Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros39Off to bed!“My Coote thy Chamber, my bosome ...

Off to bed!

“My Coote thy Chamber, my bosome thy Bed”: (Dis)locating Homoerotic Sexual Fantasies in Richard Barnfield’s Ganymede Poems

« Mon abri sera ta chambre, et mon torse ton lit » : le décentrement des fantasmes sexuels homoérotiques dans les poèmes à Ganymède de Richard Barnfield
Johann Paccou

Résumés

À partir d’une lecture de détail de The Affectionate Shepheard (1594) et des sonnets dédiés à Ganymède parus dans Cynthia (1595) de Richard Barnfield, cet article propose une réflexion sur la représentation du lit à l’époque prémoderne. Objet du quotidien pourtant notoirement absent des poèmes érotiques, le lit est stratégiquement remplacé par un couchage typiquement pastoral qui remplit non seulement une fonction utilitaire (celle d’assurer la sécurité, le confort et l’intimité de ses occupants), mais qui est également le lieu privilégié de l’invitation sexuelle parce qu’il déplace (ou décentre) les représentations traditionnelles de la sexualité en faveur d’une expression plus personnelle des désirs sexuels chez le locuteur. Au rang des alternatives à la chambre à coucher proposées par Daphnis, on compte notamment son humble maison de berger, ainsi que les berceaux de verdure qui parsèment le paysage rural. Dans ces espaces intimistes, Ganymède est invité à trouver le repos sur des litières végétales, ou sur le torse de Daphnis, ce qui implique une grande proximité entre le jeune homme et son admirateur. Si de telles alternatives au lit répondent à une invitation typiquement pastorale à profiter de plaisirs simples, elles déplacent également les fantasmes qu’exprime la voix poétique dans des lieux non conventionnels bien éloignés du traditionnel lit conjugal. Les désirs de Daphnis, que l’on peut qualifier de queer, se matérialisent ainsi dans des espaces ruraux imaginaires et lointains, ainsi que par le biais d’un mode littéraire particulièrement propice à l’expression du désir homoérotique : la pastorale. Cependant, de tels déplacements diffèrent également la satisfaction du désir. Les « lits » alternatifs dont il est question dans cet article révèlent ainsi la difficulté pour le berger d’assouvir ses désirs ailleurs que dans ses rêves.

Haut de page

Texte intégral

1In his discussion of the erotic potential of male friendship in early modern England, Mario DiGangi notes the obscurity surrounding potential erotic acts lost to history. He makes the compelling point that while we can seldom tell exactly what happened behind closed doors, “it is impossible to be sure that sexual acts did not take place between friends who shared beds or other intimacies” (DiGangi 1997, 11). The knowledge gap DiGangi mentions gains in significant potential when one considers that it was not uncommon for friends and acquaintances to share a bed in early modern England. For instance, as Alan Bray has demonstrated, servants and apprentices would often share beds for lack of space, and they would even sometimes share a bed, or at least a room, with their masters (Bray 1982, 44-51). Similar arrangements were made in universities (Bray 2003, 154). What DiGangi implies here is that historians would be biased in assuming that such sleeping arrangements did not enable sexual activity only because traces of such acts rarely survive in the historical record. The late Elizabethan pastoral poet Richard Barnfield, on the other hand, does give us some insight into early modern intimacies in his overtly homoerotic verse. It is of little importance whether the sex acts reported in his poetry actually occurred; his corpus can in any case be considered a repository of sexual desires as it mentions encounters which the fictional poetic persona both envisages and almost wishes into existence.

2The focus of the present article will be on what criticism refers to as Barnfield’s “Ganymede poems” – i. e. the first two parts of The Affectionate Shepheard (1594) and his “Certain Sonnets” published in Cynthia: With Certain Sonnets, and the Legend of Cassandra (1595). In both publications, the persona Daphnis expresses desire and love towards a young man named after Jupiter’s famous male paramour, Ganymede. The Affectionate Shepheard is made up of eclogues (i.e. poems on pastoral subjects written according to the classical tradition), a poetic form popularised in Elizabethan England by Edmund Spenser. In the first eclogue, entitled “The Teares of an affectionate Shepheard sicke for Love. or The Complaint of Daphnis for the Love of Ganimede,” the shepherd Daphnis is a hopeful lover who engages in an erotic fantasy, while in “The Second Dayes Lamentation of the Affectionate Shepheard” he gives in to despair and takes a moralistic stance. The twenty sonnets that Barnfield went on to publish the following year are all dedicated to Ganymede and written, in good Petrarchan fashion, either to praise him or to condemn his scorn for the persona’s love.

  • 1 For a history of the bed, see especially Wright (2004), Worsley (2011), and Handley (2016).
  • 2 Shakespeare’s “Sonnet XXVII” starts with the persona longing for a well-deserved rest (“Weary with (...)
  • 3 John Donne’s erotic poems constitute notable exceptions (see his “Epithalamion Made at Lincoln’s In (...)

3The bed is absent from Barnfield’s pastoral poetry, if a bed is defined as a piece of furniture dedicated to rest and sleep and usually composed of a wooden frame with a mattress and blankets on top. This absence is even more conspicuous as histories of early modern sleep have depicted the bed as the biggest and most important piece of furniture in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century homes (Miller-Blaise 2018).1 A quick glance at sonnets written by Barnfield’s contemporaries also reveals that, in early modern poetry, the bed is frequently associated with rest, illness, and death.2 In Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591), the “sweetest bed” in the quiet bedchamber is also the locus where the lover hopes to see the beloved’s face in his dreams (Sidney 1989, 168), suggesting that this space might be associated with eroticism. Yet, as is often the case in early modern poetry, the bed in Sidney’s sonnet is not explicitly connected to sexual intercourse per se.3 What is noteworthy in Barnfield’s poetry, therefore, is the conjunction of a conspicuous absence of beds with the centrality of sexual acts. Critics have indeed noted that Barnfield’s verse is more straightforwardly erotic than that of his contemporaries. Comparing his poems to those written by Shakespeare, the one other Elizabethan poet to dedicate a sonnet sequence to a man, Paul Hammond remarks for instance that “[where] Barnfield’s poetry speaks of the desire of an older man to possess a young man, eroticizing his body and multiplying images of physical consummation, Shakespeare’s poetry moves inward” (Hammond 2002, 84). The sexual encounters between men described by Barnfield do not take place in beds strictly speaking. On the contrary, sexual activity takes place in or on what can be considered as pastoral alternatives to the bed, which are most remarkable when they consist in mere vegetation or when the love-struck shepherd simply offers his own body. Such resting spots therefore take on a crucial role in the construction of Daphnis’s argument as he invites his beloved to join him in the pastoral world. Sleeping arrangements and private spaces constitute the basis of a promise of safety and comfort, in addition to being the locus of the sexual acts imagined by the amorous shepherd.

4Scholarship on intimacy and sex between men in the early modern era is extensive, to say the least. Studies of Renaissance homoeroticism almost constitute a subfield, owing to cornerstone studies such as Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982). Bruce R. Smith in Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (1991) and Stephen Guy-Bray in Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (2002) connect homoerotic desire with the pastoral mode in literature, describing pastoral spaces as particularly propitious to the expression of desire between men. This has led them both to discuss Richard Barnfield’s pastoral poetry (see especially Smith 1991, 79-115; Guy-Bray 2002, 151-163). Yet, scholarship on Barnfield remains limited, with only two edited collections entirely dedicated to the poet: The Affectionate Shepherd: Celebrating Richard Barnfield, edited by Kenneth Borris and George Klawitter (2001) and the very recent Richard Barnfield’s Poetics: Early Modern English Poetry Beyond Shakespeare, edited by Fabio Ciambella, Camilla Caporicci, and Cristiano Ragni (2025). This article undertakes to study the rhetorical and poetic strategies at play in the expression of homoerotic desire in Barnfield’s verse, specifically by considering beds and their absence in the poet’s eclogues and sonnets. Since erotic encounters are located outside the bed, such an absence is defined as a dislocation.

  • 4 I am indebted to the approach Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise defines in a study of the symbolic and aesth (...)

5Through an analysis of the tropes and figures surrounding resting places in the poet’s eclogues and sonnets, this article shows that the apparent lack of beds is enabling in the homoerotic context of Barnfield’s poetry. Such literary details are connected both to recent works in studies of early modern homoeroticism and to studies of material culture dealing with the realities and representations of the bed at the turn of the seventeenth century.4 Same-gender sexual encounters in Barnfield’s poetry, this article argues, are displaced insofar as they take place in the faraway pastoral land, where they are even more dislocated as conventional sleeping arrangements are substituted for what nature has to offer in terms of safety, comfort, and privacy. The rustic alternatives to the more refined bed do not fulfil a merely utilitarian function but become part of the affectionate shepherd’s sexual invitation. More importantly perhaps, they also displace traditional representations of sexuality in favour of the expression of the speaker’s own yearnings. Yet pastoral dislocations jeopardise the potential satisfaction of the poetic persona’s erotic desires, as sex acts are located only in dreams and fantasies.

Providing Comfort and Protection in the Pastoral Landscape

  • 5 Such beds and the hangings used would be more or less rich and ornate depending on the households’ (...)

6On a utilitarian level, pastoral alternatives to the bed provide comfort and protection in the pastoral landscape. They are thus elevated to appeal to the beloved and take part in the poetic invitation to join the affectionate shepherd in the countryside. Commonplace as it may seem, it is important to bear in mind that safety and comfort are prerequisites to sleep. As Sasha Handley points out in Sleep in Early Modern England (2016), a sense of safety was achieved through “the creation of enclosed, comfortable and familiar sleeping environments” as well as through “the selection of trusted sleeping companions” (Handley 2016, 7). She adds that “[a] state of physical and psychological comfort, however it was achieved, was judged to be most conducive to procuring peaceful rest” (8). The poster bed, which became more popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, offered the sought-after enclosed space as the curtains hanging from the posts would provide insulation in draughty early modern houses.5 The wooden box bed served a similar purpose in more modest homes (Miller-Blaise 2018, n. pag.).

  • 6 It is important to point out that the term “bedroom” was only just coming in use at the turn of the (...)
  • 7 As several critics have pointed out, line 163 echoes Christopher Marlowe’s poem “Come live with me (...)
  • 8 The OED does mention “rushes” in the corresponding definition of the noun “litter”: “Straw, rushes, (...)
  • 9 In the OED, the “bower” is defined as “[a] place closed in or overarched with branches of trees, sh (...)

7The physical and psychological comfort of an enclosed space is something that Daphnis indirectly promises Ganymede in The Affectionate Shepheard through two different spaces which appear as alternatives to the bedchamber in that they are private and propitious – if not solely dedicated – to rest.6 The first one is the shepherd’s cottage, mentioned in the first eclogue in the lines “My Coote thy Chamber, my bosome thy Bed, / Shall be appointed for thy sleepy head” (Barnfield 2005b, 47). The noun “coote,” a variant spelling of “cote” or “cot,” describes “a small detached house such as is occupied by poor people or labourers,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary (“Cote” 2025, n. pag.). In such a humble abode, the affectionate shepherd’s own body would act as a substitute for the bed. Daphnis’s desire to become his beloved’s “bed” shows the extent of his devotion – he is ready to undergo self-objectification by putting himself in the service of Ganymede’s material comfort. The poet echoes these lines in his next work: in “Sonnet VIII,” the persona’s body is once again envisaged as a bed on which the beloved can rest: “Sometimes I wish that I his pillow were” (Barnfield 2005a, 102). Later on in The Affectionate Shepheard, it appears that Daphnis’s simple cottage becomes his sheep’s own shelter, furthering what can at first glance be considered a process of degradation started off in line 113, where the “Coote” was presented as a substitute to the “Chamber”: “If thou wilt come and dwell with me at home; / My sheep-cote shall be strowd with new greene rushes […]” (Barnfield 2005b, 49).7 Since the poet mentions the “sheep-cote” directly after having Daphnis invite Ganymede to join him “at home,” it seems as though the shepherd’s dwelling were not primarily designed for humans but for animals to sleep in. As such, the humble abode is not furnished with a bed but is rather strewn with vegetation, which provides bedding on which the lovers are to sleep.8 The pastoral landscape is characterised by ubiquitous vegetation, and is more precisely associated with the bower, which is the second alternative to the chamber Barnfield brings up. Otherwise called cabinet or arbour, the bower constitutes a shady recess whose sides and roof are formed by foliage.9 Such archetypal features of the pastoral landscape are put to the fore in the first eclogue of The Affectionate Shepheard when Daphnis promises to lead Ganymede to his “pleasant Bower” (Barnfield 2005b, 47) and when he vows to shelter him from the inclement weather:

And in the sweltering heate of summer time,
I would make Cabinets for thee (my Love:)
Sweet-smelling Arbours made of Eglantine
Should be thy shrine, and I would be thy Dove.
Coole Cabinets of fresh green Laurell boughs
Should shadow us, ore-set with thicke-set Eughes. (Barnfield 2005b, 46)

8It is fair to assume that in such spaces the lovers would lie on grass or on litter of a similar kind with that found in Daphnis’s cote. The reader is therefore made to understand that the shepherd offers his beloved natural bedding in either humble habitations or in vegetal retreats. Such alternatives to the bed and bedchamber stand out for their rough, rustic aspect. This is why, in line 113 of “The Teares,” the “Cot” is set against the “Chamber” and the “bosom” against the “Bed.” The metaphors equating the pastoral alternatives offered by Daphnis with their ordinary equivalents create a contrast sharpened by the parallel construction. At first glance, the pastoral alternative necessarily appears less enticing because it is less comfortable. In other words, there is a form of demotion if the “Chamber” is but a simple “Cot,” and if the “Bed” takes the shape of the lover’s bosom, which is not designed to provide optimal sleeping conditions. And yet, the process of degradation is turned on its head as the double metaphor also indicates that the shepherd’s cottage is well worth a chamber, while his chest is worth a proper bed. Such a choice plays into an ode to simplicity that is typical of the pastoral mode, which relies on the appeal of simple forms of pleasure. Daphnis’s strategy in inviting Ganymede is not so much to argue that physical comfort and well-being are superfluous, but that much comfort can be found in simplicity. In other words, one does not need a refined, comfortable bed such as the ones that could be found in rich Elizabethan households when one has a grassy spot to lie on and one’s beloved’s torso to rest one’s head on.

9Privacy is another crucial factor in the allure of pastoral resting places. It is a central notion in the definition of the early modern “chamber,” which is a “private room” rather than what we would now see as a bedroom (“Chamber” 2025, n. pag.) It is also fundamental in the definition of the twice-promised “Cabinets” (Barnfield 2005b, 48). An early modern “cabinet” could either be a piece of furniture – a “case for storing precious objects such as jewels, valuable letters, etc.” – or “[a] private room or chamber to which a person may withdraw; [...] a boudoir.” Interestingly, the word was also used to describe a pastoral dwelling in the shape of “[a] small cabin or hut” or of “a bower” (“Cabinet” 2025, n. pag.). The vegetal yet man-made space of the cabinet, therefore, combines the image of an enclosed, private recess with the pastoral topos of vegetation providing shelter. Pastoral chambers and cabinets have an advantage over regular rooms as they provide forms of seclusion that were hard to come by in most early modern dwellings. The curtains hanging from bedposts in rich households would provide insulation as well as isolation from the rest of the room, but privacy would still be relative since a servant was likely to sleep on a truckle bed in the same room (Bergeron 1999, 134). The box beds sometimes used in less affluent households would also enclose users, but space in such houses was more likely to be limited, and rooms more likely to be shared, or to be used for another purpose entirely. This is something Lena Cowen Orlin points out:

Household inventories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries list beds in nearly every conceivable space […] in houses of all size, status, and regions. At the time, even the bedchambers of householders had trundles or pallets added for their attendants. (Orlin 1994, 185)

10Beds could even be set up in kitchens and stair landings, rendering many spaces multifunctional. According to Orlin, it was so hard to find privacy in the early modern household that “[the] basic distinction available to early moderns […] was not that of the public and the individual space but that of the public and the shared” (Orlin 1994, 185). In such a context, the bower and the cottage stand out for the degree the privacy they provide, which is far superior to that of most ordinary early modern rooms. This is simply because they are secluded; being situated in the pastoral world, they are symbolically and geographically set apart and away from civilisation and from what community life entails. The degree of privacy which can be achieved in such spaces should be considered in the context of the seduction game at play in Barnfield’s amorous poetry.

The Pastoral Bed as the Locus of Sexual Exploration

11The intimacy pastoral chambers offer fosters sexual exploration. As is obvious from examples drawn from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, bowers constitute a favoured setting for the representation of non-normative sex acts in early modern literature. In his queer poetry, Barnfield likewise elaborates an explicit homoerotic fantasy in and around the shepherd’s bower at the heart of the rural landscape, thus dislocating the erotic encounter in countryside alternatives to the bedchamber.

12The connection between intimacy and Daphnis’s erotic endeavour is made clear in “Sonnet VIII”: “Sometimes I wish that I his pillow were / So might I steale a kisse, and yet not seene, / So might I gaze upon his sleeping eine” (Barnfield 2005a, 102). The anaphora with “so” at the start of lines 2 and 3 indicates the persona’s purpose in a straightforward way: if Daphnis wants to act as his beloved’s bed, it is to enjoy the physical proximity such a position involves. Such proximity is the source of erotic opportunities which is first manifested in the stealing of a kiss; an act deemed shameful, but which might go undetected (“not seene”) both because the dozing Ganymede would not notice it coming from his own pillow and because, assuming the youth is not sleeping in public, no one would be there to witness the scene. Ganymede’s lips are the main point of focus in this sonnet where the persona addresses bees, calling them foolish for preferring the nectar of flowers over Ganymede’s sweet lips, from which “hony-combs” drop (102):

Ah foolish bees (thinke I) that doe not sucke
His lips for hony; but poore flowers does plucke
Which have no sweet in them: when his sole kisses,
Are able to revive a dying soule. (Barnfield 2005a, 102)

13The desire to kiss Ganymede is expressed on multiple occasions in Barnfield’s earlier publication, and especially in “The Teares.” Crucially, it is the first step in the sexual fantasy Daphnis describes in stanzas 16 and 17; a fantasy in which Barnfield already resorted to the conceit of the honey-hungry bee (“Oh would to God (so I might have my fee) / My lips were honey, and thy mouth a Bee” [Barnfield 2005b, 47]), and which unfolds in the enclosed space of the bower.

14It was not uncommon for early modern authors to locate non-normative sexual acts in vegetal litter and bowers rather than beds and chambers. Book II, Canto XII of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (first published in 1590) is centred around the “Bower of Bliss,” which is home to the witch Acrasia. This idyllic space is depicted as an enclosed garden, or hortus conclusus, in the shape of a vast, flowery plain, where the knight Guyon walks from one shaded vegetal retreat to the next until he finds the witch’s lair at the centre of the garden. Guyon is tempted first by a woman lying in an arbour, then by two maids engaged in sexual activity – the text tells us that they “wrestle wantonly” in a pond (Spenser 1987, 376). The first temptress is resting in a lush bower, a space depicted as a gate of “boughs and braunches, which did broad dilate / Their clasping armes, in wanton wreathings intricate” (Spenser 1987, 374). These boughs and branches,

So fashioned a Porch with rare deuice,
Archt ouer head with an embracing vine,
Whose bounches hanging downe, seemed to entice
All passers by, to tast their lushious wine, (Spenser 1987, 374)

15Spenser creates an impression of plenty in this lush bower where fruit-laden branches bend down enticingly. Endowed with agency, the trees join in an erotic embrace to form this vegetal retreat. They thus mirror and encourage the overall lasciviousness of the enchanted garden, in addition to laying the ground for the presence of the fair, scantily dressed woman (“a comely dame […], / Clad in faire weedes, but fowle disordered” [Spenser 1987, 374]; a temptress who offers the hero to drink from the squeezed fruit of the bower – an episode reminiscent of the serpent talking Eve into eating the forbidden fruit in Genesis (3:4-5). If the first woman the knight encounters is a tempting serpent, the witch Acrasia is portrayed as a spider who has spun her web around an innocent young man, and who has sucked out his life force in luring him into engaging in sexual intercourse with her (stanzas 72 to 80). In Spenser’s allegorical system, the bower thus becomes the locus of a sexuality of the non-normative, destabilising kind, which here translates into disruptive “female sexual autonomy” (Freeman Loftis 2013, 2). This is why the steadfast knight destroys the Bower of Bliss: “But all those pleasant bowres and Pallace braue, / Guyon broke downe, with rigour pittilesse;” (Spenser 1987, 381). In his epigraph to Cynthia, Richard Barnfield describes his publication as “the first imitation of the verse of that excellent Poet, Maister Spencer, in his Fayrie Queene” (Barnfield 2005a, 90). Though this part of the epigraph does not concern The Affectionate Shepheard, but rather alludes to the recourse to the Spenserian stanza in “Cynthia,” it confirms the existence of a filiation between Barnfield’s poetry and Spenser’s work.

16The bower is also associated with disruptive sexuality in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595). Oberon, the king of fairies, describes his wife’s bower as an idyllic resting place:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight […] (Shakespeare 2017, 166)

17Yet, this vegetal retreat is also the love nest where Titania takes the ass-headed Bottom after falling in love with him: “lead him to my bower” (Shakespeare 2017, 192). In the topsy-turvy world of Shakespeare’s comedy, the comically belittled fairy queen expresses excessive desire of an extramarital kind for the grotesquely metamorphosed Bottom, and the audience is led to see her private bower as the dedicated space for her desire’s fulfilment.

18Likewise, the sexual encounter of Daphnis with Ganymede, which appears as the end point and climax of the sexual fantasy in The Affectionate Shepheard, takes place in a lush bower not unlike the one Spenser describes (1987, 374, quoted above):

Then shouldst thou sucke my sweete and my faire flower
That now is ripe, and full of honey-berries:
Then would I leade thee to my pleasant Bower
Fild full of Grapes, of Mulberries, and Cherries;
Then shouldst thou be my Waspe or else my Bee
I would thy hive, and thou my honey bee. (Barnfield 2005b, 47)

  • 10 According to the OED, the verb “to suck” was used to describe fellatio only from the late-nineteent (...)
  • 11 Janet Lembke gives the following English translation: “You’ll also note that this behavior has sati (...)

19This encounter is to occur in four steps, which are marked by the adverb “then,” used both in its causal sense – meaning “in this case” – and in its temporal sense – meaning “next.” The premise and prerequisite to the shepherd’s fantasy is a kiss: as underlined above, the sexual encounter could take place only if the persona managed to entice Ganymede with his honeyed lips (2005b, 47). The second step Daphnis envisages is oral sex, as indicated by the combination of the phallic metaphor of the seed-bearing flower with the choice of the verb “to suck” in line 97. This verb, which the early moderns commonly used to describe the action of a bee gathering pollen – as exemplified in “Sonnet VIII” – is unambiguous enough to denote fellatio in the context of this manifestly sexual stanza.10 This is even clearer if we bear in mind that the classical sources which inspired Barnfield’s pastoral poetry argued that bees procreated with their mouths (Norton 2001, 124). This is notably the case in Virgil’s Georgics: “Illum adeo placuisse apibus mirabere morem, / quod nec concubitu indulgent nec corpora segnes / In Venerem soluont aut fetus nixibus edunt; / uerum ipsae e foliis natos et suauibus herbis ore legunt […]” (Virgil 1998a, 130).11 Contrary to Virgil, and in keeping with the bold homoerotic nature of his verse, Barnfield does not depict the bees’ supposed reproductive behaviour as asexual, but rather gives a sexual meaning to the image of the pollinating insect “sucking” pollen from flowers.

  • 12 According to this interpretation, “honey bee” is meant as the compound noun “honeybee,” and the cop (...)

20The next step in Daphnis’s sexual fantasy consists in him taking the beloved inside his lush “pleasant Bower” (Barnfield 2005b, 47). While the adverb “then” in line 99 is primarily used in its temporal sense, its third occurrence in line 101 can be interpreted both in its temporal and causal senses. In addition to presenting what is to follow as the next stage in the shepherd’s erotic fantasy, the poet here underlines how crucial the previous stage was in the step-by-step development of the said fantasy: it is only once Daphnis and Ganymede are inside the bower that they can reach the next and final stage in their sexual encounter. This next stage is presented as the last as its mention constitutes the last two lines of a well-balanced sestet, to which it provides a sense of finality and completion reinforced by the rhyming couplet (“Bee / bee” [47]) and by the stanza constituting a full sentence, as is common in Barnfield’s pastoral. This sense of formal closure is consistent with the culmination of the depicted sexual intercourse. This time, the sex act implied is anal penetration, an interpretation encouraged by the metaphor of the “Waspe” or “Bee” (47), through which the beloved is associated with either of two pollinating, sting-carrying insects known to live in nests or hives. The bee’s “hive” is then mentioned in line 102 as the receptacle of the penetrative bee by a poetic persona putting himself in this very position if one understands the word “bee” not only as the copula “be” but also as a repetition of the noun “Bee” in the previous line: “I would thy hive, and thou my honey bee” (47).12 As Rictor Norton suggests, this gives Ganymede “a potentially penetrative role” (Norton 2001, 124). The setting Barnfield selected for this explicit fantasy is not a house, let alone a chamber where one would expect to find a bed, but rather the shepherd’s arbour lying at the heart of the rural landscape. Being elaborated on only in and around the pastoral space of the bower, the sexual encounter between Daphnis and Ganymede is dislocated in countryside alternatives to the bedchamber.

  • 13 A phrase translating « cette catégorie si confuse » in the original (Foucault 1976, 133).
  • 14 See also Bray (1982, 14-17).

21Although Daphnis is neither Spenser’s wicked witch nor Shakespeare’s adulterous fairy queen, his erotic fantasy is non-normative on several counts. It first and foremost constitutes an unequivocal description of sexual acts, barely hidden as they are behind easily-legible metaphors revealing the poet’s taste for “relentless sexual punning,” which has led some critics to state that “there is something pornographic about Barnfield’s poems” (Smith 1991, 112). This sexual encounter, second of all, would involve two men engaging in “sodomy,” understood both in the narrow sense of anal penetration and in the wider sense of non-procreative sex acts, irrespective of the partners’ anatomical sex. Sodomy is an ill-defined notion in the early modern era, constituting what Michel Foucault has famously described as “that utterly confused category” (Foucault 1978, 101).13 Vague as it may seem, the notion of sodomy needs to be understood in the cultural context of the Renaissance, where it was “not […] so much a set of forbidden acts as the performance of those undefined acts – or the accusation of their performance – by those who threatened social stability – heretics, spies, traitors, Catholics” (Goldberg 1992, 17).14 Sex between men of the kind Daphnis envisages was also a capital offence under the Buggery Act passed in 1533, which did not define the term “buggery” but was used to target anal penetration and bestiality (Yearling 2013, 55). This is not to say that intimacy between men was necessarily criticised at the time; on the contrary, close male friendship was condoned and even revered in early modern England, and especially so when it sought to reach the Neoplatonic ideal of amicitia, or the perfect equality between two friends (see especially Bray 2003, 104, 110-111). The cultural importance of such models in early modern England has led critic Laurie Shannon to describe forms of “Renaissance homonormativity,” a concept which she defines as “an almost philosophical preference for likeness or a structure of thinking based on resemblance” (Shannon 2000, 191-192). This sought-after “homonormativity” often translated into intense relationships between people of the same gender, involving advanced forms of intimacy and proximity dramatized for instance by Shakespeare through the companionship between Antonio and Sebastian in Twelfth Night (c.1601).

  • 15 On the eroticisation of pedagogical pederasty in early modern England, see, for instance, Crewe (20 (...)
  • 16 On the myth of Ganymede and its reappropriation in the Renaissance, see especially Barkan (1991) an (...)

22Classical pederasty constituted another model for male homoerotic relations in early modern England. This model, characterised by the pedagogical and erotic relationship between an adult male and a younger boy, justified to a certain extent erotically charged relations between men and boys in the Renaissance.15 Barnfield’s choice of name for his persona’s beloved sets his eclogue directly in the pederastic vein. The mythological Ganymede, known to early modern English authors primarily through Virgil’s Aeneid (first-century BCE) and Book X of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (first-century CE), is a fair young Trojan shepherd whom Jupiter, transformed into an eagle, forcibly takes to Olympus to make him his cupbearer and paramour – a detail which is more or less explicit according to the version of the myth (Ovid 1998, 229-230; Virgil 1998b, 128).16 As such, Ganymede is the emblem of pederasty, representing more specifically the epitome of the eromenos – the younger, passive beloved in the pederastic relation – while Jupiter fills in the customary role of the erastes, or older, active lover and tutor. Even though it is unclear whether Daphnis is older than Ganymede at the start of the first eclogue, he does appear so at the start of “The Second Dayes Lamentation of the Affectionate Shepheard,” where, having put aside any hope of carnal consummation, he laments: “Why is my Summer season almost done? / My Spring-time past, and Ages Autumn gone?” (Barnfield 2005b, 52). More importantly perhaps, Daphnis does appear as more experienced than his beloved right from the first eclogue, as he wants to teach Ganymede the ways of a shepherd’s life. Barnfield’s poetic voice, therefore, partially subscribes to a pederastic model inherited from classical Antiquity. This model, however, cannot entirely account for the acts described in stanza 17 because they destabilise the expected power dynamics between the eromenos and the erastes. Daphnis giving Ganymede penetrative agency as a “Waspe” or “Bee” (Barnfield 2005b, 47) blurs the line between these two traditional roles. As such, the kind of relationship Daphnis envisages with Ganymede has neither the moral value of amicitia nor the cultural prestige of classical pederasty, which is straightforwardly referenced only to be altered in a poem where the young beloved is offered sexual agency.

23In other words, Barnfield’s verse is transgressive and destabilising in a way that same-gender desire is not, when it is channelled through culturally accepted tropes. In early modern parlance, his poetry could be labelled as “sodomitical,” or, to use a much more modern term, as queer. A deliberately vague term escaping categorisation, queer, as Valerie Traub defines it, “is always posed against the ‘normal’” (Traub 2015, 17). Queer theory, therefore, “analyses the multitude of incoherencies and contradictions that destabilize the distinction between the normal and the perverse” (Sanchez 2019, 5-6), and does so through an examination of “the representation of mobile erotic relations instead of fixed erotic identities” (DiGangi 1997, 51). We know that the erotic pursuit Barnfield describes in The Affectionate Shepheard was seen in a negative light by a number of his contemporaries. This is made evident by the poet’s own justification for the homoerotic content of his eclogues in the liminary epistle to Cynthia: With Certain Sonnets, and the Legend of Cassandra. This epistle, entitled “To the curteous Gentlemen Readers,” reads:

Some there were, that did interpret The affectionate Shepherd otherwise then (in truth) I meant, touching the subject thereof, to wit, the love of a Shepheard to a boy; a fault, the which I will not excuse, because I never made. Onely this, I will unshaddow my conceit: being nothing else, but an imitation of Virgill, in the second Eclogue of Alexis. (Barnfield 2005a, 90)

  • 17 “The shepherd Corydon was burning for Alexis, / His master’s fair delight, but had no hope in sight (...)
  • 18 In an exaggerated but striking statement, Leonard Barkan argues that during the Renaissance, “antiq (...)

24The pederastic and/or homoerotic content of Barnfield’s eclogues displeased at least some of his readers, who deemed writing about a shepherd’s love for a boy a “fault.” The author’s morality having been questioned, he felt the need to justify himself before his readership in a disclaimer. In the light of stanza seventeen, among others, Barnfield’s justification nonetheless sounds paradoxical, if not ironic. Indeed, Barnfield undeniably wrote, in Virgil’s manner, about “the love of a shepherd to a boy.” One can even argue that the first two stanzas of “The Teares of an affectionate shepheard sicke for Love” spell out the opening lines of Virgil’s second eclogue: “Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin / delicias domini, nec quid speraret habebat.17 The opening sestet of Barnfield’s first eclogue does mention the persona’s ardent desire for Ganymede as well as his despair in the face of unrequited love: “I began to rue th’unhappy sight / Of that faire Boy that had my hart intangled;” (Barnfield 2005b, 44). This idea is echoed in the next stanza: “If it be sinne to love a lovely Lad; / Oh then sinne I, for whom my soule is sad” (44). Interestingly, the poetic voice shows awareness of the culturally non-normative nature of his desire for Ganymede, whose sinful nature he accepts and boldly embraces. This ties into early modern discourse surrounding sodomy and justifies the poet’s choice of the pastoral mode as a strategy of dislocation of homoerotic desire. Barnfield’s liminary epistle to Cynthia reveals that, in his view, finding inspiration in Virgil is justification enough for the homoerotic and/or pederastic content of his poem.18 Unconcealed homoeroticism, which some found unsavoury in spite of the poet’s choice to locate it in a shady retreat tucked away in the distant pastoral space, is once again dislocated by the author, who strategically denies any “fault” when he symbolically renounces authorship in describing his work as an imitation, giving his text a highly regarded, temporally and geographically distant parentage.

  • 19 In the OED, “the place of conjugal union” is mentioned as a meaning commonly transferred to the wor (...)
  • 20 On lushness and fertility in Barnfield’s eclogues, see Paccou (2025).

25Non-normative sex acts in early modern literature, therefore, are best depicted not in bedrooms, let alone in beds, but in pastoral secret settings. In the case of Barnfield’s pastoral poetry, but also in Spenser and Shakespeare, such a change in location accompanies a movement away from the marriage bed.19 As the characters and personae put matrimony and traditional forms of heterosexual union aside to pursue sexual relations in other contexts, they also turn away from the customary bed. In the case of Barnfield’s homoerotic verse specifically, lush vegetal alternatives to the bed and to the bedroom may symbolically make up for the fruitlessness of the union of Daphnis and Ganymede. In other words, pastoral bedding may be so fertile precisely because the same-gender sexual intercourse that is to take place on it cannot lead to procreation.20 In keeping with Barnfield’s pastoral ode to simplicity, such a dislocation also participates in a movement away from material preoccupations, as it ties in with a desire to renounce objects that are associated with comfort to privilege other, simpler forms of pleasure, among which stands sexual delight. Barnfield’s pastoral invitation promotes a primal return to sensuous pleasures; a return which can only be achieved in close proximity with nature – which, however, is always a construct in pastoral literature. Book II, Canto XII of The Fairie Queene is a case in point, as Spenser highlights the artificial nature of the magically created, highly allegorical Bower of Bliss. Likewise, the typically pastoral dismissal of material considerations in Richard Barnfield’s poetry is accompanied by a movement away from reality: the sexual encounter is not only recounted in a literary work which encourages a reflection on its own artificial nature, but it is also located in the unreal and the undone because it occurs in a dreamlike elsewhere.

Of Dreams and Sexual Fantasies

26Further connecting the eclogues and the sonnets, this last section dwells on the structural and thematic role of dreams in Barnfield’s poetry, demonstrating the key role they play in the construction of the pastoral elegy. It culminates with a reading of “Sonnet VI,” where the dream vision combines eroticism with medical and religious imagery. The desires expressed in Barnfield’s Ganymede poems are nothing but wishes, dreams, and fantasies. The oneiric nature of The Affectionate Shepheard is highlighted right from the onset, as the first stanza reads:

Scarce had the morning Starre hid from the light
Heavens crimson Canopie with stars bespangled,
But I began to rue th’unhappy sight
Of that faire Boy that had my hart intangled;
Cursing the Time, the Place, the sense, the sin;
I came, I saw, I viewd, I slipped in. (Barnfield 2005b, 44)

27The last line of this passage illustrates how the poetic voice uses the simple past to indicate conquest in an assertive tone, echoing the words Julius Cesar allegedly spoke after a swift victory: “Veni, vidi, vici.” As Stephen Whitworth puts it, “[the] implicit metaphor that structures the stanza also suggests the finality of a consummated love,” leading the reader to imagine the sexual encounter did happen (Whitworth 1999, 71). This encounter supposedly happened at a given “Time” and in a definite “Place,” prefiguring the episode of the bower in stanza seventeen. The phrase “I slipped in,” denoting the action of entering, implies sexual penetration. In other words, it appears that Daphnis’s desire for Ganymede was consumed in sexual intercourse, hence the “sin” mentioned in line five. The rest of the poem, however, is set in an indefinite future expressed in a wishful conditional mood: “Oh would to God he would but pitty mee” (Barnfield 2005b, 47). In the first stanza, the despondent persona already mourns Ganymede’s presence: “I began to rue th’unhappy sight / Of that faire Boy.” Through hypallage, the poet implies that it is not so much the sight of Ganymede which is “unhappy,” but rather the persona himself, as he laments losing sight of his beloved. Barnfield’s poems in The Affectionate Shepheard are elegies – poems of lamentation, from the Greek élegos, ‘to lament’ – as the titles of the two eclogues make clear: the first depicts the love-sick Daphnis as shedding “Teares” and defines the text as a “Complaint,” and the second presents the eclogue as the repository of the shepherd’s “Lamentation.” In early modern English literature, it was common to depict homoerotic relationships in an elegiac mode, framing them as relationships that were “always already lost” (Traub 2002, 174-175). As Stephen Guy-Bray points out, the elegiac mode was closely associated with the pastoral in poems that would lament both the loss of love and the loss of the pastoral setting in which homoeroticism would traditionally find expression. This also tied in with ecological considerations: “by the sixteenth century, with greater population density and greater governmental control of land and land use, the setting of the pastoral […] was clearly something that only existed in poetry” (Guy-Bray 2002, 14). The literary pastoral setting heralds its own disappearance as poems written in this mode “also [mourn] the loss of the pastoral landscape” (Guy-Bray 2002, 14). The landscapes described by poets such as Barnfield do not correspond to the reality of the Elizabethan countryside, which is why the elegiac pastoral permits such dislocation as described above.

28The consummation of Daphnis’s ardent desire for Ganymede is further put into perspective by the stanza’s dreamlike quality. The opening lines of The Affectionate Shepheard offer a description of dawn, which we understand thanks to the presence of Venus, “the morning Starre” (Barnfield 2005b, 44), and the description of the red tinge of the sky: “Heavens crimson Canopie” (44). As the harbinger of dawn, Venus outshines every other star and ushers in a new day. In this light, the regretted vision mentioned in this stanza can be interpreted as an all too fragile dream that Daphnis has just awoken from, and whose memory inexorably fades away. The persona is beset with regret at the break of day because awaking pulls him out of his nightly visions of the beloved Ganymede. This interpretation of the opening lines to The Affectionate Shepheard connects the eclogues to Barnfield’s “Sonnet VI”:

Sweet Corrall lips, where Nature’s treasure lies,
The balme of blisse, the soveraigne salve of sorrow,
The secret touch of loves heart-burning arrow,
Come quench my thirst or els poore Daphnis dies.
One night I dreamd (alas twas but a Dreame)
That I did feele the sweetnes of the same,
Where-with inspir’d, I young againe became,
And from my heart a spring of blood did streame,
But when I wak’t, I found it nothing so,
Save that my limbs (me thought) did waxe more strong
And I more lusty far, and far more yong.
This gift on him rich Nature did bestow.
Then if in dreaming so, I so did speede,
What should I doe, if I did so indeede? (Barnfield 2005a, 101)

  • 21 Dreaming of the beloved is also the topic of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet XXVII,” where the poetic voice d (...)
  • 22 It is for instance the case in The Faerie Queene (Spenser 1987, 376, discussed above) as well as in (...)

29In the second quatrain, the poetic voice describes a dream he had, in which he got to kiss Ganymede’s lips, whose sweetness is praised in the first quatrain.21 No mention is made of the pastoral landscape Barnfield’s eclogues are set in, and there is no cottage or bower in sight. No bed is mentioned either, whether it be traditional, or pastoral. The actors, however, are the same: the poetic voice is the shepherd Daphnis, referring to himself in the third person in line 4, pining for the fair Ganymede, whose name is mentioned elsewhere in the sequence of twenty sonnets dedicated to him – in Sonnets IV, IX, X, XII, XV, XVIII, and XIX. The topic is also familiar since this sonnet recounts a dream vision. The manifestation of sexual desire through the eruption of a spring furthermore suggests a pastoral setting since sources and fountains are central elements of any pastoral landscape.22

  • 23 In this light, the spring of sanguine humour becomes an instance of bloodletting, the treatment com (...)
  • 24 See Patricia Simons’s observation that “[w]hile semen was not one of the four humors, it was a cruc (...)

30The imagery of blood here ties erotic, medical, and religious discourses in a complex way. In Daphnis’s dream, contact with the beloved’s lips has the effect of magically rejuvenating the speaker, causing profound changes in his physiology. The mention of the eroticised lips in the first quatrain appears as a prelude to the apparition of clearer sexual imagery in the second as the spring appears as a consequence of pressure building up because of carnal desire. Such imagery is evident in the persona’s blood spurting from his heart, given that youth and blood were traditionally associated with sexual vigour in Galenic medicine.23 Since early modern medical discourse construed the hot and moist humour as the main component of semen, the image of the spring of blood can be interpreted as a symbol of the physiological phenomenon of ejaculation.24 The spring of blood also invites us to see the persona of Barnfield’s erotic poem as a Christ-like figure. A bleeding heart can be associated with the Passion of Christ in the New Testament, Jesus’s side having been pierced by a Roman soldier with his spear: “But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water” (John 19:34, KJV). Barnfield’s reference to the suffering of Christ on the cross helps present the persona as an ailing figure, whose passion lies in unrequited love. The death of Christ is furthermore associated with the persona’s own death in his dream, a death Daphnis witnesses through the sight of his own heart bleeding. Circling back to our interpretation of the spring of blood spurting out as a consequence of ardent desire and as a potential image of ejaculation, we can also see that Barnfield symbolically combines the death of Christ – and the symbolic death of the persona – with Daphnis’s little death, or orgasm, thereby merging erotic, medical, and religious discourses. The fact that this vision of death and desire is the last thing Daphnis mentions from his dream encourages us to think that it is what caused him to wake up, leading on to the third quatrain, where he recounts the moment he awoke.

31The return to reality is filled with disappointment (“I found it nothing so”), but the erotic dream has had a physical impact nonetheless: the speaker’s morning vigour connotes an erection. This reading is encouraged by the mention of the limbs “[waxing] more strong” upon awaking, an image which reads in conjunction with the adjectives “lusty,” implying health and vigour in a potentially erotic sense, and “young,” whose connection to “strong” is aurally underlined by the rhyme. The chiasmus in line 11 (“more lusty far, and far more yong”) emphasises the intensifier “far” as well as the two adjectives from the same semantic field of sexual vigour. These images associate with that of the “spring of blood” to suggest arousal resulting in turgidity. In a sonnet recounting a morning erection following a mystical erotic dream, the poet playfully dramatises the rift there exists between fantasy and reality. On line 9, the volta marked by the conjunction “but” underlines this rupture in striking a sharp contrast between the dream recounted in the second quatrain and the partially disappointing return to reality in the third quatrain. The return to reality is disappointing because the erotic encounter did not happen, but it is only partially so as the persona has made a happy discovery, that of a promising sexual potency on his part. The final couplet once again underlines this rift in opposing what happened “in dreaming” and what could happen “indeede” – read “in deed,” in action, in reality. The persona wonders what would happen to him were he to actually kiss Ganymede, when merely dreaming of this kiss already caused him to feel significantly invigorated. As it was already the case in The Affectionate Shepheard, where sexual imagery was also used to describe encounters that happened not only in a remote pastoral space, but also in the persona’s dreams, the acts Daphnis so pines for are never achieved, and his wishes never reach fulfilment.

32In Barnfield’s poetry, same-gender sexual encounters are thrice removed: not only do they take place in the realm of dreams and fantasies, but also far away in the fantasised pastoral space, where they are further dislocated as conventional sleeping arrangements are replaced by what nature has to offer. That is why natural alternatives to beds can be found in cottages and green bowers and arbours, where Daphnis and Ganymede can enjoy safety, comfort, and privacy. Out there, the rustic, potentially rougher alternatives to the more refined bed are made an integral part of the amorous shepherd’s sexual invitation in addition to fulfilling their primary, utilitarian function. Such a spatial dislocation entails a moral dislocation since pastoral alternatives to beds and chambers also displace traditional, generally heteronormative representations of sexuality in favour of the expression of the persona’s own sexual fantasies. In other words, Barnfield creates and opens a space that is tailored to Daphnis’s desires – a queer pastoral space, as it were, fitting queer desires. Considerations on the illusory nature of the persona’s desires in fictional idyllic spaces also foster a reflection on pastoral as a highly coded literary mode that relies on artifice. As Alan Sinfield points out regarding Marlowe’s “Come live with me and be my love,” “[p]astoral is city poets cultivating a fantasy about the country, in which labor is effaced and sexual desire is unencumbered by social pressures” (Sinfield 2007, 133). Taking into account the codification and circulation of pastoral tropes amongst these “city poets” is essential to an understanding of the poetic strategies at play in Richard Barnfield’s homoerotic verse.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

Barkan, Leonard. Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Barnfield, Richard. Cynthia: With Certain Sonnets, and the Legend of Cassandra (1595). In Poems of Richard Barnfield. Ed. George Klawitter. Lincoln: iUniverse, 2005a. 87-129.

Barnfield, Richard. The Affectionate Shepheard. Containing the Complaint of Daphnis for the love of Ganymede (1594). In Poems of Richard Barnfield. Ed. George Klawitter. Lincoln: iUniverse, 2005b. 41-85

“Bed” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1250733830.25

“Bedroom.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3442378009.

Bergeron, David M. King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1999.

“Bower (1).” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7921532773.

Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982.

Bray, Alan. The Friend. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Bromley, James M. “Rimming the Renaissance.” In Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England. Ed. James M. Bromley and Will Stockton. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 171-194.

“Cabinet.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1037568379.

Caporicci, Camilla, Fabio Ciambella, and Cristiano Ragni, eds. Richard Barnfield’s Poetics: Early Modern English Poetry Beyond Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury, 2025.

“Chamber.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/6770697123.

Cheney, Patrick. “Introduction: Authorship in Marlowe’s Poems.” In The Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe. Ed Patrick Cheney and Brian J. Striar. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. 1-25.

“Cote.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7381446842.

Crewe, Jonathan. “Disorderly Love: Sodomy Revisited in Marlowe’s Edward II.” Criticism 51.3 (2009): 385-399.

DiGangi, Mario. The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Donne, John. “Epithalamium Made at Lincoln’s Inn.” In The Complete Poems of John Donne. Ed. Robin Robbins. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013a. 617-627.

Donne, John. “To his Mistress Going to Bed.” In The Complete Poems of John Donne. Ed. Robin Robbins. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013b. 325-330.

Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la sexualité, I : La volonté de savoir. Paris : Gallimard, 1976.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1978.

Freeman Loftis, Sonya. “Reconstructing the Bower of Bliss: Homoerotic Myth-Making in The Faerie Queene.” In Renaissance Papers 2012. Ed. Andrew Shifflett and Edward Gieskes. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2013. 1-12.

Goldberg, Jonathan. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.

Guy-Bray, Stephen. Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

Hammond, Paul. Figuring Sex Between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.

Handley, Sasha. Sleep in Early Modern England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.

“Litter.Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/6907241696.

Marlowe, Christopher. “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (1600). In The Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe. Ed. Patrick Cheney and Brian J. Striar. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. 157-158.

Mercer, Eric. Furniture, 700-1700. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.

Miller-Blaise, Anne-Marie. “In Bed with John Donne: Unstripping Poetry.” Thirty-Third Annual John Donne Society Conference. University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland, 28 June 2018, Unpublished Conference Paper.

Norton, Rictor. “Pastoral Homoeroticism and Barnfield, the Affectionate Shepherd.” In The Affectionate Shepherd: Celebrating Richard Barnfield. Ed. Kenneth Borris and George Klawitter. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press; Associated University Presses, 2001. 117-129.

Orlin, Lena Cowen. Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Paccou, Johann. “Richard Barnfield’s Pastoral Catalogue: Sweet Persuasion and the Profusion of Details in The Affectionate Shepheard (1594).” Special Issue on “Shakespeare in Focus: the Art of Small Things.” Ed. Gilles Bertheau and Christine Sukič. Revue de la Société Française Shakespeare 43 (2025), https://doi.org/10.4000/15nn2.

Sanchez, Melissa E. Shakespeare and Queer Theory. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2019.

Saslow, James M. Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. London: Bloomsbury, 2010.

Shannon, Laurie. “Nature’s Bias: Renaissance Homonormativity and Elizabethan Comic Likeness.” Modern Philology 98.2 (2000): 183-210.

Sidney, Philip. Astrophil and Stella. In Sir Philip Sidney, A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. 153-211.

Simons, Patricia. The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Sinfield, Alan. “Marlowe’s Erotic Verse.” In Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion. Ed. Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett A. Sullivan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 125-135.

Smith, Bruce R. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. Thomas P. Roche. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987.

Stewart, Alan. Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Suck.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/6669204692.

Traub, Valerie. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Traub, Valerie. Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Virgile (Virgil). Géorgiques. Trans. Eugène de Saint-Denis. Paris : Les Belles lettres, 1998a.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Cecil Day Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998b.

Virgil. Virgil’s Georgics: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Janet Lembke. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

Virgil. Virgil’s Eclogues. Trans. Len Krisak. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

Whitworth, Stephen. “Passing for Mean: Barnfield and the Aristotelian Poetics of Copulation.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 29.3 (1999): 71-86.

Worsley, Lucy. If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home. London: Faber & Faber, 2011.

Wright, Lawrence. Warm & Snug: The History of the Bed. Stroud: Sutton, 2004.

Yearling, Rebecca. ‘Homoerotic Desire and Renaissance Lyric Verse’. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 53.1 (2013): 53-71.

Yen, Julie W. “‘If It Be Sinne to Love a Sweet-Fac’d Boy’: Rereading Homoerotic Desire in Barnfield’s Ganymede Poems.” In The Affectionate Shepherd: Celebrating Richard Barnfield. Ed. Kenneth Borris and George Klawitter. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press; Associated University Presses, 2001. 130-148.

Haut de page

Notes

1 For a history of the bed, see especially Wright (2004), Worsley (2011), and Handley (2016).

2 Shakespeare’s “Sonnet XXVII” starts with the persona longing for a well-deserved rest (“Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed” [Shakespeare 2010, 165]), while his “Sonnet LXXIII” mentions the “deathbed” (257). In Sidney’s sonnet sequence, the bed is “the field where joy’s peace some do see” (Sidney 1989, 206), but it is also Stella’s “sick-bed” (Sidney 1989, 207).

3 John Donne’s erotic poems constitute notable exceptions (see his “Epithalamion Made at Lincoln’s Inn” [2013a] and his “To his Mistress Going to Bed” [2013b]).

4 I am indebted to the approach Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise defines in a study of the symbolic and aesthetic function of beds in the poetry of John Donne. It consists in “reclaim[ing] the material and the everyday and its thickness and evocativeness to more aesthetic purposes. The bed in Donne’s amorous poetry […] functions as a striking example of how the material can help to unfold an author’s poetic agenda” (Miller-Blaise 2018, n. pag.). In a similar manner, the present study unfolds Barnfield’s poetic agenda, using pastoral sleeping arrangements as a point of entry.

5 Such beds and the hangings used would be more or less rich and ornate depending on the households’ wealth and status. For an example of an elaborate Elizabethan poster bed, see for instance the picture of an early-seventeenth century bed at Berkeley Castle (Mercer 1969, 122 fig. 136) as well as Mercer’s discussion of it (1969, 72-76).

6 It is important to point out that the term “bedroom” was only just coming in use at the turn of the seventeenth century. The OED records the first occurrence of the word used in the sense of “a room used or intended to contain a bed or beds” in 1600. From then on, “bedroom” progressively became a substitute for the now archaic “bedchamber” (“Bedroom” 2025, n. pag.).

7 As several critics have pointed out, line 163 echoes Christopher Marlowe’s poem “Come live with me and be my love,” generally known under the title “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (see, for instance, Norton 2001, 127; Yen 2001, 132). Marlowe’s own pastoral invitation first appeared in print in 1599 in a volume of verse entitled The Passionate Pilgrim and printed by William Jaggard. Other versions of the poem then circulated in the seventeenth century (Cheney 2006, 2). In the same tradition as Richard Barnfield’s speaker, Marlowe’s persona “uses material gifts to persuade his beloved to engage in erotic play” (Cheney 2006, 11). The close thematic and poetic proximity between the two texts might suggest that one poet was inspired by the other: either Marlowe found inspiration in an early version of Barnfield’s 1594 eclogues circulated before the former’s death in May 1593, or “Come live with me and be my love” circulated in other forms at least five years prior to its publication, allowing Barnfield to draw from it for his Affectionate Shepheard.

8 The OED does mention “rushes” in the corresponding definition of the noun “litter”: “Straw, rushes, or the like, serving as bedding” (“Litter” 2005, n. pag.).

9 In the OED, the “bower” is defined as “[a] place closed in or overarched with branches of trees, shrubs, or other plants; a shady recess, leafy covert, arbour.” This third sense, however, only appeared in the 16th century. In Old English, the word referred to a “dwelling, habitation, abode,” or, more specifically, to “[an] inner apartment” (“Bower (1)” 2025, n. pag.).

10 According to the OED, the verb “to suck” was used to describe fellatio only from the late-nineteenth century onward (“Suck” 2025, n. pag.). Yet, as James Bromley suggests, “a better history of sexual practice would take early modern writers at their word” (Bromley 2013, 183). On this point and on images surrounding the fantasised sexual encounter in this passage, see also Paccou (2025, n. pag.).

11 Janet Lembke gives the following English translation: “You’ll also note that this behavior has satisfied / the bees – they don’t indulge in mating, not letting their bodies / go slack in love nor bringing forth their young with effort; / in truth, without male help, they themselves gather young in their mouths / from leaves, from sweet grass; […]” (Virgil 2005, 66-67).

12 According to this interpretation, “honey bee” is meant as the compound noun “honeybee,” and the copula “be” is omitted, as it was commonly the case in early modern English. On the semantic blur around these homophones, see especially Yen (2001, 133) and Paccou (2025, n. pag.).

13 A phrase translating « cette catégorie si confuse » in the original (Foucault 1976, 133).

14 See also Bray (1982, 14-17).

15 On the eroticisation of pedagogical pederasty in early modern England, see, for instance, Crewe (2009, 387) and Stewart (1997). It is worth mentioning, as a trigger warning at least, that such relationships would nowadays amount to paedophilia. They should therefore be discussed with caution and historical distance.

16 On the myth of Ganymede and its reappropriation in the Renaissance, see especially Barkan (1991) and Saslow (1986).

17 “The shepherd Corydon was burning for Alexis, / His master’s fair delight, but had no hope in sight” (Virgil 2010, 10).

18 In an exaggerated but striking statement, Leonard Barkan argues that during the Renaissance, “antiquity was a kind of gigantic motor vehicle bureau giving out licenses” (Barkan 1991, 24).

19 In the OED, “the place of conjugal union” is mentioned as a meaning commonly transferred to the word “bed” (“Bed” 2025, n. pag.).

20 On lushness and fertility in Barnfield’s eclogues, see Paccou (2025).

21 Dreaming of the beloved is also the topic of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet XXVII,” where the poetic voice describes the “journey” he goes on “in [his] head” to see the fair youth (Shakespeare 2010, 165). While Shakespeare lays emphasis on the antithesis lying at the heart of the nightly vision, Barnfield focuses on the erotic nature of the dream. In both sonnets, however, the beloved’s sight is nothing but an illusion.

22 It is for instance the case in The Faerie Queene (Spenser 1987, 376, discussed above) as well as in Barnfield’s own eclogues, where he describes the “glimmering” of night’s silvery light “on the christall Fountaines” (Barnfield 2005b, 52).

23 In this light, the spring of sanguine humour becomes an instance of bloodletting, the treatment commonly given to people suffering from an imbalance of humours.

24 See Patricia Simons’s observation that “[w]hile semen was not one of the four humors, it was a crucial fluid mainly concocted from the most vital humour, blood; a build up of semen gave rise to sexual desire, and its management was a crucial aspect of men’s health” (Simons 2011, 6). Patricia Simons’ work is key to understand the symbolism associated with semen in early modern England, especially as it demonstrates that manhood was defined in projective terms and therefore correlated to ejaculation: “[sexual] metaphors were often grounded in an understanding of the adult male body’s fluids, heat and projective more than penetrative capacity” (3).

25 All online sources last accessed 1 December 2025.

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Johann Paccou, « “My Coote thy Chamber, my bosome thy Bed”: (Dis)locating Homoerotic Sexual Fantasies in Richard Barnfield’s Ganymede Poems »Sillages critiques [En ligne], 39 | 2025, mis en ligne le 11 février 2026, consulté le 13 juin 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/18513 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15rp3

Haut de page

Auteur

Johann Paccou

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Johann Paccou is a PhD candidate at the Sorbonne Nouvelle working under the supervision of Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) and Jeffrey Masten (Northwestern University). In his dissertation, entitled “Rhetoric and Homoerotic Desire in Early Modern English Literature,” he explores the literary strategies at work in the expression of queer desire in works by Elizabethan and Jacobean authors such as John Lyly, Richard Barnfield, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare. He has recently published an article on gender malleability and female homoerotic desire in Lyly’s Galatea in Shakespeare en devenir, an article on sweetness, abundance, and fertility in Barnfield’s pastoral poetry in Revue de la Société française Shakespeare, and a chapter on gender and desire in an advanced reader’s guide to Shakespeare’s romantic comedy Twelfth Night for Éditions Atlande. With his research team, he is currently working on the first French translation of Barnfield’s homoerotic poetry.

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search