| Chapter 3: | Barnfield's Amintas |
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autumn of 1592 and lasting through 1595 (the year after Ferdinando's own death) is clear; for immediately after that tragic death, other writers of pastoral literature—notably Spenser and Nashe—passed the name Amintas on to Ferdinando.
For example, Nashe—thought by most modern scholars to have been Ferdinando's friend—dubbed him Amintas in his dedication of Pierce Pennilesse His Supplication to the Divell in 1592, a few months before Ferdinando succeeded to the Derby earldom. More significantly, because of his great literary influence, Spenser flatteringly passed Amintas on to Ferdinando in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (published, as amended from an earlier draft, in 1595), first by praising him as a poet and then (in a passage added to the original version) lamenting his very recent death:
Amyntus floure of shepheards pride forlorne:
He whilest he lived was the noblest swaine,
That ever piped in an oaten quill:
Both did he other, which could pipe, maintaine,
And eke could pipe himselfe with passing skill.
(lines 434, 439–443)
I think it accurate to say that all modern Spenser editors and critics—in addition to most non-Spenserian historians who have examined the question—identify Amintas as Ferdinando Stanley (for example, Oram et al 542; Schrickx 75–76; Bagley 75; Titherley 51–52; Nicholl, Cup 88; E. A. J. Honigmann 75; May, Courtier Poets 49–52; and Hotson passim). Edmund Malone in the eighteenth century was probably the first to realize and to claim that the London poets had indeed conferred this particular pastoral name upon Ferdinando just after Watson's death. One reason for this high honor—as Hotson long ago noted—is that