SOURCE: Stephens, Alan. Introduction to Selected Poems of Barnabe Googe, pp. 7-21. Denver: Allan Swallow, 1961.

In the following excerpt, Stephens examines Googe's style and the literary inspiration for his poetry in Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets.

I

Barnabe Googe's Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, … appeared in 1563. Googe was then twenty-three years old. It will be well to examine the tradition which informed Googe's poems, for that tradition is alien to most contemporary readers.

Googe's education had prepared him to serve in the government (he was the son of the Recorder of Lincoln, and a kinsman and retainer of Lord Burghley) and, as contemporary scholars have shown, education at that time was intensively rhetorical: year after year, the boy spent about nine hours a day, six days a week, inching up through the ranks of his Latin texts, from Aesop and the Bible, through the verse of the Italians Mantuan and...