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

Spenser's phrase “passing skill,” with respect to the quality of Ferdinando's own verse, did not mean “passable skill” in the 1590s (as most earlier editors and critics had thought), but rather “surpassing skill” and was thus extremely high praise (173). Hotson's corrective reading is still not widely enough understood by readers of Spenser's two-word phrase.

For Barnfield, writing Greenes Funeralls a year after Watson's death, Ferdinando—not Watson—was the pastoral lover Amintas. As previously noted, Barnfield in Greenes Funeralls Sonnet VII respectfully beseeches his honored friend Amintas to give over a bit of time to join him in writing a poem in honor of the dead Greene (for a modernized text of Sonnet VII, see appendix C). For Barnfield knew—along with everyone else in literary London—that Watson was dead, having even predeceased Greene. Nashe's most recent biographer, Charles Nicholl, takes it for obvious fact that Nashe clearly thought of Ferdinando as Amintas at the time (Cup 109 and passim). Nashe's beliefs on this score are important because Nashe and Barnfield were notable allies in their support and defense of the dead Greene in the literary London of this particular time, and allied haters of Greene's posthumous detractors, such as Gabriel Harvey. It thus makes sense that the younger Barnfield, just down from Oxford, would have believed what his older friend Nashe, just from Cambridge, believed about the real-world name shadowed by the pastoral Amintas.

But in fact, scholarship has been available since 1979 which, taken with all the rest of the evidence, lays the question of the identity of Barnfield's Amintas to rest. Up until the mid- to late- twentieth century, it had been known for hundreds of years that Ferdinando Stanley had been some sort of poet, but very few people had in fact read the one extant poem then known to be his. Then, in 1979, Steven B. May discovered two previously