Richard Barnfield and Queer Classicism in Elizabethan England

Richard Barnfield was an Elizabethan writer and poet and author of the most overtly queer poetry of the English Renaissance. This book offers the first in-depth critical examination of his literary output and his engagement with, and appropriation of, classical literature.

Richard Barnfield and Queer Classicism in Elizabethan England offers a comprehensive reappraisal of the work of Richard Barnfield, the Elizabethan writer who authored homoerotic and pastoral poetry during the last decade of the sixteenth century. While Barnfield has often been dismissed as an imitative poet, this book sheds new light on Barnfield''s imaginative engagement with classical and contemporary texts, presenting him as a subtly subversive poet who consistently inhabits poetical models, genres, and tropes only to disrupt them from within. Reading Barnfield''s oeuvre against the backdrop of his cultural environment and his education, this work unveils the poet''s deconstructive practices and his ironic--but deeply knowledgeable--engagement with the classics, often used as a tool to subvert self-serving and exemplary interpretations of texts from classical antiquity as taught by contemporary grammar schools. This monograph argues that the works of Barnfield reveal a sophisticated understanding of contemporary poetical models and practices, which he mimics while also upending their usual poetic force: the poet that emerges from this study is not just sexually non-conformist, but also ironically subversive in his approach to institutions such as the education system and the monarchy, sceptical in his use of poetic tropes, and imaginative in his engagement with the classical tradition.