| Chapter 1: | Barnfield's Ganymede |
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his Mystigogus Poeticus. Stephen Orgel is thus wrong in his recent claim that “[t]he name Ganymede cannot be used in the Renaissance without the connotation [of] homosexual flirtation” (43)—unless his idea of connotation in the Renaissance is so polysemic as to hold that “everything means everything,” as some critics do believe, but as I think Orgel does not.
When “Ganymede” is used in this honorific way by the London writers of the time to figure a specific person (used, that is, as a true proper noun rather than as indicative of a type), it almost invariably signifies the Stanleys, in particular the sitting earl of Derby, who is also sometimes figured as an eagle—that is, as the “eagle of Ganymede.” The entire subject of the Stanleys, the Ganymede myth, and honorific literary usage of this matter, is perhaps summed up best by Leslie Hotson: “The Stanley legend of the Eagle and Child…follows Xenophon's sublime spiritual view (Symposium 8, line 30), adopted by Alciati and Conti), as against the sensual, pathic-catamite version…” (172).
Because we know that William Stanley became the new earl of Derby by the time Barnfield's Cynthia was published in 1595 with its Daphnis-to-Ganymede sonnet sequence, we might reasonably suspect that William Stanley was Barnfield's Ganymede, but perhaps still to feel that we did not possess reasonable certainty—were it not for the fact that Barnfield actually dedicated Cynthia to him. In that dedication, Barnfield clearly reminds Stanley and his Inns of Court target audience of his Affectionate Shepheard of three months earlier (upon which he dwells at length in the front matter) with “affection”-laden language, thus providing yet another instance of love object continuity: