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

Chapter 1

Barnfield's Ganymede

The young poet Richard Barnfield (1574–1620) was both the first writer to praise Shakespeare's poetry in print and the first to attempt Spenserian stanzas after Edmund Spenser (in admiring imitation of that master's Faerie Queene). Even more strikingly, he was the first poet in England to publish openly homoerotic verse in which the “I” of the poems is self-identified as the writer himself (the second was Shakespeare). He published his first three books within one year: Greenes Funeralls, registered February 1, 1594; The Affectionate Shepheard, published November 1594; and Cynthia, with Certain Sonnets, entered January 17, 1595 (for the dates, which are important to the argument attempted here, see Klawitter 59 and Morris, Richard Barnfield 49). All three books are openly homoerotic in subject matter (although for Greenes Funeralls it was perhaps only one poem) and are decidedly experimental in technique. Of these,