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Richard Barnfield, “Amyntas,” and the Sidney Circle
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The Appearance of the pastoral name “Amyntas” in the poems of Richard Barnfield and in those of well-known members of the Sidney circle points to a network of interesting relationships not hitherto perceived generally. Barnfield's elaborate and extended references to Amyntas not only reveal some of the influences upon this poet's early compositions but also shed additional light upon the authorship of Greenes Funeralls, a work interesting both for its importance in the Greene-Harvey controversy and for its allusion to Greene's attack upon Shakespeare. Of significance also is the precise nature of Barnfield's connection with the group of writers who, after Sidney's death, attached themselves to Mary Herbert but retained still the spirit of Sir Philip. It is a connection that can be established clearly only if we understand aright the identity of Amyntas and the intention of the poet in employing the name.
In four English works published between 1592 and 1595, Amyntas represents under the guise of pastoral allusion various persons whom the authors desired to praise: “Colin Clovts come home againe,” Pierce Penilesse his Svpplication to the Diuell, The Affectionate Shepheard, and Greenes Funeralls. Amyntas appears also in pastoral poems by Thomas Watson and Abraham Fraunce as an unfortunate shepherd who dies for love, and again in the works of other writers who wish by this method to allude to Watson's work or to Fraunce's. The name is met then in three ways: as a poetic name for an historical personage contemporary to the writer who uses it, as a name appropriate to a shepherd but having no topical significance in the fashionable Arcadian romances of the last two decades of the sixteenth century, and as a reference to poems using the name Amyntas either in their titles or in their subtitles.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- PMLA , Volume 74 , Issue 4-Part1: Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America , September 1959 , pp. 318 - 324
- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1959
References
1 For a detailed rehearsal of the place of Greenes Funeralls in both these matters, see Warren B. Austin, “A Supposed Contemporary Allusion to Shakespeare as a Plagiarist,” SQ, vi (Autumn, 1955), 373-380.
2 Tasso got the name perhaps from Virgil, who employs it in the second, third, fifth, and tenth Eclogues.
3 “Though the Amyntas is not, as is so often stated in standard reference books, indebted to Tasso's Aminta for its story, its general debt to the Italian pastoral writings is undoubted” (Leicester Bradner, Musae Anglicanae, New York, 1940, p. 46). Despite Bradner's warning, A. Lytton Sells asserts boldly that “when in 1585 [Watson] translated Tasso's Aminta, it was not into English verse but into Latin hexameters” (The Italian Influence in English Poetry, Bloomington, 1955, pp. 121-122).
4 Poems, ed. E. Arber (London, 1870), p. 147.
5 Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow (London, 1910), iii, 320.
6 The existence of a warm friendship between Fraunce and Watson can be deduced from the dedication to Lodge's Phillis (1595) wherein they are invoked as “fore-bred brothers . . . / Who in their swan-like songs Amintas wept” (ed. M. F. Crow, London, 1896, p. 12). My interpretation, below, of three lines of Spenser's Faerie Queene supports a similar theory of close friendship.
7 Works of Edmund Spenser, Variorum ed., iii, ed. F. M. Padelford (Baltimore, 1934), 91. All quotations from Spenser are from the Variorum.
8 “Spenser and Thomas Watson,” MLN, lxix (Nov., 1954), 484-487.
9 That Spenser is referring to both Watson and Fraunce has been asserted by C. Elliot Browne, “The Earliest Mention of Shakespeare,” N&Q, 4th Ser., xi (1873), 378, though on what evidence one cannot say. Browne quotes Poets as poets'.
10 Fovre Letters and Certeine Sonnets, ed. G. B. Harrison (London, 1922), p. 68.
11 Lines 47-48 of the prologue refer to “our English Fraunce, / A peerelesse sweet Translator of our time”; ll. 57-59 to “Watson, worthy many Epitaphes / For his sweete Poësie, for Amintas teares / And joyes so well set downe” (Life and Minor Works of George Peele, ed. D. H. Horne, New Haven, 1952, p. 246).
12 Palladis Tamia, ed. D. C. Allen (New York, 1938), p. 284.
13 Not enough has been written about the relationship between Spenser and Fraunce. Katherine Koller, “Abraham Fraunce and Edmund Spenser,” ELH, vii (June 1940), 108-120, has shown that the influence of Spenser on the Pens-hurst circle can be illustrated best through his influence upon Fraunce. Fraunce has long been suggested as the Corydon of “Colin Clovts come home againe,” and lines from The Shepheardes Calender were used by Fraunce to illustrate oratory in his Lawiers Logike (1588), as well as lines from the Faerie Queene in MS to illustrate elaborate “conceited verses” in his Arcadian Rhetorike (1588).
14 For the history of this controversy, see Works, vii, Pt. i, 471-472, and E. A. Strathmann, “Lady Carey and Spenser,” ELH, ii (April. 1935), 35, 51-53.
15 Poems, ed. E. Arber (Westminster, 1896), p. 29.
16 Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Isham Reprints (London, 1870), p. xxiii.
17 Complete Poems of Richard Barnfield (London, 1876), p. xxxvi, n.
18 But for Edmonds' uninformed guess in 1870, Watson's identification as Barnfield's Amyntas has never been questioned.
19 The elegy in the second eglog is also in the pentameter ababcc stanza, and the sixth eglog is merely a slight variation of this form: abbaec. That The Affectionate Shepheard and The Shepheards Garland are both pastorals adds something to this contention.
20 See Waldo F. McNeir, “Barnfield's Borrowings from Spenser,” N&Q, cc (Dec. 1955), 510-511. McNeir traces twenty parallels between Barnfield's Cynthia and Faerie Queene i-iii. He would have found equally rich fields in The Affectionate Shepheard.
21 The Arcadian Rhetorike, ed. Ethel Seaton (Oxford, 1950) p. 35.
22 Greenes Newes both from Heauen and Hell By B. R. 1593 and Greenes Funeralls By R. B. 1594, ed. R. B. McKerrow (Stratford, 1922), p. ix.
23 R. B. Greenes Funeralls: (London, 1954), B,'.
24 McKerrow (p. ix) claims that anaphora is used but twice in Greenes Funeralls: Sonnet ii, ll. 1-4, and Sonnet ix, ll. 1-4; but ll. 10-12 of Sonnet vii are a clear use of anaphora; and by Fraunce's definition: “Anaphora [,] a bringing back of the same soüd, is when the same sound is iterated in the beginning of the sentence” (p. 40), the figure can be found also in Sonnet i, ll. 9-11; Sonnet iii, ll. 7, 11; Sonnet iv throughout; and often. McKerrow (p. ix) cites the use of anaphora elsewhere in Barnfield as “Poems, ed. Arber, pp. 20, st. 5; 28, st. 5; 31, st. 5; 33, st. 3; and often.”
25 The strongest argument against Barnfield's authorship of Greenes Funeralls is the disclaimer by Barnfield himself, in the preface to Cynthia, that he has written anything earlier than The Affectionate Shepheard (Poems, Arber, p. 44). Criticism has held long that Greenes Funeralls is one of the books he disclaims. But there can no longer be any question that Barnfield is the author of Greenes Funeralls. Since Barnfield is not the kind of man who would publicly deny the authorship of a work written in the spirit of Greenes Funeralls (a loyal defense of a dead man calumniated), it cannot be one of the two books he repudiated either. Barnfield's reference to first fruits applies to published works only, just as Shakespeare's dedication of Venus and Adonis calls that poem “the first heire of my invention.” Greenes Funeralls was published “contrarie to the Authours expectation.” It is a poor work. Since Barnfield did not publish it himself, had no hand in the publication, might even have objected to it, it is not strange for him to ignore it in the preface to Cynthia.
26 “Greenes Funeralls, 1594, and Nicholas Breton,” SP, Extra Ser., i (May 1929), 1, 10.
27 A Bibliographical and Critical Account of the Rarest Books in the English Language (New York, 1866) iv, 221.
28 Mark Eccles, Christopher Marlowe in London (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), has argued convincingly that “C. M.” is Christopher Marlowe and has established beyond doubt that Watson and Marlowe were the closest of friends. The significance of this friendship upon Barnfield cannot be lost upon the reader who sees the influence of Marlowe's “Passionate Shepherd” upon stanzas 16-33 of The Affectionate Shepheard and who sees close imitation in the first line of stanza 28 and in ll. 1-2 of stanza 33.