Background
Barnfield was born on the 13th of June, 1574 in Norbury, Staffordshire, United Kingdom.
Barnfield was born on the 13th of June, 1574 in Norbury, Staffordshire, United Kingdom.
In November 1589 Barnfield matriculated at Brasenose College, Oxford, and took his degree in February 1592. He performed the exercise for his masters gown, but seems to have left the university abruptly, without proceeding to the M. A.
In his twenty-first year, Barnfield published anonymously his first work, The Affectionate Shepherd. This was a sort of florid romance, in two books of six-line stanzas.
Although the poem was successful, it did not pass without censure from the moral point of view because of its openly homosexual content. Two months later, in January 1595, Barnfield published his second volume, Cynthia, with certain Sonnets, and the legend of Cassandra.
In 1598, Barnfield published his third volume, The Encomion of Lady Pecunia, a poem in praise of money, followed by a sort of continuation, in the same six-line stanza, called The Complaint of Poetry for the Death of Liberality. In this volume there is already a decline in poetic quality. But an appendix of Poems in diverse Humours to this volume of 1598 presents some very interesting features. Here appears what seems to be the absolutely earliest praise of Shakespeare in a piece entitled A Remembrance of some English Poets, in which the still unrecognized author of Venus and Adonis is celebrated by the side of Spenser, Daniel and Drayton. Here also are the sonnet, If Music and sweet Poetrie agree, and the beautiful ode beginning As it fell upon a day, which were once attributed to Shakespeare himself.
In the next year, 1599, The Passionate Pilgrim was published.
In 1605 his Lady Pecunia was reprinted, and this was his last appearance as a man of letters. Some sources have claimed that Barnfield married and withdrew to his estate of Dorlestone.