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

appears to do so only eleven months later in his dedication of Cynthia to William. Therefore, it stands to reason that William Stanley is the man promised that future praise in Greenes Funeralls.

Still, even if Barnfield was, as I said previously, “Stanley-obsessed” at this time, how do we know for sure that the “friend” promised future praise in Greenes Funeralls' Sonnet V is indeed William, rather than his brother Ferdinando? It might, after all, seem equally plausible on the surface that, because Greenes Funeralls honors Ferdinando in sections of its Sonnet IIII (sic.) and Sonnet VII—begging him to write his own poems in praise of Greene—Ferdinando might be the “friend” promised future praise by Barnfield in the intervening Sonnet V. As Barnfield, Spenser, and most of the other poets knew—and as Elizabethan scholars have only recently come to realize through their discovery of poems thought lost—Ferdinando was a well-known and highly esteemed courtier poet at the time (May, Courtier Poets 49–52). Spenser named him one of the best in Colin Clout's Come Home Again. Thus, the idea that Barnfield would request such poems from Ferdinando makes even more sense now than it may have made before these discoveries. The question of why Barnfield indicates William rather than Ferdinando as the man promised future praise is an important one, because, as I will try to establish, Barnfield was already beginning a dialogue with certain Shakespeare's sonnets in Greenes Funeralls—particularly those in the Rival Poet group—and with their ultimate addressee, who was not the dead Greene but the living Earl William. This dialogue would be pursued by Barnfield and Shakespeare through Barnfield's next two books, both written in 1594.