In 1891, E G. Fleay suggested that Thomas Nashe had Thomas Lodge in mind in the section of Pierce Penilesse (1592) that describes "The prodigall yoong Master" (margin) and begins "A yoong Heyre or Cockney, that is his Mothers Darling, if hee haue playde the waste-good at the Innes of the Court or about London...."[sup1] Since then, few have noticed this suggestion, still fewer have accepted it. R. B. McKerrow (1904) recorded it without comment.[sup2] N. Burton Paradise (1931) rejected it, thinking Mashe's description more a general illustration than a specific personal attack. Besides, he wrote, since Lodge had not returned from his voyage with Cavendish by August 8, 1592, when Pierce was registered, the attack would have been untimely or without point. To Paradise, moreover, Lodge probably was not a prodigal and wastrel of the kind in Nashe's account.[sup3] Edward Andrews Tenney (1935) did find a clear allusion, whether Lodge had returned home or not.[sup4] And Charles Nicholl (1984) thought that it "reads very like" one.[sup5] No others, to my knowledge, mention it.

Tenney, exasperated that Paradise had denied the presence of an allusion, gave a fair summary of Nashe (who is quoted) and the case for one: "the known facts coincide exactly with Nashe's description. Lodge was a 'yoong Heyre,' 'his Mothers Darling,' with a 'Students pension,' who 'playde the waste-good at the Innes of Court,' quarreled with his father and brother; and finally went 'to the sea' to 'teare the gold out of the Spaniards throats.'"[sup6]

Another detail, not before noticed, strengthens the case for an allusion and may render the point incontrovertible. "Mothers Darling" (my italics), which occurs in the first line of the section and is capitalized, is a kind of Elizabethan anagram for Thomas' Lodge. Elizabethan anagrams were frequently inexact. "In practice, anagrammatists often omitted or substituted any letter which proved inconvenient or insoluble," according to R.A. Dunn.[sup7] For Elizabethans, to be close was enough. The letter n seems to have been notably volatile in their anagrams. Its capacity to be converted into a tilde allowed it be removed. Samuel Daniel played on his own name, removing the n, in the title character Delia. Golden in Euphues Golden Legacie, the alternate title of Lodge's novel Rosalynde, was there with n as an anagrammatic reference to Lodge. Perhaps slightly inexact was Goldey, Michael Drayton's anagram for Lodge, in Endimion and Phoebe (1595), though one can argue that the y was not pronounced.[sup8] Lodge himself, in A Fig for Momus (1595), used the exact Golde.[sup9]

The spelling "Mothers Darling," moreover, as it appears in the text fags to suggest to modern readers another basis for its function as an anagram: its pronunciation. There is a good deal of evidence, some of it disputed, that the postvocalic and preconsonantal r was seriously diminished or already silent in Shakespeare's day, and especially so in London (Nashe makes a point of calling Lodge a "Cockney" and one "about London"), as it is with these two particular words in many English dialects today. Helge Kokeritz, and H.C. Wyld before him, thought so.[sup10] Phonetically, when the schwa replaces er, Mothers becomes Mothas, an anagram for Thomas. (The character Moth in Love's Labour's Lost; many think, represents Thomas Nashe.) Nashe thus appears to have relied on a London pronunciation as part of his fun, Lodge being identified completely with the city. He expected his readers to guess the name of the "waste-good" he is describing and to enjoy the ingenuity of the clue as to Lodge's identity. He may have also intended in the phrase to suggest Lodge's mother's family name Loddington (through the pronunciation dolling).

Other probable allusions to Lodge, still less exact, may have been considered sufficiently anagrammatic. Everard Guilpin, in Skialetheia (1598), refers to Lodge as Del Phrygio, among which letters, for what it's worth, Lodge may be found.[sup11] Lodge is apparently the Phrigio in John Marston's Scourge of Villanie ( 1598).[sup12] Spenser is believed by many to have commended him in Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591) as "pleasing Alcon."[sup13] And also thought by some to be a stand-in for Lodge is Alcon, a character in a play Lodge co-authored, A Looking Glass for London and England (written ca. 1590). Experiments with Lodge's name at the time appear to have been numerous and various.

Evidence for an allusion here to Lodge is quite substantial even without the anagram. But many will agree that this additional, special kind of evidence, so thoroughly Elizabethan in its form and so typical of Nashe in its ingenuity, should suffice to clinch the case.

[sup1] F.G. Fleay, A Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama: 1559-1642 (London: Reeves and Turner, 1891) 2: 131; Thomas Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, rev. F.P. Wilson (1904; rev. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958) 1:170.

[sup2] McKerrow, Nashe 4: 100.

[sup3] N. Burton Paradise, Thomas Lodge: The History of an Elizabethan (New Haven: Yale UP, 1931) 42-43.

[sup4] Edward Andrews Tenney, Thomas Lodge (NewYork, Russell & Russell, 1935) 130-31.

[sup5] Charles Nicholl, A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984) 59.

[sup6] Tenney 131n.

[sup7] Ed., William Camden, Remains Concerning Britain (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984) 402n.

[sup8] Michael Drayton, The Works of Michael Drayton, ed.J. William Hebel (1931; rpr. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961) 1:155.

[sup9] Thomas Lodge, The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge (Glasgow: Hunterian Club, 1883) 3: 23-27.

[supl0] Kokeritz, Shakespeare's Pronunciation (New Haven: Yale UP, 1953) 314-16; but see Fausto Cercignani, Shakespeare's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation (Oxford, Clarendon, 1981) 358-60.

[sup11] Sat. III.85-92, ed. D. Allen Carroll (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1974) 75; see notes 185-87.

[sup12] Sat. VIII.122-5,John Marston, The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, Liverpool UP, 1961) 154; see notes 343-44.

[sup13] Line 394, Edmund Spenser, The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spencer, ed. William A. Oram, et al. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989) 541.

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By D. Allen Carroll