Richard Barnfield's Poetics

Edited collection on Richard Barnfield, a lesser known but important early modern English poet who was a contemporary of Shakespeare and wrote homoerotic verse.

Richard Barnfield is sometimes considered the rival poet in Shakespeare’s sonnets but has been relatively neglected in studies of early modern English poetry.

This edited collection situates Barnfield’s position in early modern literature beyond his best known work, The Affectionate Shepherd, exploring his classical education, wider homoerotic verse and distinctive aesthetic literary style.

Making use of different approaches, the essays in this volume tackle issues of intertextuality and interdiscursivity through the poet’s use of classical sources and poetic genres such as the sonnet and epyllia. Particular attention is devoted to the relationship between Barnfield’s work and that of his contemporaries. Traditionally limited to a comparison with Shakespeare’s output, this volume places Barnfield in the literary panorama of his time, giving specific attention to those features which make his work stand out. Using corpus linguistics tools, the poet’s entire body of work is further elucidated through the structure and meter of his sonnets as well as formal and functional aspects of his use of irony. Written by an international group of scholars, this collection celebrates the 450th anniversary of Barnfield’s birth and makes his poetry essential to the study of early modern literature.