Shakespeare's queer inspiration

Before the 20th century, only two English writers—both Elizabethans—had published love sonnets about men: Richard Barnfield with the shepherd Daphnis and Ganymede, followed by William Shakespeare and his fair youth. “Barnfield is the one who indicates to Shakespeare what you can do with a queered Petrarchan sonnet,” explains Will Tosh, author of Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, on the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. “He’s the one who shows Shakespeare what’s possible. Shakespeare takes that challenge and runs with it and does something much more profound and interesting in his collection.”

In an excerpt from Straight Acting, Tosh tells the story of Barnfield’s meteoric rise in literary London in the 1590s, his groundbreaking poetry, and its influence on Shakespeare.

Nothing is known of Barnfield’s early education, although judging from his literary output it was, like Shakespeare’s, thorough. There was plenty of family money to send him to university at fifteen, the standard age for a boy who’d attended a grammar school. Oxford initially suited him. He graduated in 1592, but swiftly abandoned plans for a Master of Arts (eighteen-hour days of theology, Aristotelian philosophy and logic weren’t his thing). Instead, he cooled his heels until the plague was beginning to lift, and then made for London. By the time he was twenty, he was already a published poet: he wrote a short collection called Greene’s Funerals (1594), which eulogized the contemporary crop of literary celebrities including Edmund Spenser and the late Robert Greene. The volume, which may have been issued contrary to his wishes, was dedicated to London’s ‘gentleman readers’, code for the men of the Inns of Court, and probably a sign that he had joined an Inn of Court or Chancery himself. It’s unlikely he intended to study or practice the law. Instead, the Inns of Court were an ideal place to absorb the queer poetry and drama that appeared in 1593 and 1594.

He was an early reader of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, which he devoured along with the other epyllia that followed in its wake. He got his hands on manuscript copies of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, and his wildly popular pastoral lyric poem that begins, ‘Come live with me and be my love’. He also leapt on the two plays by Marlowe that appeared in print early in 1594, less than a year after the playwright’s death, Edward II and Dido Queen of Carthage. All would find themselves echoed or quoted in the work Barnfield wrote at some speed and published in November 1594, a queer erotic fantasy that sensationally lifted the veil on the decorously classicised and Latinised conventions of pastoral romance.

This was the book published—anonymously at first—as The Affectionate Shepherd. It was a miscellany of a kind, but the surrounding material attracted much less attention than the substantial two-part pastoral poem at its heart, ‘The Tears of an Affectionate Shepherd sick for love, or the Complaint of Daphnis for the love of Ganymede’. Readers expecting a familiar rehash of Virgil’s second Eclogue were in for a surprise. This was Virgil supersized, sexualised and anglicised into something altogether new. It was in every respect bigger, longer and uncut.

The speaker Daphnis—a shepherd, but like all pastoral figures, intimately connected with lordly folk and divine creatures—adores the beautiful young Ganymede (another instance of that resoundingly queer name). But Ganymede is also beloved by Guendolen, Queen of the Nymphs—who is herself fending off advances from a geriatric suitor and mourning the loss of her first love.

Over two parts, or ‘lamentations’, an increasingly abject Daphnis goes all out to win over Ganymede, and entice him away from Guendolen, whose so-called love, Daphnis argues, is vapid and self-centred. Never before in English had a poet been so upfront about the bodily reality of queer male desire, a force which frames the poem from its first stanzas and propels the sequence of lures, promises and seductions that Daphnis places before Ganymede to persuade him to ‘be my boy, or else my bride’ (2.78).

In the opening lines, Daphnis describes—or perhaps imagines—an early-morning visit to Ganymede’s chamber:

Scarce had the morning star hid from the light
Heaven’s crimson canopy with stars bespangled,
But I began to rue th’unhappy sight
Of that fair boy that had my heart entangled.
Cursing the time, the place, the sense, the sin,
I came, I saw, I viewed, I slipped in.

If it be sin to love a sweet-faced boy
(Whose amber locks, trussed up in golden trammels,
Dangle adown his lovely cheeks with joy,
When pearl and flowers his fair hair enamels),
If it be sin to love a lovely lad,
Oh then sin I, for whom my soul is sad. (1.1–12)

The four ‘sins’ in two stanzas—and the Caesarean implications of conquest in ‘I came, I saw, I viewed’, to say nothing of the resonance of ‘slipped in’—place Daphnis’s desires and intentions well beyond anything that could possibly be understood as bloodlessly poetic yearning.

Part of the romantic deal that Daphnis proposes is transactional: he will reward Ganymede with a wealth of luxuries if the boy sleeps with him. Some are desirable consumer goods (a golden tennis racquet, or a fan made out of phoenix feathers). But other gifts are succulently edible—ripe-to-bursting cherries, oozing honey and strawberries ‘bathed in a melting sugar-candy stream’ (2.70). It’s clear that Daphnis conflates the pleasure of these delicacies with the anticipated joy of Ganymede’s body: ‘O, would to God [. . .] My lips were honey, and thy mouth a bee,’ he yearns:

Then shoulds’t thou suck my sweet and my fair flower
That now is ripe and full of honey-berries.
Then would I lead thee to my pleasant bower
Filled full of grapes, of mulberries and cherries;
Then shoulds’t thou be my wasp or else my bee.
I would thy hive, and thou my honey be. (1.95–102)

The flower-sucking and honey-depositing stays in Daphnis’s imagination. In accordance with the traditions of Petrarchan love poetry or Virgilian pastoral, Ganymede remains unmoved. Daphnis threatens to exile himself to the Caucasus and let ‘a vulture gnaw upon my heart’ (2.30), but to no avail. He becomes resentful of Ganymede’s shining ivory beauty, and his lazy assumption that everyone will fall at his feet in adoration. It’s not just white boys, Daphnis hints, who can turn heads: ‘We cannot choose, but needs we must confess: / Sable excels milk-white in more or less’ (2.275–76). In a society such as Barnfield’s, which was developing a growing awareness of racial difference, the possibility that Daphnis might seek love from a man of colour rather than the pale and disdainful Ganymede hovers at the margin of the poem.

As ‘The Tears of an Affectionate Shepherd’ comes to an end, the rueful Daphnis imagines that he has become not just older and wiser but ‘age-withered’ (2.414) and wrinkled, his very life force burnt up by his unrequited passion for Ganymede. He bids ‘a thousand-thousand times farewell’ to his ‘love-hating boy’ (2.421–22), and sadly gives up the field (although we never learn if the ‘wantoniz[ing]’ (1.161) competitor Guendolen ever gets her man).

The Affectionate Shepherd targeted the same post-plague readership, hungry for delight, that Shakespeare had served with Venus and Adonis. Barnfield was even more clear-sighted about what he understood his audience to want: an arousingly sexed-up version of the English pastorals that had proved such a hit since Spenser’s The Shepherd’s Calendar fifteen years before. Barnfield had no intention of sanitising the form’s lush homoeroticism. He didn’t want a reader like Spenser’s annotator E. K. to delude themselves that Daphnis’s feelings were free of ‘disorderly love’. Orderly or otherwise, Daphnis’s queer desires were very much the point of the poem, and they found instant ‘friendly favour’, as Barnfield later put it. The Affectionate Shepherd’s combination of queer sex appeal and misogynist exclusion (the vampish Guendolen is ‘light’ (1.158) and fickle) was calculated to please the young men of the Inns of Court.

The poem barely had a chance to astonish its readers before Barnfield exceeded it in imagination and innovation. He spent the Christmas holidays of 1594–95—when, if he was in London, he may well have attended the infamous Gray’s Inn festivities—rethinking the destiny he gave to Daphnis and Ganymede in the final pages of ‘The Tears of an Affectionate Shepherd’. Barnfield decided to erase the shepherd’s wizened, forlorn end and start his narrative again, reuniting his lovers in a numbered sequence of twenty sonnets. In moving Daphnis and Ganymede from the established classical setting of the pastoral romance to the as-yet-unqueered territory of the Petrarchan sonnet, he was breaking new ground. No one had ever cast two men in a published love sonnet before, let alone made them the stars of an entire collection. This was queer terra incognita.

He wrote quickly. By Easter, they were in print and on sale at the Paul’s Churchyard bookshop of the up-and-coming publishing brothers Humphrey and Matthew Lownes. The volume—Cynthia, with Certain Sonnets—also included his legend of Cassandra and verses in lavish praise of the queen, and carried a poem in ‘commendation of the author his work’ by one ‘T. T.’, who may be the same Thomas Thorpe who would later publish Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It was a classy publication, and it bore a sense of expectation that the same ‘courteous gentlemen readers’ who had lapped up The Affectionate Shepherd would return to buy Barnfield’s next offering. In ‘Certain Sonnets’, Daphnis and Ganymede slotted easily into the roles of sonnet speaker and lusted-after love-object (they had, after all, rehearsed the parts extensively in The Affectionate Shepherd). Ganymede still has his ‘sin-procuring’ (17.13) body and an ‘obdurate beauty’ (19.4) that rebuffs all seductions; Daphnis vows he’ll die unless Ganymede ‘quench [his] thirst’ (6.4) with kisses.

The mood is alternately keenly voyeuristic and chattily intimate. Daphnis imagines stealing a kiss from the sleeping Ganymede, and watches hungrily from the riverbank as his ‘fairest fair’ (7.6) swims in the Thames (there are echoes of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander as Ganymede attracts aroused interest from Neptune). But he also settles down beside him for a revelatory heart-to-heart, and presents him with a pair of kid gloves—the traditional Elizabethan courtship gift.

Consummation arrives in the form of a vigorous wet dream, as Daphnis fantasises that Ganymede’s ‘sweet coral lips’ (6.1) kiss him into a paroxysm of youthful energy, and he feels from his ‘heart a spring of blood’ that sends lusty strength coursing through his limbs. Daphnis recognises that ‘in dreaming [. . .] [he] did speed’ (6.13), or orgasm in his sleep, and wonders what it would be like to do so with Ganymede ‘in deed’ (6.14)—while wide awake.

He doesn’t manage to sleep with him ‘in deed’, but Daphnis achieves something even more astonishing: a declaration to Ganymede that he is and always will be his beloved. In a culture that tried wherever possible to separate the intense romantic feelings of male friendship—amicitia perfecta—from erotic love, Barnfield collapsed the distinction in an utterly determined and unambiguous way. Placed in the very middle of the sequence, Daphnis’s avowal (Sonnet 11) is worth quoting in full:

Sighing and sadly sitting by my love,
He asked the cause of my heart’s sorrowing,
Conjuring me by heaven’s eternal king
To tell the cause which me so much did move.
‘Compelled,’ quoth I, ‘to thee I will confess.
Love is the cause, and only Love it is
That doth deprive me of my heavenly bliss:
Love is the pain that doth my heart oppress.’
‘And what is she,’ quoth he, ‘whom thou dost love?’
‘Look in this glass,’ quoth I, ‘there shalt thou see
The perfect form of my felicity.’
When, thinking that it would strange magic prove,
He opened it; and taking off the cover
He straight perceived himself to be my lover.

This is queer drama in content and form: Ganymede’s sudden realisation, delivered by means of a pocket mirror, that he is the cause of Daphnis’s heartsickness comes as the volta in the sonnet’s closing triplet. And although Barnfield’s sonnets don’t follow a chronological plot, this is a poem that gestures towards what might happen after such a declaration. What does Daphnis hope Ganymede will say?

Ganymede might well have struggled to find the words. Early modern English culture didn’t have a language to describe an exclusive bond of erotic love between two men: there was no direct queer equivalent at this time of the romantic and sexual discourse of straight courtly love. In his sonnets, Barnfield was beginning to invent one. By lifting his lovelorn shepherds from classical pastoral and transplanting them into the English love sonnet, up to this point exclusively associated with poems in praise of a glacial Petrarchan mistress, he was giving a new vernacular voice to queer desire. This was Barnfield’s—and English literature’s—coming-out poem. Shakespeare, picking up a copy in Lownes’s bookshop in 1595 and contemplating his own composition of love sonnets, had never seen anything like it.

About the author

Will Tosh is head of research at Shakespeare’s Globe, London. He is a scholar of early modern literature and culture, a dramaturg for Renaissance classics and new plays, and a historical adviser for television and radio. He is the author of two previous books, and he appears regularly in the media to discuss Shakespeare and his world. He lives in London.