‘Living fame no fortune can confound’: Barnfield at 450

After tracing the biography of the sixteenth-century English poet Richard Barnfield, this introductory chapter discusses the editorial and reception history of Barnfield’s poetic output, highlighting the fact that while his contemporaries did not fail to acknowledge the poet’s talents, Barnfield’s oeuvre was largely forgotten after his death and remained virtually unknown until the nineteenth century. It also underscores how the bold homoeroticism of Barnfield’s poetry has elicited the most diverse responses from readers across time, functioning as a mirror in which to observe the evolution in the cultural attitude towards non-heterosexual forms of love and desire. The aim, features and originality of the volume Richard Barnfield’s Poetics: Early Modern English Poetry Beyond Shakespeare are then described. It explains how this edited collection, written by an international group of scholars making use of different approaches, is the first to take into account Barnfield’s entire corpus and tackles several crucial issues for the in-depth understanding of his literary output. It shows how the homoeroticism of Barnfield’s poetry, the specific focus of some of the chapters included here, is explored from new and challenging perspectives, which bring forward a critical discussion that has been acquiring growing importance while also underscoring the multifaceted intersections between this specific aspect of Barnfield’s poetics and other elements of his production. At the same time, other relevant issues are given the attention they deserve, including matters of intertextuality and interdiscursivity, the poet’s relationship with his (re)sources, his engagement with different poetic genres, the way in which he relates to a series of contemporary discourses, such as those of patronage and law, and considerations on his linguistic and stylistic achievements.