Thomas Lodge

As you like it is a Shakespearean comedy that was written between 1598and 1600 and was one of the first plays performed in the Globe during the Elizabethan period . The main source of the play is a romance written by Thomas lodge entitled Rosalynde , Eupheus’Golden legacy . Like  Rosalynde , As you like it  belongs to  the pastoral literary tradition  . A literary style that developed mostly during the renaissance and lasted till the end of the Victorian era ( Watts 9-18). Lodge’s narrative was basically meant to protect pastoral traditions .However ,by multiplying the voices, Shakespeare Tended in a way to mock these traditions .

This essay reads the connection between female complaints in Tudor
minor epics and Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage in light of rhetorical
practices shared by two educational institutions: grammar schools and
the Inns of Court. By the time a former schoolboy came to London for
legal training or to write for the stage, the ability to entertain a hypothetical proposition and invent a speech in response to it – a necessary forensic skill – was intimately tied to early school training in prosopopoeia, the habit of inventing speeches for ancient characters. These paired practices granted Rome’s female characters (Ariadne, Scylla, Salmacis, Oenone, Dido) a remarkable English after-life – giving dramatists and lawyers a cast of characters with which to critique the social claims made by the educators who promised to give them cultural capital. I read cross-voiced complaints in epyllia by Thomas Lodge, Thomas Heywood, and William Shakespeare in light of ethopoiea (“character-making”) and the proto-dramatic practices implicit in legal training. Placing the institutional satire in these complaint poems alongside the meta-rhetorical preoccupations of Dido, the paper traces a recognizably Tudor form of discontent: skeptical imitations of epic that undercut normative, end-driven representations of nationhood and masculinity from within the genre thought to consolidate these identities and from within the institutions that most benefited from upholding them.

Plague was a frequent visitor to early modern England, ravishing the whole country six times between 1563 and 1666. The plague problem was, however, definitely not just an English peculiarity. Plague, due to its recurrent and devastating outbreaks, was one of the central themes of late sixteenth-century medical scholarship and social policymaking. Plague was regulated mainly at the local levels, but most of the continental regulations and contemporary guidance seems to endorse two common features. They placed considerable emphasis on contagion and drew certain correlations between contacting plague and poverty on the one hand and meagre living conditions on the other hand. In some desperate attempts, the Elizabethan and Jacobean governments, set out to contain the spread of the disease, missing some marked features of these novel continental practices, issued various ill-suited regulations which dominated English plague control from 1578 to 1666. Despite these regulations' remarkably egalitarian overtone and seemingly charitable resolutions, this paper argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean policies of plague control were destined to failure chiefly because of their elitist and inconsiderate measures, reducing them effectively to a harsh policy of confinement of the infected poor masses, taking almost no account of their health or well-being.

This paper attempts to examine different hypotheses about the sea-voyage of Thomas Lodge to the Canaries and Azores, during which he wrote Rosalynde, the main source text of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. In order to date the voyage, biographers of Lodge have always traced the activities of Captain Clarke, whose name is mentioned in the dedicatory epistle; whereas they have completely ignored its destination, as well as a dubious farming practice of the inhabitants of Tenerife. This paper will revise the three main theories proposed on this matter by taking into account the studies in the history of the Canary Islands, such as the pirate
attacks and the proceedings of the Court of the Inquisition. It will also be suggested that the Forest of Arden was largely inspired by the vegetation of woods and fields of the Atlantic archipelagos. The landscape, and arguably the myth, of
the Fortunate Islands offered Lodge an incomparable Arcadia to construct his Arden, which Shakespeare kept intact when he translated Arden to the English soil for the comedy that culminates with the representation of the ideal order of the world by means of the four weddings at the end of the play.

Lodge claimed A Margarite of America (1596) was based on a—still unidentified—“historie in the Spanish tong.” Although the romance’s dramatic structure has been suggested, the source ‘historie’ has never been sought in the Spanish theatre. This essay proposes Juan de la Cueva’s El príncipe tirano (1583) as the possible Spanish source text of Lodge’s Margarite. After an introduction, the plot is outlined to show, firstly, the romance’s intertextual elements already detected by scholarly criticism and, secondly, others Lodge might have borrowed from El príncipe tirano. This article will supplement current studies on Margarite by shedding new light on the plot and characters.