though the scholarly consensus has judged these attributions to be insufficiently supported by
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