Refashioning Antiquity: Richard Barnfield's Cassandra

Cristiano Ragni’s chapter (‘Refashioning antiquity: Richard Barnfield’s Cassandra’) turns the attention to one of Barnfield’s most neglected works and, in line with what Riviera too discusses, confirms that the poet’s approach to classical literature was all but based on ‘unimaginative imitation’. By offering a close reading of the unconventional The Legend of Cassandra, this chapter highlights the peculiar strategy that Barnfield used to reinvent and re-semanticize the character of the Trojan prophetess who famously refused (or betrayed) Apollo and was thus cursed never to be believed. On the one hand, while acknowledging the uncertainty that surrounds the identification of possible sources for this epyllion, Ragni presents Cassandra’s petty behaviour towards Apollo and her later falling in love with Agamemnon not only as evidence of what Tania Demetriou has called Barnfield’s ‘allusive fluency with Greek material’ (2017: 58) but also as his hitherto unrecognized familiarity with the mythological compedium included in Thomas Cooper’s 1565 Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae. On the other hand, Ragni identifies and comments on Barnfield’s various stylistic choices in Legend, which notably blend the features typical of the ‘minor epic’ genre, with the moralizing tone of laments, as well as the celebratory aspects of panegyrics. This rare combination, Ragni demonstrates, enables Barnfield to avoid potential associations between the ambiguous character of Cassandra and the flesh- and-blood counterpart of any woman celebrated in contemporary literature: Queen Elizabeth I.