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THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM
No. VIII. Barnfield's Sonnet to R. L.
To his friend Maister R. L. in praise of Musique and Poetrie? This is the eighth poem of *The Passionate Pilgrim*. The texts are identical, though in Barnfield's publication capitals are more freely used than in *The Passionate Pilgrim*, while the proper names are in italics and not in roman letters as in the later volume.¹
‘R. L.,’ to whom Barnfield addressed the sonnet, is doubtless Richard Linche, author of a collection of sonnets called *Diella* which appeared in 1596. John Dowland, to whom Barnfield refers in line 5 of his sonnet, was the famous lutenist and musical composer, who had published a year before a valuable volume in folio, called ‘The First Book of Songes, and Ayres of foure partes with Tablature for the Lute’ (printed by Peter Short). The compliment to Spenser in lines 7–8 is repeated in Barnfield’s volume in the next poem but one, a piece which is entitled ‘A Remembraunce of some English Poets’ and opens with the line: ‘Live Spenser ever in thy Fairy Queene.’ Already, in 1595, Barnfield had proved his admiration for Spenser by publishing a poem in the Spenserian stanza, called ‘Cynthia’, which he described in his preface as ‘the first imitation of the verse of that excellent Poet Maister’
¹ In a reprint of Barnfield’s volume under the abbreviated title ‘Lady Pecunia’, in 1605, only two of the eight ‘poems in diuers humours’ were included. Among the omitted pieces were the two poems which figured in *The Passionate Pilgrim*. From this omission of the two pseudo-Shakespearean pieces Collier argued that Barnfield was not their author; that the claim to them advanced in behalf of Shakespeare by the compiler of *The Passionate Pilgrim* was justifiable, and that they were dropped by Barnfield in 1605, in deference to an imaginary protest on the part of the compiler of Jaggard’s miscellany. Collier ignored the fact that not the two pseudo-Shakespearean pieces alone, but four other of the original eight ‘poems in diuers humours’ were excluded from the new edition of Barnfield’s volume. So wholesale an exclusion undermines Collier’s theory, apart from the internal evidence of poetic quality, which entirely negatives Shakespeare’s responsibility for the two pieces in question. Cf. Collier’s *Bibliographical Account*, i. 57–8; Grosart’s Introduction to Barnfield’s *Poems* (Roxburghe Club), pp. xxv seq.
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