| Chapter 1: | Barnfield's Ganymede |
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eighteenth century until the present note the family's connection with the Ganymede myth. From this connection was derived the equally famous Stanley badge of the eagle and child—a badge worn by the family's servants, including their companies of players—clearly indicating their happy acceptance of the grafting of the Ganymede material onto their own family myth.
The London writers of the time used Ganymede in two main ways, both of them psychologically and politically affective, and both of course rooted in the myth of Ganymede and Jupiter. It was used pejoratively by the moralists, though always (by practical necessity) in a generic, almost common noun sense, to say “catamite”—a kept love, usually a boy. For example, after calling Bacon a pederast (albeit in Greek), John Aubrey adds that, “His Ganimedes and Favourites tooke Bribes…” (Orgel 32). Chapman's character Quintiliano (in May Day 3.3.228–233) leeringly asks a boy whom he hopes to hire to play female roles on the stage: “Hast ever practiced, my pretty Ganymede?” (Orgel 42).
Honorifically, however, “Ganymede” was employed by writers in the British neoplatonic and pastoral traditions to personify holy and transcendent virtue. Thus Chapman, when in his usual neoplatonic vein, writes: “Ganymede is the bewtie of the minde” (45). Francis Thynne in 1600 stated: “[Ganymede] a prudent mann doth signify, / who doth his minde to Heavenlie things addresse, / and flies to Heaven by livinge vertuouslie” (Hotson 172). Similarly, Abraham Fraunce wrote: “by the ravishing of Ganymede by Iupiter, understand the lifting up of mans minde…to heavenly conceipts:…as though mans soule thus ravished by Iove might wel be sayd to enjoy his heavenly comfort and counsaile” (Fraunce I3). And George Wither: “By Ganymed, the Soule is understood…The Aegle, means the Heav'nly Contemplation” (116). As late as 1642, Alexander Ross gave over twelve paragraphs to this same neoplatonic interpretation of Ganymede in