"Glaucus and Scilla" is a work of the same genre as Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," a classical tale told in stanzas of six lines.
"Delayes in tragic tales provoke offences"
says Lodge, and his tale is too prolix, verbose, and full of "delayes". There are harmonious cadences, and pretty descriptions, but Lodge's poetic vein is best in his brief lyrics. He found time, on sea or land, to write "Rosalynde: Euphues' Golden Legacy". This contains the tale which Shakespeare made immortal by transfiguring it in "As You Like It". The vagrant and affected prolixity of this kind of story had a popularity that endured for a century, and surprises us as much as our popular novels will doubtless astonish future generations. Such as the style was, Lodge had mastered it, and redeemed it by the intercalated verses. "Rosalynde" had vogue, and Lodge, who had set forth on a freebooting expedition with young Thomas Cavendish, wrote probably the only novel, "A Margarite of America" (1596), ever composed in the frosty Straits of Magellan. His next novel was "Euphues's Shadow," the euphuism of the shadow is equal to that of the substance. His play, "A Looking Glass for London and England," written in collaboration with Greene, was acted in 1592. We are introduced to Rasni, King of Nineveh, with three Kings of Cilicia, Crete, and Paphlagonia, returning from the overthrow of Jeroboam, King of Jerusalem..
Greene and Lodge are magnificently disdainful of local colour. The Cilician King, in very sonorous blank verse, proclaims the Assyrian monarch to be more beautiful than Hyacinthus and Endymion, personages of Greek mythology. Oseas the prophet, brought in by an angel, listens to an angelic harangue of some thirty lines, and tersely replies: "The will of the Lord be done!" To him enter "Clown and a crew of Ruffians," and we have several pages of humours in prose; mainly the talk is of ale and horses. After a prolonged and chaotic performance, Nineveh repents under the preaching of Jonah, and these amiable moralists, Greene and Lodge, bid London go and do likewise. That the blank verse is not bad, and that the satire of Rasni's flatterers may be a hit at the adulators of Elizabeth, is the best that can be said for this Scriptural drama. After all it is not so tedious as Lodge's play from Roman history, "The Wounds of Civil War".
It is needless to speak of such mere hackwork as his books on William Longbeard and Robert the Devil, but his "Fig for Momus," satires in rhyming heroic couplets, accredit him, contrary to the boast of Joseph Hall, as the first English satirist.
Not popular in literature, Lodge (1600) turned physician, taking his M.D. degree at Avignon. Now he really flourished, and was in good practice, till his death in 1625. His reputation rests on his lyrics; for the advance of the drama he did nothing.
Nash.
With no special gifts except reckless fluency, Thomas Nash, or Nashe, made his name one of the most frequently quoted in the history of Elizabethan literature. The son of "William Nash, minister" (not improbably a Puritan preacher) Nash was born at Lowestoft in Suffolk in November, 1567. The Christian names of his brothers and sisters, Nathaniel, Israel, Martha, Rebecca are of the Biblical sort favoured by "the Brethren".
Nash made no claim to the title "gentleman" then used in the heraldic sense. He was (1582) either a "sizar" (at Oxford "servitor") or Lady Margaret's Scholar of St. John's College, Cambridge, and was in residence for nearly seven years. By 1589 he was in London, a literary hack, employed, for example, to write an "Introduction" to Greene's "Menaphon". He addresses the students of both Universities in his irrepressibly rattling way, and it is hardly possible to doubt that in a long passage he rails at the unfortunate Kyd in his capacities as playwright and translator from the Italian. He rapidly reviewed contemporary literature and mocked at English hexameters, the darlings of Gabriel Harvey.