Barnabe Barnes

This, on the little known Barnabe Barnes, from Morley's 1893 English Writers: an attempt towards a History of English Literature:

"Barnabe Barnes published, in May, 1593, his "Parthenophil and Parthenophe," which is a way of naming "the Maid and her Lover," as Sidney's Astrophel and Stella were names for "the Star and her Lover." It is a collection of a hundred and four sonnets, twenty-six madrigals, and a sestine exact in technical construction. These are followed by twenty-one elegies, a canzone, a translation of the first Idyll of Moschus, twenty odes, four more sestines, and a few sonnets of compliment.

"Barnabe Barnes was the fourth of nine children of Richard Barnes, Bishop of Durham, who died in 1587. A year before his father's death Barnabe entered Brasenose College, but he left Oxford without graduating. In 1591 Barnabe Barnes went with the Earl of Essex into Normandy, to join the French against the Prince of Parma. As a friend of Gabriel Harvey, whom he supported with a sonnet against Nash, Barnabe Barnes received in his own face some of the mud thrown in the Nash and Harvey gutter-war [See Nash's "Have with you to Saffron Walden" where he accuses Barnes of cowardice]. While many of the sonnets in "Parthenophil and Parthenophe" are in the form then commonly used, of three quatrains and a couplet, others vary the rhyming, and some — as the thirtieth, thirty- second, thirty-third, and others — are accurately formed on Petrarch's model. In 1595 Barnabe Barnes published "A Divine Centvrie of Spirituall Sonnets," mainly Petrarchan in their form. Whether he sing of earthly or of heavenly love, the passion is conventional, but there is livelier imagery in the poems upon earthly love. After the death of Elizabeth, Barnabe Barnes published, in 1606, "Foure Bookes of Offices ; enabling privat Persons for the speciall service of all good Princes and Policies." This was followed in the next year (1607) by a tragedy, called " The Divel's Charter," on Pope Alexander VI. and Lucretia Borgia. Barnes died in December, 1609" (pp. 214-215).

Barnes' connections to Shakespeare are tantalizing.  Their common acqaintance is John Florio (p. 463), translator of Montaigne and secretary to Southampton, who was in Barnes' service while he was at Oxford.  Barnes and his friend William Percy, to whom Parthenophil and Parthenophe is dedicated, were both sonneteers in the same circles as Shakespeare in the years when he was, most likely, writing his sonnets.  Barnes, in 1593 wrote a flattering sonnet to Southampton, and at least one widely read biographer (Sir Sidney Lee in his 1898 biography; see also Lee's DNB entry on Shakespeare in 1909) assigned Barnes the role of rival poet of the Sonnets. Later Barnes contributed to the spate of Jacobean plays on witchcraft, necromancy and the daemonic, The Devil's Charter, reflecting the interests of King James, near the same time that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth.  Barnes' play was performed before the King by Shakespeare's company.

Here are several links to Barnes' work:

• Sonnets by Barnes in Specimens of English Sonnets, ed. Alexander Dyce, 1833, from GBS in full view and PDF.
• The Devil's Charter, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 1904, from GBS, full view and PDF.
• The Devils Charter, students facsimile edition, from the Dyce collection, 1913, from GBS, full view and PDF.
• The Poems of Barnaby Barnes, ed. A. B. Grosart, 1875, from GBS, full view and PDF.