ABSTRACT
Perhaps he could endure because, at the start of his life, events seemed auspicious. Lodge was born in 1558, the year Elizabeth I ascended the throne, to a family long prosperous and influential. Edward Andrews Tenney writes that
Lodge’s paternal grandfather, Thomas Littleton, moreover, was a justice of the common bench whose Tenures was a standard Elizabethan legal text at the Inns of Court; his father was a founder of the Muscovy Company in 1555 and lord mayor of London in 1562. For one from such a background, young Thomas Lodge received the proper training. As a boy, he lived in Derby House in Cannon Row, London, where he was companion to William, son of Henry Stanley, fourth earl of Derby. One of the greater families under Elizabeth, the Stanleys must have provided young Thomas with excellent training in languages, music, and gentlemanly skills-in the rudiments of a traditional humanist education. They were also a notable Catholic family who probably fostered in him his deep and abiding moral sense; his ties to them in later life, at any rate, were enduring.2 In 1571, two years after Spenser, Thomas Lodge entered Merchant Taylors’ School where he was taught by Richard Mulcaster; in 1573 he matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford. Extant records show that he underwent a rigorous four years there studying Latin and Greek, rhetoric and dialectic, taking prescribed lessons in Euclid, Porphyry, Plato, Aristotle, Agricola, and Joannes Caesarius; Valerius Maximus, Suetonius, Florus, Pliny, Livy, Cicero, Vergil, Horace, Lucan, Juvenal, Terence, and Plautus; Politian, Laurentius Vallensis, and Aulus Gellius.3 He was admitted to the B.A. on 8 July 1577 and may then have gone on his own Grand Tour, to France and Spain, before his final determination during Lent 1578 after which, on 26 April, he joined his brother William at Lincoln’s Inn. Through all these years he seems especially appreciative of “Studious bookes” as “ the true ritches o f the m in d e ” as he writes to Thomas Smith.4 He also believed in uthe aduancement of Letters”* as the basis for imitatio, for “what children [like men] apprehend,” he tells us in A fig for M om us (1595), “The same they like, they follow and commend” (sig. E2; 3:35).
