The Wounds of Civil War
play
The Wounds of Civil War is an Elizabethan era stage play, written by Thomas Lodge. A dramatization of the ancient Roman conflict between Marius and Sulla, the play is generally considered Lodge's only extant solo drama.
Publication
The Wounds of Civil War was entered into the Stationers' Register on 24 May 1594, and was published in quarto later that year by the bookseller John Danter. The title page of the quarto identifies Lodge as the author, and states that the play was performed by the Admiral's Men. The 1594 quarto is the only publication of the play before the nineteenth century.
Date
The date of the authorship and premier performance of the play is not known with certainty. Many scholars have considered the scene in Act III that includes a chariot drawn by four Moors as an imitation of the famous similar scene in Marlowe's Tamburlaine, indicating that Lodge's play must post-date Marlowe's. The Wounds of Civil War is generally dated to the 1587–92 period. (A minority view allows the possibility the Lodge's play may have pre-dated Marlowe's, and that Marlowe may have been influenced by Lodge.)
Sources
Lodge's primary source on the First Civil War in ancient Rome was the Roman History of Appian; an English translation of Appian's work, by "W. B.," had been published by Henry Bynneman in 1578. Lodge departs from his source when it suits his purposes, as in elevating the minor figure Junius Brutus into a significant character.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Wounds of Civil War” is play. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Wounds, Civil and play, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “play” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7776248. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1594, 1587 and 1578.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Wounds of Civil War” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.