A Stylistic Approach to Irony in Barnfield’s 'Lady Pecunia'

The current chapter aims to offer a stylistic analysis of Richard Barnfield’s poem The Encomion of Lady Pecunia or The Praise of Money (1598), a sardonic ode to wealth. It has been defined by critics as a ‘paradoxical encomion’ on wealth (Miller 1956), ‘a tongue-in-cheek disquisition on wealth and the dangers of forgery’ (Massai 2004). To my knowledge, the present study is the first stylistic analysis of the poem.1 The analysis will focus primarily on the original 1598 edition, which comprises fifty sixains.2 A revised second edition (bearing the modified title Lady Pecunia, or The Praise of Money) was published in 1605, including an additional six stanzas and some slight lexical and syntactical modifications to the pre-existing stanzas, as well as the orthographical and punctuation variance which is typical of the period. Many of these lexical and syntactic modifications consist in substituting present tense descriptions of the, since deceased, Queen Elizabeth I with past tense and present perfect forms and including contemporary references (to James, to political and economic issues in Ireland etc.). For a comprehensive comparison of the two editions, see Fabio Ciambella’s chapter in this volume (xxx). It is beyond the scope of the present chapter to undertake an exhaustive philological analysis of the variants between the editions. Instead, I aim to consider the original 1598 poem as an aesthetic text in its own right, worth investigating in terms of its creative, ironic and humorous use of language.