| Chapter 1: | Barnfield's Ganymede |
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Dee on occasion visited him at one or another of his homes. On the grounds of his Latham estate, he bred and raced horses. In fact, it is from him that we get the racing term derby, for he set up and ran the very first derby race there. Indeed, Latham House and his two other palaces (Knowsley and New Park) had been for many years the largest and most lavish in all England, after that of the queen's own largest residence—substantially grander even than that of the magnificent Herberts at Wilton (throughout Europe, Latham House, Knowsley, and New Park were known collectively as “The Northern Court” [Heywood qtd. in Canino 191]). Although he was never viewed as a serious contender for the throne upon his succession to the earldom (unlike his elder brother Ferdinando), the Burghley spies nevertheless kept a close watch on Stanley in this regard, and it is from one of them, George Fenner, that we learn of his “penning plays”—which, within its context, simply meant, “We do not have to worry about him.”
The first step in identifying Ganymede as Earl William—(en route to Shake-speares Sonnets) is to relate Barnfield's The Affectionate Shepheard to the twenty homoerotic sonnets in his Cynthia. Because Barnfield is himself incontestably Daphnis in both works—he calls himself by that pastoral name in both—it also seems reasonable to believe that he refers to the same man within a three-month period as his beloved Ganymede, to whom he speaks in the most intimate and loving terms, in both works. Thus (to belabor the obvious), if we know the identity of Ganymede in Cynthia, we then also know the identity of Ganymede in The Affectionate Shepheard, published only two or three months earlier.
The next step is to ask if any person or persons were exclusively associated with the figure of Ganymede in Tudor-Stuart England. The answer is yes: the Stanleys of Latham. They were identified not just in England but in all the courts of Europe with the Ganymedean eagle. The reason for this close identification