The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare

by J. J. Jusserand

Greene had a rival of much higher stature in his friend Thomas Lodge. Lodge was a little older than Greene, and survived him long, so that he happened to be a contemporary both of Greene and of his imitators. He rivalled Greene, but did not imitate him, being himself a direct legatee of Lyly. The sort of life he led differed greatly from that of his friend, but it was scarcely less characteristic of the period. Lodge was the son of a rich London grocer who had been Lord Mayor. Born in 1557, he had known Lyly at Oxford; had studied law; then, yielding to those desires of seeing the dangers and beauties of the world which drove the English youths of the period to seek preferment abroad, he closed his books for a while, and became a corsair, visiting the Canary Isles, Brazil, and Patagonia. He brought back, as booty from his expeditions, romances written at sea to beguile the tedium of the passage and the anxieties of the tempest. One was called "The Margarite of America"; another "Rosalynde." The latter fell into Shakespeare's hands and pleased him; he drew from it the plot of "As you like it."[155] Coming before the literary public, Lodge does not altogether forget his profession of corsair, and in order to deprive the critics of the temptation to sneer, he is careful to brandish his rapier from time to time, and to write prefaces that make one's hair stand on end. "Roome for a souldier and a sailer, that gives you the fruits of his labors that he wrote in the Ocean!" he cries to the reader at the beginning of his "Rosalynde," and let fault-finders keep silence; otherwise he will throw them overboard "to feed cods."

After such a warning there would be nothing it seems but to hold our tongue; but perhaps, taking the practical side of the question, we may consider that by this time Lodge's rapier must have grown very rusty, and would not offer more danger than any critic is bound to incur in the performance of his duty. Besides that admiration may in all sincerity be blended with criticism when it is a question of Lodge's masterpiece, "Rosalynde."

The tale itself bears a somewhat curious history. Twice at two hundred years' distance it took the fancy of the greatest genius of the period. In the Middle Ages it was called the "Tale of Gamelyn,"[156] and Chaucer apparently intended to work it into his "Canterbury Tales," but he died before he had completed his wish, and some copy of the rough old poem having, as it seems, been found among his papers, it was in after time inserted in the manuscripts of his works as the "Cooke's Tale." As it stood in the fourteenth century this story recited mere deeds of valour, of strong, sinewy fighters; love and women played no part in it; and it is a great loss for us not to know whether old Chaucer would have made this very necessary addition, and what sort of mediæval Rosalind he would have depicted.

As things went, we are indebted to our gentleman adventurer for the invention of Rosalind. Lodge took up the tale and remodelled it entirely; he gave place in it to the fair she-page and to her friend Alinda and to Phœbe, the hard-hearted shepherdess, in such a way that when Shakespeare in his turn bethought himself of this story, he had nothing to add to fit it for his own stage, nothing except genius.

preparing for the hunt, 1575.

But if Lodge cannot be considered a man of genius, he is certainly a writer of very remarkable gifts. His novel is a pastoral tale that takes place somewhere in France, near Bordeaux, and reads as pleasantly as any story in "Astrée," no mean compliment. Probability, geography and chronology, are not Lodge's strong points; we are in fact again in the country of nowhere, in an imaginary kingdom of France over which the usurper Torismond reigns. The true king has been deposed and leads a forester's life, untroubled, unknown, in the thick woods of Arden. Rosalind, a daughter of the deposed king, has been kept as a sort of hostage at the court of the tyrant in Bordeaux, presumably his capital. All of a sudden she is exiled in her turn, without more explanation than "I have heard of thy aspiring speaches and intended treasons."[157] Alinda, her friend, the daughter of the tyrant, refuses to leave her, and both fly the court, Rosalind being dressed as a page, a rapier at her side, her wit full of repartees, her mind full of shifts, and equal, in fact, as in Shakespeare, to any emergency. "Tush, quoth Rosalynd, art thou a woman and hast not a sodaine shift to prevent a misfortune? I, thou seest, am of a tall stature, and would very well become the person and apparell of a page; thou shalt bee my mistris, and I will play the man so properly, that, trust me, in what company so ever I come, I will not bee discovered. I will buy mee a suite, and have my rapier very handsomely at my side, and if any knave offer wrong, your page will shew him the point of his weapon. At this Alinda smiled, and upon this they agreed, and presentlie gathered up all their jewels which they trussed up in a casket.... They travailed along the vineyards, and by many by-waies, at last got to the forrest side," the forest of Arden, which at that time happened to be near the vineyards of Gascony.

But this geographical situation is the least of the wonders offered by the forest. In it live not only Gerismond, the lawful king, very happy and contented, free and without care, wanting nothing; but, in the valleys, the most lovable shepherdesses and the most loving shepherds; they feed their flocks while piping their ditties; they inscribe their sonnets on the bark of trees; they are very learned, though mere shepherds; they quote Latin and write French; they know how to ask the god of love that the heart of their mistress may not be "de glace."

"Bien qu'elle ait de neige le sein."

They live in the shade of the most unaccountable woods, woods composed of pine-trees, fig-trees, and lemon-trees. "Then, comming into a faire valley, compassed with mountaines whereon grewe many pleasant shrubbs, they might descrie where two flocks of sheepe did feede. Then looking about they might perceive where an old shepheard sat, and with him a yong swaine, under a covert most pleasantlie scituated. The ground where they sat was diapred with Floras riches, as if she ment to wrap Tellus in the glorie of her vestments: round about, in the forme of an amphitheater were most curiouslie planted pine-trees, interseamed with limons and citrons, which with the thicknesse of their boughes so shadowed the place, that Phœbus could not prie into the secret of that arbour.... Fast by ... was there a fount so christalline and cleere that it seemed Diana and her Driades and Hemadriades had that spring as the secret of all their bathings. In this glorious arbour sat these two shepheards seeing their sheepe feede, playing on their pipes...." It is like a landscape by Poussin. Alinda and her page find the place very pleasant, and decide to settle there, especially when they have heard what a shepherd's life is like. "For a shepheards life, oh! mistresse, did you but live a while in their content, you would saye the court were rather a place of sorrowe than of solace ... Envie stirres not us, wee covet not to climbe, our desires mount not above our degrees, nor our thoughts above our fortunes. Care cannot harbour in our cottages, nor doo our homely couches know broken slumbers." Fine assertions, to which some hundred and fifty years later Prince Rasselas was most solemnly to give the lie. But his time had not yet come, and both princesses resolve to settle there, to purchase flocks, and "live quiet, unknowen, and contented."[158]