Description

Richard Barnfield (1574-1620) was an English poet who matriculated at Brasenose College, Oxford in 1589 and took his degree in 1592. In 1594, in his twenty-first year, Barnfield published anonymously his first work, The Affectionate Shepherd, dedicated with familiar devotion to Penelope, Lady Rich. Although the poem was successful, it did not pass without censure from the moral point of view. Two months later, in 1595, Barnfield published his second volume, Cynthia, With Certain Sonnets and the Legend of Cassandra. In 1598 he published his third volume, The Encomion of Lady Pecunia, a poem in praise of money, followed by a sort of continuation, in the same six-line stanza, called The Complaint of Poetry for the Death of Liberality. In 1599 The Passionate Pilgrim was published, with the words "By W. Shakespeare" on the title-page. Barnfield's Lady Pecunia and The Complaint of Poetry were used as sample texts by the early 17th-century phonetician Robert Robinson for his invented phonetic script.