The Affectionate Shepherd: Celebrating Richard Barnfield (review)

Reviews 197 Parergon 20.1 (2003) senses than one this is the heart of the book—its physical centre, and the core from which the discussion flows outwards to other subjects and to more recent times. Sections of the chapter achieve an immediate lucidity by exploiting the full meaning inherent in ordinary words, in contrast with the challenging abstract terminology employed in some other places. For example, a recapitulation of the brilliant alternation of horizontal and vertical staging in the Crucifixion pageant leads into an ardent exposition of the uniquely powerful perspective achieved when theatrical signs are imbued with sacramental meaning: ‘Christ is now invisible; then visible. It is a miming of Elevatio. And in that rising, we are asked not to merge with Christ in the identificatory theater of passion, not to become him, or to enter or be at one with him, but to bear a terrible witness as we ourselves are addressed as participants at the scene of crucifixion’ (pp. 69–70; italics in text). Many other examples of the rich scholarship in this collection, which includes a comprehensive bibliography, notes and index, could be given. The thinking on abstract issues of theatrical signification, and the specific knowledge offered on medieval and modern drama and related arts are of a quality that invites thoughtful and repeated reading. Cheryl Taylor School of Humanities James Cook University Borris, Kenneth and George Klawitter, eds, The Affectionate Shepherd: Celebrating Richard Barnfield, Selinsgrove and London, Susquehanna University Press, 2001; board; pp. 387; RRP US$55.00; ISBN 1575910497. This book gives convincing evidence that Richard Barnfield deserves a ‘celebration ’, and that it is long overdue. Despite his persona as a gentle, ‘affectionate shepherd’, his name has, since his own time, been associated with scandal, since his best known, or most notorious, work on Ganymede was read as openly homoerotic and a defence of sodomy. In these times of greater tolerance for sexual preferences, his time for positive appreciation has at last come. From its dustjacket, a 1592 drawing of Pan with a wickedly upturned and sharp phallus poring lecherously over a diminutive, limp and anxious Daphnis, the collection of essays rarely allows us to stray from its writers’ preoccupation with homoeroticism. Andrew Worrall, providing a revisionist biography that shows Barnfield did not conventionally marry and sire children, is intent on 198 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) stripping away the ‘more comfortable imaginings’ (p. 37) of older critics determined to save Barnfield from ignominy. ‘His first two books [of The Affectionate Shepherd] revealed only too publicly a young man who was determined not to fit in with the aspirations of his family, and they refused to put up with this rebellion’ (p. 36). Ostensibly a Spenserian imitation of Virgil’s Second Eclogue, the poem is linked by Raymond-Jean Frontain with the Song of Solomon, unashamedly transferring the amorousness from heterosexual longing to ‘the love of a Shepheard to a boy’. Frontain places Barnfield in this respect within a homoerotic pastoral tradition, running from the ancient Greeks to Marlowe. Rictor Norton develops this line of enquiry, and draws attention to Daphnis’s frank appreciation of Ganymede, which could hardly be more explicit: If it be sinne to love a sweet-fac’d Boy, (Whose amber locks trust up in golden tramels Dangle adown his lovely cheekes his fair haire enamels) If it be sinne to love a lovely Lad: Oh then sinne I, for whom my soule is sad. Julie W. Yen picks up the phrase ‘a sweet-fac’d Boy’, suggesting that Barnfield blurs the boundaries between friendship and desire in a way that fruitfully breaks down gender boundaries and dispels anxieties. She inevitably draws into the discussion Shakespeare’s Sonnets and lesbian ‘coming-out’ representations in television sitcoms in the 1990s. Mario DiGangi widens the net to include the iconic Derek Jarman, and generalises Daphnis’s failure to seduce Ganymede as linguistic as well as erotic. Compositional copia is as insistent as prodigal desire but they both fail to achieve their desired ends: ‘My Plentie makes me Poore’. The refrain of the ‘solitude of the unrequited same-sex lover’ is continued by Casey Charles, although the lack of consummation is seen...