The play of "James IV" is so absurdly unhistorical (it transfers the plot of an Italian novel by Cinthio to the Court of Holyrood), that it can hardly be read with patience, but Greene's sweet, patient, long-enduring heroine, Dorothea, appears again, in the part historically filled by a very different person, Margaret Tudor, whose passion for being alternately married (finally to "Lord Muffin") and divorced, was rebuked by her brother, Henry VIII, himself no model of constancy. Greene introduced and Shakespeare continued the practice of taking plots for romantic comedies, (such as "As You Like It") from Italian novels; and, like Shakespeare, he is the poet of good women, "the Homer of women," as his friend Nash said with hyperbole of compliment. Lodge. The Memoirs of Thomas Lodge, had he left them to us, would be of more interest than are his writings. He "had an oar in every paper-boat," says the Cambridge satirist in the play, "The Return from Parnassus," but he had oars in other boats that were not of paper. Born about 1558, he was the second son of Sir Thomas Lodge, an eminent grocer. He was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, being by one academic generation junior to Lyly. Going to the Inns of Court, London, he answered Gosson's attack on poetry, "The School of Abuse," in an abusive style very unlike that of Sir Philip Sidney's "Defence of Poesy". He and Barnaby Rich (the supposed author of a most vivacious translation of two books of Herodotus), were friends, and wrote commendatory verses, each for the other's work (1581). If in his "Alarum against Usurers" (1584), Lodge is speaking from his personal experience, he already knew "the ignoble melancholy of pecuniary embarrassment," thanks to the expensive acquaintance of "Mrs. Minx," and long bills due to his tailor. He warns the young against the temptations of the town, at tedious length and with overabundance of classical allusions. In an unreadable romance (1584) (Lyly's "Euphues" being the model), "Forbonius and Prisceria," he inserts many not unreadable verses. "Glaucus and Scilla" is a work of the same _genre_ as Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," a classical tale told in stanzas of six lines. "Delayes in tragic tales provoke offences"