The Literary Career of Thomas Lodge, 1579-1596

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The Literary Career of Thomas Lodge, 1579-1596 THE LITERARY CAREER OF THOMAS LODGE, 1579-1596: STUDIES OF THE PLAYS, PROSE FICTION AND VERSE by Charles Walters Whitworth, Jr, Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. University of Birmingham October 1978 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Synopsis This thesis consists of studies of Lodge's writings in the major genres during his literary career, from 1579 to 1596. The first chapter is a biographical sketch, with particular attention to that period. The literary career is seen as a diversion and a postponement of his real vocations, medicine and Catholicism. The sixth chapter comments briefly on the pamphlets and the later works. The four main chapters treat, respectively, plays, prose fiction, lyric poems and sonnets, narrative and satirical verse. The studies include description of little-known works, structural and prosodic analysis, critical assessment, some textual criticism, source study and consideration of Elizabethan literary history as it impinges upon Lodge's writings. The bibliography is part of the thesis and is intended as a research, tool in its own right. It consists of classified lists of essential materials for scholarly and critical work on Lodge. The thesis is thus partly exploratory and preparatory. The main critical contention is that Lodge's literary reputation has suffered from its subsidiary relationship with Shakespeare's. Lodge excelled as a poet, particularly as a lyrist, and ought to be regarded primarily as such, rather than primarily as a prose romancer (i.e., author of Rosalynde). It is urged that editions of Lodge's works, beginning with the verse, are needed. Approximate length: 9O,OOO words Preface and Note on Texts I began this thesis, rather naively, as a general critical survey of all Lodge's works. It has become something else, and I wish to say here what the final product comprises. The more I have learned, the more I have pared away, until the scope has been reduced to the period of his main literary activity, from about 1579 to 1596, and within that span, to the writings in the major genres, namely, drama, prose fiction and poetry. 'Critical surveying' soon turned into various sorts of scholarly investigating. It became clear that the number of books on Lodge was misleading: all were critical biographies or more cursory surveys of the man and his works. The narrative of the events of his life, as they are known, was almost always the primary objective and the writings were commented upon, sometimes perceptively, sometimes less so, en passant. I wanted to leave the 'life 1 aside, fascinating though it is, and concentrate on the works. It is, after all, because he wrote that we know of or care about Lodge in the first place. So I have not written a biography. The first chapter recounts in summary fashion the known events of Lodge's life up to 1596 when, in a real sense, one life ended and another began. The chapters which follow are studies of the works by genre, with the poetry divided into lyrics and sonnets, and narrative and satirical verse. This arrangement has meant long chapters: the alter­ natives were many very short chapters, one on each work, which would in any case have become impossible with the short poems and made for fragmentation in the treatment, or a chronological scheme with arbitrary divisions. The groupings I have used are natural ones and, furthermore, they allow comparisons of each of Lodge's own performances with the others in each ii genre and with those of other writers. My aims are several and vary in relative importance in the various chapters. Criticism remains a principal purpose, and a number of Lodge's works receive close scrutiny for the first time here. Simple description is resorted to for little-known works, particularly some of the prose fiction, lyrics and shorter narrative poems. Examination of Lodge's ways with his remarkably numerous and diverse sources in the narrative and dramatic works and with his foreign models for many poems figures prominently in all chapters. The early publishing history and biblio­ graphical peculiarities of individual works are noticed. Lodge's literary relations with his contemporaries, questions of influence both on and by him, and the historical interest attaching to many of the works are considered. Embedded in the text and notes are selective comments on the history of Lodge scholarship -and criticism. The notes section is large: since much of the work I have done is investigatory in nature, many leads have been raised which cannot be pursued within the confines of the present thesis. It has seemed proper to leave these along the way as signposts. Some of the notes might have been suppressed if this were being offered as a 'finished' piece of criticism. The bibliography is intended to be part of, not an appendage to, the thesis: a list of essential materials for a scholarly and critical edition of Lodge's works. Finally, I have done a fair amount of editing and commenting on textual problems, particularly in Chapters 4 and 5, on the poetry. This leads to the matter of texts of Lodge's works, which has loomed large through­ out the preparation of this thesis. There is no edition of Lodge in the modern sense of the word. What has passed for one for nearly a century now is the collection of re­ prints supervised by Edmund Gosse for the Huntcrian Club of Glasgow in iii the 188Os. The motive was clearly antiquarian: facsimiles of the original editions insofar as modern printing would allow. Roman type replaced blackletter, small capitals replaced the Roman of the originals. Long s_ was reproduced. No emending of the texts was done: misprints, mixed and inverted founts, mispaginations and other errors of all kinds, and the vagaries of Elizabethan spelling and punctuation were carefully recreated. Inevitably, new errors were introduced in the resetting. Gosse borrowed whatever copies he could of the early editions and gave them to the printer with instructions to deviate not an em. Sometimes he was obliged to use an inferior edition, such as the 1598 second quarto of A Looking Glass for London and England. Such texts, while making available Lodge's works (except the three big translations and those of Luis de Granada), clearly have no privileged status. Since my main purpose in quoting from Lodge is to illustrate critical observations, I have used reliable modern editions in modern spelling whenever they are available; the edition used, with full details, is always indicated in the first reference to it. When good modern editions are available, but only in old spelling I have, in quoting, normalized spelling and punctuation in accordance with present-day usage, clearly indicating the edition that is being thus altered. For the majority of Lodge's writings no reliable editions, in old or modern spelling, are available. For these I have returned to copies of the earliest editions, on microfilm except in the case of Wit's Misery for which I have used a Scolar Press facsimile. These I have edited, again modernizing spelling and punctuation, but retaining Lodge's words except where there are obvious errors; attention is called to emendations of such errors. Archaic forms, even when not required by rhyme or rhythm, such as sprite for spirit, eyne_, tho, lite for little, are retained; iv spelling is sometimes simplified to make them more recognizable (e.g. sprite for spright). This editing exercise serves a double purpose, putting into more readable form passages, including a number of complete poems, which in some cases have never been edited, and making sample tests of the problems to be encountered by an editor of Lodge. When the early editions are used, signature references are given, followed by a reference to Gosse's collection for the reader's convenience. The form of such references will be: signature; Works, volume, short title, page. When the work concerned is obvious from the context, the title will be omitted from the Gosse reference: Works, volume; page. Each work is paginated separately in Gosse's volumes; his page numbers are those at the bottom. For the sake of uniformity, quotations from old-spelling editions of authors other than Lodge are also modernized on the same principles. The second part of the first section of the Bibliography (I.ii) lists editions of Lodge's works since 18OO seen during the preparation of the thesis. An asterisk denotes those which are my reference texts. Full bibliographical details of editions to the end of the seventeenth century are given by Allison (see below). The following abbreviations are used: Allison A F Allison, Thomas Lodge 1558-1625: A Biblio­ graphical Catalogue of the Early Editions (to the end of the seventeenth century), Pall Mall Biblio­ graphies 2 (Folkestone and London, 1973) Archiv Archiv fur das Studium dcr Neueren Sprachcn und Literaturen CBEL, I The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 5 vols, I, edited by George Watson (1974) D.N.B. Dictionary of National Biography EA Etudes Anglaises ES English Studies (Amsterdam) HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly MLN Modern Language Notes MLQ Modern Language Quarterly MLR Modern Language Review MP Modern Philology n.s.
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