SOURCE: "Pastoral Romance: Sidney and Lodge," in Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction, Princeton University Press, 1969, pp. 80-93.

In the following excerpt, Davis discusses Lodge's emphasis on action within the pastoral romance form.

… Whereas Sidney showed increasing concern to make explicit the intellectual content of his pastoral, Thomas Lodge—the greatest writer of pastoral romance after Sidney—chose instead to stress the action of pastoral, the means of coming into contact with ideals rather than the ideals themselves. By putting his emphasis on the playing of roles, he took advantage of the potentialities of the genre as fully as Sidney had, but produced a totally different effect. His three pastoral romances, The Delectable Historie of Forbonius and Prisceria (1584), Rosalynde. Euphues Golden Legacie (1590), and Euphues Shadow, The Battaile of the Sences (1592), show an interesting progression in this regard.

At the beginning, Lodge was interested not in the values inherent...