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Thomas Lodge: The religious forces and Elizabethan Methods

The religious forces and Elizabethan methods that influenced him:

In the 1570s, the Puritan interests in England began attacks upon traditional entertainments, especially the theater. The puritan movement under Queen Elizabeth was a reform wholly within the Established church and was not the militantly organized movement. In the earlier period Roman Catholics, English Catholics and Puritans were all within the framework of one church. Second method in writing that influenced is Plagiarism which the Elizabethans called imitation. The reasons behind this practice are that Aristotle’s Doctrine of Imitation was widely accepted in the Universities. It claimed all literary production as common property. A specific example from Thomas’s work is that, he relied heavily on a continental source, Badius Ascensius’ preface to an edition of Terence’s Plays (1502) for his first work, the Reply to Gosson. But he gave credits to the source writers more than Shakespeare gave Lodge for As You Like It. A second explanation for widespread imitation lies in the demand for books in the sudden burst of literary activity following 1580.