Author, Privateer, Physician. He was one of England's "University Wits", a group of Cambridge and Oxford-educated young men who made a precarious living through writing in the late 16th Century. Lodge turned out poetry, plays, pamphlets, and translations. But he is most noted for his prose romances, important forerunners of the modern novel, written in an ornate, discursive manner. The best of them are "Rosalynde" (1590), which provided Shakespeare with the plot for "As You Like It", and "A Margarite of America" (1596). The son of a former Lord Mayor of London, Lodge earned a BA degree at Trinity College, Oxford in 1577, and trained as an attorney at Lincoln's Inn before abandoning the law for literature. At Oxford he probably knew fellow student John Lyly, creator of the highly artificial style called "euphuism" that influenced Lodge and English prose in general for decades. In a characteristic debut for an Elizabethan author he first won attention through a literary feud, lambasting Stephen Gosson's "Schoole of Abuse" (1579) for denouncing plays (except his own) as immoral. Lodge defended the theatre with the pamphlet "Honest Excuses" (1580). His other notable early works are his first prose romance, "Forbonius and Prisceria" (1584), and "An Alarum Against Usurers" (1584), an exposé of how London crooks exploited young spendthrifts that anticipated the "cony-catching" pamphlets of his friend Robert Greene. Hoping to gain a fortune through piracy, Lodge took part in freebooting expeditions to the Canary Islands and the Azores (1586 to 1587) and to South America (1591 to 1593). "Rosalynde" and "A Margarite of America" were written to dispel the tedium of these voyages, which were otherwise unprofitable for him. Most of his original work was published between 1587 and 1596, including the verse fable "Scillaes Metamorphosis" (1589), a strong influence on Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis"; his major collection of poetry, "Phillis" (1593); the plays "The Wounds of Civil War" and, with Robert Greene, "A Looking Glass for London and England" (both published 1594); "A Fig for Momus" (1595), which helped popularize verse satire to England; and the pamphlet "Wit's Misery and World's Madness" (1596). As he approached 40, Lodge re-evaluated his life. He converted to Catholicism, married, and went to France to study medicine. He received a medical degree from Avignon University in 1598 and another from Oxford in 1603, but was denied a license to practice in London because of his religion. From 1606 to 1610 he lived in Belgium to escape persecution of Catholics following the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, then returned to England and acquired a reputation as a distinguished physician. His later writings were translations of Josephus (1602) and Seneca (1614), and a couple of medical texts. Lodge died in London while fighting the plague epidemic in the Summer of 1625, which also claimed playwright John Fletcher. No burial records for him have been discovered, but the likeliest interment sites were the now defunct Church of St. Mary Magdalen Old Fish Street, near his office-flat in London, or the parish churchyard at Leyton, where he had a country house for 30 years. His complete works were first published in 1893.