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

Chapter 3

Barnfield's Amintas

Persons honored by having pastoral names bestowed upon them by the poets in Elizabethan England were usually pastoral poets themselves (such as Spenser/Colin, Sidney/Astrophil, and Drayton/Rowland), although they could also be great ladies known for their literary patronage (as with Mary Sidney/Myra and Alice Spencer Stanley/Amaryllis—the latter of whom was Ferdinando's wife). One such pastoral poet was Thomas Watson—a literary figure of the highest eminence at the time—who was called Amintas during his lifetime by Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Edwards because he had written poems in the early 1590s centered upon the pastoral Amintas of mythology. Some Barnfield scholars and editors have advanced him as Barnfield's Amintas over the years (on shaky grounds, as they acknowledge). But Ferdinando's identification with this pastoral figure, beginning almost immediately after Watson's death in the