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

The Affectionate Shepheard has always been the best known; in its own time, its section “The Shepherd's Content” seems to have been particularly well received, but the book's first part, “The Teares of an Affectionate Shepheard,” has proved more enduring.

“Teares” is made up of two related eclogues which tell the story of the shepherd Daphnis' love for his fair Ganymede. Barnfield plainly identifies himself as Daphnis (as all editors and critics agree), even signing himself with that name in the book's dedication. Henry Chettle seals his identity with his offhand note in his Piers Plainnes seaven yeres prentiship when he writes of Barnfield that “young DAPHNIS hath given his verdict”—a most favorable one—about the high quality of the shepherd's life in The Affectionate Shepheard. But the other pastoral figures in the work have stubbornly resisted identification despite the fact that most readers over the years have seen some sort of historical representation (and hence, some sort of social allegory) in them and in the situation they depict. Part of this book's work is its attempt to make positive real-world identifications of two other figures: Barnfield's pastoral shepherds Ganymede and Amintas, as doing so leads on to the larger argument about Barnfield and Shakespeare.⁴ It is partly upon these identifications—particularly the former—that the larger claim made here about a rivalrous Shakespeare-Barnfield dialogue rests—although the mere existence of some sort of dialogue between them appears established regardless of any specific historical representations.

I identify Barnfield's Ganymede as William Stanley, sixth earl of Derby. This fascinating nobleman has been principally known in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as one of the chief rival claimants for authorship of most of Shakespeare's dramatic canon (along with the earl of Oxford, Marlowe, Bacon,