Barnabe Googe

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Barnabe Googe (June 11, 1540 - February, 1594) (also spelled Barnaby Googe) was an English poet.

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He was born in London or Kent, the son of Robert Googe, recorder of Lincoln.

He studied at the strongly Reformist Christ's College, and was long thought to have also studied at New College, Oxford, although this appears uncertain. He afterwards removed to Staple's Inn, where his cousin William Lovelace held the position of Reader. Around this time he started to write poetry, and found himself in an exciting creative coterie with other young writers, such as Jasper Heywood and George Turberville. Earlier authorities claim that he became a gentleman pensioner to Queen Elizabeth, in effect, a member of her bodyguard, but this has been disproved. Nonetheless, Googe did have close associations with the court, since he was related to William Cecil. Googe exploited this important connection persistently in the years that followed, and Cecil extended considerable patronage towards his young protegé. It may have been due to Cecil's encouragement that Googe accompanied the Elizabethan humanist scholar Sir Thomas Challoner on a diplomatic embassy to Spain in 1562.

While he was away, a friend, Laurence Blundeston, sent Googe's juvenile poems to a printer. On his return, Googe learned of Blundeston's actions and reluctantly gave his consent to their publication when he discovered that the printer had already paid for the paper for the print run and the composition was underway. The book appeared in 1563 as Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonettes. Googe's anxiety over the publication of the work was no gesture of false modesty: prior to the appearance of his book, no writer in England had ever published his own poetry under his own name. In this, Googe was an accidental pioneer.

There is extant a curious correspondence on the subject of his marriage with Mary Darrell, whose father, Thomas Darrell, refused Googe's suit on the ground that she was bound by a previous contract. More to the point, recent research has shown that Thomas Darrell was a recusant who harboured Jesuit priests in his manor house of Scotney, near Lamberhurst in Kent. The idea of his daughter marrying a young man without fortune, and one moreover intimately acquainted with leading English Protestants such as Cecil and Archbishop Parker, must have horrified him. When Googe found his suit discouraged by Thomas Darrell, he appealed to his powerful contacts and the marriage duly took place in 1564 or 1565. Some sense that familial harmony was restored can be gauged by the fact that Googe took his wife to live in Lamberhurst at the manor house of Chingley.

In 1569 he dedicated a long allegorical poem with a moralistic marine topic, The Shippe of Safegarde to his sisters-in-law. By this time, Googe had served Cecil on a difficult military expedition to Ireland, where he had contracted dysentery and nearly died. Further colonial service on Ireland awaited him in 1582 when Googe was appointed to the position of provost-marshal of the court of Connaught, and some twenty letters of his in this capacity are preserved in the Public Records Office. It is often said, on scant evidence, that Googe knew other poets in Irish service, notably Edmund Spenser.

Googe was an ardent Protestant, and his poetry is coloured by his religious and political views. In the third "Eglog," for instance, he laments the decay of the old nobility and the rise of a new aristocracy of wealth, and he gives an indignant account of the sufferings of his co-religionists under Mary. The other eclogues deal with the sorrows of earthly love, leading up to a dialogue between Corydon and Cornix, in which the heavenly love is extolled. The volume includes a fine poem in praise of John Bale, Googe's best-known poem, the irascibly charming "Of Money," and epitaphs on Nicholas Grimald,and Thomas Phaer, whose translation of Virgil Googe admired.

His other works include a translation from Marcellus Palingenius (said to be an anagram for Pier Angelo Manzolli) of a satirical Latin poem, Zodiacus vitae (Venice, 1531?), in twelve books, under the title of The Zodyake of Life (1560); The Popish Kingdome, or reign of Antichrist (1570), translated from Thomas Kirchmeyer or Naogeorgus; The Spiritual Husbandrie from the same author, printed with the last Foure Bookes of Husbandrie (1577), collected by Conradus Heresbuchius; The Overthrow of the Gout (1577), a translation from Christopher Ballista, (Christophe Arbaleste), and The Proverbes of Lopes de Mendoza (1579).