Double Vision in Barnfield's homoerotic poetry (1)
Reading
habits are changing, as Alberto Mangual observes in The Traveller, the Tower, and the
Worm: The Reader as Metaphor. The
World Wide Web takes the reader on a journey of many roads, often at
speed...and (I would add) frequently down the same paths with repeat
information. One of the problems with the World Wide Web is the ease of
reproduction: material is copied and pasted from one site to another such that
errors multiply. Like Spencer's wandering Red Cross Knight, the reader finds
that killing Error does not stop the spawning. Before attempting to review
Barnfield's Cynthia, it is
necessary to remove some of the misconceptions about the author and his
work in general. Nothing new, I know will be said, but it is best to be on
solid ground as regards biography and influences.
Richard
Barnfield was baptised on June 13th, 1574, in Norbury, Staffordshire. As with
Shakespeare, his date of birth is not known. Little time, however, passed
between birth and baptism in the C16. Infant mortality was high, so parents
were eager to have their child ready for Heaven. Two days intervened in the
case of Elizabeth I. Richard Barnfield would have been born somewhere around
June 10th, 1574. Astrologically, this would have made him a Gemini. As a
follower of Spenser, who was well aware (as any learned person in Elizabethan
England) of hermetical matters, Barnfield was born under the sign of the
androgyne and twins. I would not wish to make too much of this fact, but it
should be kept in mind as a reader considers Barnfield's concern with twinning
and male to male love.
Two
dates are given (across the internet) for Barnfield's death, 1620 and 1627.
1620 is correct. As Worrall pointed out in Notes
and Queries (1992, pp.
170-1), the 1627 will, taken as evidence of Barnfield's death, was Barnfield's
father's will. That same will has been used to create a certain prejudice
against Barnfield: he married, had a son, Robert, and his poems, therefore, are
little more than a literary pastoral game by a heterosexual poet. Not so. It
should be added, as regards this line of prejudice, that even if Barnfield had
married it would not have meant that the poetry was automatically some kind of
posturing. Heterosexual marriage, then as now, was and is a convention that
"gay" men undertake. Interestingly, the prejudice is forgotten when
it comes to Shakespeare. He married, had two daughters and one son, yet The Sonnets are readily taken as masterpieces of
male to male sexuality.
The
Poetry Foundation has this to say about Barnfield: [he] "published Cynthia, modelling his collection—which
includes a 20-sonnet sequence—after the poems of Spenser and Shakespeare."
The mention of the "20-sonnet sequence" intimates an influence from
Shakespeare's sonnets. Across the internet, there are many discussion that
connect Barnfield's sonnets with those of Shakespeare. Such is unlikely. Recent
discoveries have linked the Dark Lady of The
Sonnets to Lucy Negro who was
a prostitute-actor, notably mentioned in the 1594 Christmas entertainments. Her
reputation spread through the rest of the decade. Prior to this connection,
critics attributed sonnets 127-54 to the middle of the 1590s. Now, this seems
to be likely. This only suggests a date of composition for these sonnets-- it
doesn't suggest an audience date. Certainly, Shakespeare's
"sugared-sonnets" were circulating among a literary elite in 1598, as
Mere's mentions them. But The
Sonnets were largely unknown
until 1609. The idea that Barnfield was a diluter of Shakespeare is simply
incorrect. If anything, Shakespeare built on Barnfield's work, so the influence
works in the opposite direction to what is assumed across the internet. On a
simple technical note, Barnfield's sonnets are not Shakespearean sonnets: use a
different rhyme scheme and do not show the characteristic octet/sestet split.
If Barnfield accessed any Shakespeare beyond the early plays, it would have
been Venus and Adonis and The
Rape of Lucrece. The strongest influence on Barnfield is Spenser; and this
shows in Cynthia.
Barnfield
was 20 years old when he wrote and published Cynthia, which opens
with two sections that are drawn together in a third poem, "An Ode".
"Cynthia" is a sequence of twenty Spenserian stanzas
spoken by Barnfield's pastoral persona, Daphnis. The sonnets, as already said,
number twenty and record Daphnis's love for Ganymede. "An Ode"
describes how an unmentioned person finds Daphnis broken-hearted for his love
of "a lasse" more beautiful than Ganymede. Numbers were often used to
carry silent meanings in Renaissance poetry and the double use of twenty
represents Barnfield, aged 20, split, like a halved androgyne, between two
different visions. But before those visions are looked at, it is useful to
set a context for the volume by discussing the framing of the poetry.
Cynthia opens with an address to the reader. The author is Barnfield. He begins by acknowledging The Affectionate Shepherd (1594) as his work, disowns "two Books" that have been wrongly attributed, and then refers to licentious interpretations of his work. It has been said that Barnfield apologises for his "interested representation of homoerotic desire" (Norton, Rictor, "Pastoral Homoeroticism, p.6). In truth, Barnfield simply disassociates himself from the wrong readings (not stated overtly) and evokes classical precedent as his defence: Virgil's Eclogue II. At the close of his address. Barnfield makes it clear that the model for “Cynthia” is Spenser and his returning to Spenser is worth some careful thought.
As
a student of Spenserian pastoral, Barnfield would have known the controversy
surrounding E.K.'s gloss on the homoerotic element of the "January"
eclogue in The Shepherd's
Calendar (1579). Colin
explains that he does not love Hobbinol, though Hobbinol loves him, and he is
devoted to Rosalind. A mere two lines of unsensual verse
It is not Hobinol,
wherefore I plaine.
Albee my
loue he seeke with daily suit
(Ianvarie, ll 55-56)
caused
E.K to hear pederasty and defend Spenser, mainly via Plato. Rictor Norton
repeatedly points out (in articles across the net and in print) that Webbe
heard a similar note in the "June" eclogue and this caused him
to sneer, in A Discourse
of English Poetrie (1586), at
Spenser's familiarity with Italian sodomy. If this were true, Spenser would be
a dangerous model for Barnfield to use. In fact, in his Discourse, Webbe repeats that others have
said that Spenser used "unsavoury love" in "June" and was
aware of Italian sodomy, but all he hears in the eclogue is old friendship sacrificed
to heterosexual love, as often happens to young men. By making “Cynthia” into
"the first imitation of the verse of that excellent Poet Maister
Spenser", Barnfield is consciously making a connection with the homoerotic
element in English pastoral. And it is English
pastoral, nor Virgilian Latin/Roman/Italian pastoral because Cynthia continues the imperial theme of
Elizabethan England. There is no accident in how Spenser selects Spenser’s
dangerous “April” eclogue as a major source. In this eclogue Hobbinol refers
openly to his love for Colin, "on him was all my care and ioye"
(l.23) and then sings, in Colin's absence, one of Colin's harmonius
"lays". Hobbinol, the beloved, recreates his love with a song of
"Eliza, Queene of Shepherdes all" ("April", l.34). Spenser
sets Hobbinol’s nature inspired love of Colin as the context for a divine
vision of Elizabeth I’s reign. This connection is revived in Cynthia. The first poem, “Cynthia” uses
the Spenserian Stanza to overtly link Barnfield’s work with the political
vision of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590), Books 1-3. The twenty sonnets
show, as Spenser did with Colin and Hobbinol, the natural love connected to
that political vision. Golden Age pastoral is used by Barnfield to connect the love of men to natural order, not unnatural lust.
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