[2] Barnabe Barnes was well acquainted with the work of contemporary French sonneteers, to whom he is largely indebted, and he borrows his title, apparently, from a Neapolitan writer of Latin verse, Hieronymus Angerianus.
It is possible to outline a story from this series of love lyrics, but the incidents are slight, and in this case, as in other Elizabethan sonnet-cycles, it is difficult to dogmatise as to what is the expression of a real personal experience, and what is intellectual exercise in imitation of Petrarch.
Nashe, never slow to pick a fight, took due note: "But my young master Barnaby the Bright, and his kindness (before any desert at all of mine towards him might pluck him on or provoke it), I neither have nor will be unmindful of."
He therefore responded in kind in Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596) with various observations on Barnes: he was a bad poet, he had dreadful dress sense ("getting him a strange pair of Babylonian britches, with a codpiece as big as a Bolognian sausage") and had been a coward on the field of battle during the wars in France.
It is however on record that Barnes was prosecuted in Star Chamber in 1598 for attempting to murder one John Browne, first by offering him a poisoned lemon and then by sweetening his wine with sugar laced with mercury sublimate.
In 1606 he dedicated to King James Offices enabling privat Persons for the special service of all good Princes and Policies, a prose treatise containing, among other things, descriptions of Queen Elizabeth and of the earl of Essex.