Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles | Page 3

he is described as "turning over Galen every day."
Yet no one had been in the last twenty years the sixteenth century more responsive than Lodge to the shifting moods of that excitable period. Lodge was the son of a Lord Mayor of London, and was a contemporary at Oxford with Sidney, Gosson, Chapman, Lyly, Peele and Watson. His life included a round of varied experiences. A student at Lincoln's Inn, a young aspirant for literary honours, friends with Greene, Rich, Daniel, Drayton, Lyly and Watson, a taster of the sorrows that many of the University wits endured when usurers got their hands upon them, for a time perhaps a soldier, certainly a sailor following the fortunes of Captain Clarke to Terceras and the Canaries, and of Cavendish to Brazil and the Straits of Magellan, in London again making plays with Greene, off to Avignon to take his degree in medicine, back again to be incorporated an M.D. at Oxford and to practise in London, adopting secretly the Roman Catholic faith, and sometimes hiding on the continent as a recusant from persecution at home, imprisoned perhaps once for debt, and entertaining a concourse of patients of his own religion till his death in 1625:--the life of Lodge thus presents a view of the ups and downs possible in that picturesque age.
The wide variety of his literary ventures reflects the interests of his life. Some controversial papers, some unsuccessful plays, two dull historical sketches in prose, some satirical and moralising works in prose and in verse, two romantic tales in verse and three in prose, a number of eclogues, metrical epistles and lyrics, some ponderous translations from Latin and French, and two medical treatises; these widely differing kinds of writing are the products of Lodge's industry and genius. All, however, have but an antiquarian interest save two; the prose romance called _Rosalynde, Euphues' Golden Legacy_, could not be spared since Shakespeare borrowed its charming plot for _As You Like It_; and _Phillis_, bound up with a sheaf of his lyrics gathered from the pages of his stories and from the miscellanies of the time, should be treasured for its own sake and should keep Lodge's memory green for lovers of pure poetry.
Lodge's lyric genius was a clear if slender rill. His faults are the more unpardonable since they spring from sheer carelessness and a lack of appreciation of the sacred responsibility of creative power. He took up the literary fashion of the month and tried his hand at it; that done, he was ready for the next mode. He did not wait to perfect his work or to compare result with result; therefore he probably never found himself, probably never realised that after three centuries he would be esteemed, not for the ponderous tomes of his translation of Josephus, not for all the catalogues of his satirical and religious and scientific writings, but for mere lyrics like the "Heigh ho, fair Rosaline," and "Love in my bosom like a bee," heedlessly imbedded in the heart of a prose romance.
Lodge was one of the earliest to follow the example of Sidney in linking a sequence of sonnets together into a sonnet-cycle. The _Astrophel and Stella_ was published in 1591, though it had doubtless before this been handed about, as was the Elizabethan fashion, in manuscript. Early in 1591 also when Daniel was probably abroad, twenty-seven of the fifty-seven sonnets that a year later formed the sonnet-cycle _Delia_ were published in his absence. Now in August of 1591 Lodge set sail with Cavendish on that long voyage to Brazil and the Straits of Magellan from which he did not return till early in ninety-three, and it was during his absence that Daniel's and Constable's sonnet-cycles came out. It is possible that Lodge saw Daniel's series, as he doubtless did Sidney's, in manuscript before he left England, but the Induction to _Phillis_, which carries a message to Delia's "sweet prophet," was almost certainly written later, and in the absence of further proof it seems no more than fair to allow Lodge to share with Daniel and Constable the honour of being the earliest to take the hint Sidney had offered.
On the whole, Lodge's sonnets show a much more cheerful and buoyant temper than Daniel's "wailing verse." The "sad horror, pale grief, prostrate despair" that inform the _Delia_, are replaced in the _Phillis_ by a spirit of airy toying, a pleasure in the graces of fancy even when they cluster around a feeling of sadness. During Lodge's absence, his friend Robert Green published several pieces for him, and in one of the prefaces promised the public to present on his return "what labours Lodge's sea-studies afford." _Phillis_ was the chief of these sea-studies, and was like _Rosalynde_ "hatcht in the stormes of the ocean and feathered