Riviera, Massimiliano; (2024) ‘Orpheus came and began to sing’: Richard Barnfield’s allusive subversion. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text (Edited version) 'Orpheus came and began to sing' - Richard Barnfield's allusive subversion [Edited version].pdf - Other Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 June 2025. Download (2MB)

Abstract

This thesis offers a comprehensive reappraisal of the work of Richard Barnfield, the Elizabethan writer who authored homoerotic and pastoral poetry during the last decade of the sixteenth century. While Barnfield has often been dismissed as an imitative poet, this thesis sheds new light on Barnfield’s imaginative engagement with classical and contemporary texts, presenting him as a subtly subversive poet who consistently inhabits poetical models, genres, and tropes only to disrupt them from within. Reading Barnfield’s oeuvre against the backdrop of his cultural environment and his education, this thesis unveils the poet’s deconstructive practices and his ironic – but deeply knowledgeable – engagement with the classics, often used as a tool to subvert self-serving and exemplary interpretations of texts from classical antiquity read even more ‘wisely and narrowly’ than William Webbe wished. Chapter One examines Barnfield’s homoerotic reading practices, outlining how in The Affectionate Shepheard he turns to Virgil to authoritatively anchor homoeroticism within the pastoral tradition, while also engaging with Spenser, Marlowe, and Drayton to learn how to write about same-sex desire. Chapter Two explores the Trojan elements of Cynthia to argue that Barnfield seemingly engages with the major literary fashions of the time – in terms of both genres and content – to offer a satirical review of the cultural and political project of the translatio imperii, articulated into the rejection of Virgilian epic models and a scathing treatment of the Trojan genealogy on which Elizabeth grounded her mystique. The study of Barnfield’s habit of stripping exemplary figures of their cultural capital continues in Chapter Three, which examines how Barnfield, in his 1595 Orphic epyllion, desecrates the figure of Orpheus, employed by poets and rhetoricians alike as an embodiment of the civilizing virtues of the humanae litterae, thus turning the legendary musician into an antithetical version of the character proudly invoked by rhetorical handbooks and apologies of poetry. Finally, Chapter Four examines Barnfield’s last collection to survey how, at the end of his short-lived literary career, he returns to his bucolic roots and employs the topoi of the pastoral elegy to mourn the death of patrons’ munificence on which the survival of poetry depends. This thesis argues that the works of Barnfield reveal a sophisticated understanding of contemporary poetical models and practices, which he mimics while also upending their usual poetic force.

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