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

If these connections were not enough to identify Stanley with Ganymede, we have a commendatory front-matter poem in Cynthia by one T. T., who is just possibly Thomas Thorpe, who would publish Shake-speares Sonnets fifteen years later—an identification Harry Morris notes (Colin's Child 54), and which Katherine Duncan-Jones also finds intriguing (47)—which provides us with more connections. Duncan-Jones is certainly right in asserting that, “[I]ndeed, there seems to be some as yet unexplained connection between Shakespeare and Barnfield” (47). Glancing both backward at The Affectionate Shepheard and ahead to the text which will follow his prefatory poem, and after explicitly identifying Earl William Stanley with the eagle, T. T. implies that Stanley actually asked Barnfield to write the verses in Cynthia:

T. T.'s reference to Stanley as the eagle who lends his poetic “wings” to Barnfield, and who has “tasked” him to write this book, would seem to go a good way toward settling the question of Stanley's identification with Barnfield's Ganymede.