Cynthia: Richard Barnfield borrows from Lucrece

Like Shakespeare’s Sonnets, first printed in 1609, Richard Barnfield’s sonnet sequence Cynthia (1595) was accompanied by a narrative complaint. Barnfield’s complaint, called “The Legend of Cassandra,” recounts five episodes in the life of the Trojan prophetess Cassandra.

In “Cassandra,” Barnfield seems to draw from both Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. As Charles Crawford pointed out, there are verbal echoes between “Cassandra” and Venus and Adonis (including yoked arms and raining tears), while Barnfield’s description of Tarquin watching the sleeping Cassandra strongly evokes Lucrece. Barnfield engaged with Shakespeare’s writing throughout his brief career, borrowing from and alluding to Shakespeare’s works, as in The Affectionate Shepherd (1594), and referring to him explicitly, as in “A Remembrance of Some English Poets,” published in The Encomion of Lady Pecunia: or the Praise of Money (1598).

This is not to say that Barnfield’s poem was not innovative in its own right; Cassandra is presented as a clever, if not exactly praiseworthy, woman, and manages to outwit the men around her several times before she commits suicide after being abducted and raped by Agamemnon.

The first edition, shown here, is known to survive in two copies: one at the Folger Shakespeare Library and another at the Huntington Library. The book must have been fairly popular, as another edition of Cynthia was printed the same year.