Thomas Lodge (c. 1557 – September 1625) was an English writer and medical practitioner whose life spanned the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.
Early life
Thomas Lodge was born about 1557 in West Ham, the second son of Sir Thomas Lodge, Lord Mayor of London, by his third wife Anne (1528–1579), daughter of Henry Luddington (died 1531), a London grocer.
The year before he was born his father had transferred the ownership the manors of Hawkstone and Soulton to Sir Rowland Hill, publisher of the Geneva Bible and a fellow Lord Mayor. The Lodge family continued some form of association with those manors, and it has been suggested that this was part of the inspiration of Lodge junior's literary output.
He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and Trinity College, Oxford; taking his BA in 1577 and MA in 1581. In 1578 he entered Lincoln's Inn, where, as in the other Inns of Court, a love of letters and a crop of debts were common.
Early literary work
Lodge, disregarding the wishes of his family, took up literature. When the penitent Stephen Gosson had published his Schoole of Abuse in 1579, Lodge responded with Defence of Poetry, Music and Stage Plays (1579 or 1580), which shows a certain restraint, though both forceful and learned. The pamphlet was banned, but appears to have been circulated privately. It was answered by Gosson in his Playes Confuted in Five Actions; and Lodge retorted with his Alarum Against Usurers (1584)—a "tract for the times" which may have resulted from personal experience. In the same year he produced the first tale written by him on his own account in prose and verse, The Delectable History of Forbonius and Prisceria, both published and reprinted with the Alarum.
