William Shakespeare, Richard Barnfield, and the Sixth Earl of De ...

A few years down the road, and increasingly mindful of Haines' caution to Buck Mulligan in Ulysses that Shakespeare's sonnets are “the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance,” I nonetheless came to conclude from the evidence I accumulated that not only was Barnfield's Ganymede the sixth earl of Derby, William Stanley, but also that Barnfield's published poems from 1594 (including over twenty homoerotic love sonnets) were in dialogue with some of Shakespeare's own homoerotic sonnets to his Fair Youth, that Barnfield was in fact the Rival Poet of Shakespeare's sonnets, and that Stanley was the beloved male pastoral addressee of both poets. This book is given over almost wholly to that argument, and therefore to the admittedly unfashionable—even déclassé—topic of which it is an example. Matthew Steggle has recently noted that the topic of historical reference in literary works of art has indeed become so very unfashionable that younger scholars are reluctant to involve themselves with it. Yet he outbraved fashion and did exactly that with his doctoral dissertation on what he calls “personation” in the War of the Theatres (c. 1599–1601), going on to develop it into a critically esteemed book (Steggle 11 ff.). Even further, Charles Cathcart has pointed out that within this particular scholarly genre, in specific studies which purport to discern some sort of literary competition, a strange consensus has developed that such studies “should not include the detective attempt to identify the satirical personation of one writer by a rival” (Cathcart 3). Yet Cathcart himself attempted this very task with his Marston, Rivalry, Rapprochment, and Jonson in 2008, providing us with a much-needed examination of all the previously unexamined spillover that resulted from the War of the Theatres in the early seventeenth century. I believe that this work, if done both carefully and bravely, is now needed more than ever in literary studies.²