Barnabe Barnes’s Sonnet Sequences : Moral Conversion and Prodigal Authorship

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Chapter 7 focuses on another neglected sonneteer: Barnabe Barnes, who published Parthenophil and Parthenophe, Sonnettes, Madrigals, Elegies and Odes, in 1593, and A Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets in 1595—a unique example of an author releasing two printed sonnet sequences, one secular, one sacred, in two years’ span. The first sonnet of the second sequence presents it as a recantation of Barnes’s previous poems. The chapter therefore interrogates the relationship between the two works, and focuses on the echoes between them—an approach that previous studies have envisaged, but never explored in detail. It argues that they might be understood as a Petrarchan diptych consistent with Barnes’s authorial strategy. Parthenophil and Parthenophe is an experimental sequence in which Barnes displays his poetic and rhetorical ability—an endeavour favoured by the topic of love which requires, in Puttenham’s words, ‘a forme of Poesie variable, inconstant, affected and most witty of any others’. The sequence is obviously marked by excess, as it ends with Parthenophil’s rape of Parthenophe. The networks of topoi in the two sequences echo one another. A Divine Centurie… seems devised to remind the reader of Parthenophil and Parthenophe and to highlight the connection between the two works. The purpose of such intricacy was probably for Barnes to produce a representation of himself as having undergone a moral conversion. Such a pattern of conversion and recantation echoes not only Petrarch’s Canzoniere and Epistle to Posterity, but also the careers of the ‘Elizabethan prodigals’ as analysed by Richard Helgerson. Barnes’s staged conversion was probably targeted at the Bishop of Durham, Tobie Matthew, to whom Barnes offered a copy of A Divine Centurie…, and from whom he was seeking favour. However, the fact that his second sonnet sequence was printed, and therefore aimed at a wider readership, calls for further hypotheses. Barnes’s connections with Gabriel Harvey and printer John Wolfe, which suggest that he might have had a say in the editorial process and in the designing of the book, also underline his involvement in the feud between Nashe and the Harvey brothers. Barnes’s recantation might therefore have had to do with his desire to protect his reputation from the damaging effects of the quarrel. By analysing the articulation of Barnes’s two sequences in terms of authorial strategy, this chapter offers new possibilities for understanding the relationship between secular and divine sonnets.