Richard Barnfield (1574–1620)

Richard Barnfield was a celebrated poet of the English Renaissance, whose life and works offer a striking window into the margins of literary expression, sexual dissent, and outsider voices in Elizabethan England. Though not a self-proclaimed heretic or critic of religion, and unlikely to have identified as irreligious in the modern sense, Barnfield’s work resonates strongly within the tradition of freethought and cultural nonconformity. His poetry, admired in his lifetime, later provoked discomfort, reinterpretation, and ultimately erasure from the mainstream literary canon.

Yet Barnfield’s influence reached the highest levels of English literature, directly shaping the style and tone of early Shakespearean verse. He also remains one of the only male poets of his era to write about same-sex desire with clarity, without cloaking it in multiple layers of allegory or myth. His legacy speaks not only to artistic courage but also to the long history of how social norms shape who is remembered and who is forgotten.

In 1595, Barnfield published Cynthia, a sequence of sonnets and odes in a voice uncannily close to Shakespeare’s own. One of its poems, ‘If Music and Sweet Poetry Agree’, was long misattributed to Shakespeare and included in early editions of his works. Even today, scholars debate the extent of mutual influence between the two writers. Some view Barnfield as a gifted imitator; others suggest a more reciprocal exchange, with Barnfield’s style helping shape Shakespeare’s early sonnet sequences (particularly those addressed to the ‘Fair Youth’, which some scholars have interpreted as being about a male paramour). There is at least partial evidence of Shakespeare directly lifting and adapting some of Barnfield’s lines into his own sonnets, as he was known to do with other playwrights and poets.

Where Shakespeare’s sonnets famously play with ambiguity and plausibly deniable double entendres, Barnfield’s are strikingly direct. In one, he writes:

The poems are also occasionally bawdy and explicit. One vivid verse from The Affectionate Shepherd offers a suggestive hunting invitation:

This passage has often been read as layered with double entendre: a playful pastoral image of hunting overlaid with erotic teasing. The ‘thrustle-cock’, ‘ivory arrow’, and ‘bag and bottle’ all carry clear phallic, seminal, or sensual associations. It is precisely this blend of charm, eroticism, and unapologetic physicality that made Barnfield vulnerable to censorship and critical discomfort thereafter.

His final major work, The Encomion of Lady Pecunia (1598), shifted focus to satirical commentary on wealth and greed. After that, he withdrew from literary life. He died in 1620, with little historical record to say for certain what became of him.

Despite his early fame and critical recognition, Richard Barnfield became a target for sanitisation almost as soon as the 17th century began. Later editors and commentators reinterpreted his homoerotic poems as allegorical, ironic, or satirical—anything but sincere. Thomas Warton, writing in the 18th century, insisted that Barnfield had been merely adopting ‘the character of a shepherd’, distancing the emotions in the poems from the poet himself. This tactic of framing queer love as literary performance rather than personal truth became standard.

By the Victorian period, even that thin recognition had all but vanished. Barnfield was either excised from histories of English literature or included only as a footnote, framed as indecorous or juvenile. The emotional force and originality of his poetry was ignored in favour of explaining it away, a pattern that echoed the treatment of classical same-sex desire described by Kenneth Dover in Greek Homosexuality. In both cases, the apparent clarity of the relationships depicted was retroactively obscured by moral discomfort.

This discomfort also shaped how literary history handled other Elizabethan figures. Christopher Marlowe (who also wrote about his same-sex attractions, and reportedly was indiscreet about his attraction to men, as well as being an open atheist) was partly suppressed, but later partly fully rehabilitated as a daring iconoclast, often seen as the period’s second-best playwright after Shakespeare. Barnfield, whose poems were good enough to be mistaken for Shakespeare, evinced a literary rebellion that was emotional rather than polemical, and found no such revival. His same-sex desire was too visible, and his lack of political notoriety made him easier to discard.

What remains remarkable is that despite Barnfield’s striking influence on Shakespeare, his name was scrubbed from most educational and literary institutions. That some of his lines were still misattributed to Shakespeare well into the 20th century highlights the irony: his voice survived, but only under someone else’s name.

Richard Barnfield stands as a figure of both literary achievement and cultural marginalisation. His inclusion in the story of freethought and secular heritage reflects broader traditions of artistic independence, emotional candour, and social defiance, even where these were not marshalled explicitly against religion or power.

His poetry challenged the boundaries of expression in his time, not through manifesto or controversy, but through the realism with which he depicted gayness. At a moment when poets were expected to either mimic classical models or uphold social conventions, Barnfield chose to write – at times with tenderness, at others with overt bawdiness – about sexual and romantic desire between men. His later exclusion from the literary canon reveals how literary history is shaped not by talent alone but by the cultural frameworks that determine whose voices are deemed acceptable. Barnfield’s fate mirrors that of many whose works or identities challenge dominant norms: misattributed, misread, and ultimately neglected.

His life and writing form part of a wider tradition of individuals who broke with convention — sexual, artistic, and implicitly spiritual — and whose work exposed the fault lines between moral orthodoxy and the realities of human desire. In giving voice to love rarely acknowledged in public discourse, Barnfield contributed to a lineage of thinkers and creators whose legacy endures precisely because they were not meant to.

Liam Whitton is Director of Communications and Development at Humanists UK. He still wishes he had written about Barnfield for his ‘Shakespeare’ module.

_{Main image: Frontispiece from The Complete Poems of Richard Barnfield, ed. Rev. Alexander B. Grosart (1876)}