A Lost World of Allusion

The poem “Phyllida and Corydon” is appended to this essay.

Just as our every utterance Is a recombination based on an inventory of possibilities formed of all the speech we have heard, every literary text arises from the vast database of all preceding texts. Unlike the largely self-contained messages of non-aesthetic discourse, the interconnections in poetry, fiction, and drama – allusions, sources, and influences – enrich meaning, creating outgoing waves of significance the critic may pursue very nearly without limit. Though sometimes such intertextuality functions as display or ornament, it also allows for the expression of subtle and complex thought, including that which seems paradoxical, ambivalent, or mysterious, the very sort of material which aesthetic texts can uniquely well express. In the current era, unlike previous periods, even educated people are often incompetent at decoding relevant sources and influences and understanding the implications of devices such as quotation, allusion, homage, and parody. The loss of this secondary elaboration of meaning has impoverished the semantic field of virtually all poetry, but the principle applies in particular to poetry of the past, and most of all to highly conventional works.

Nicholas Breton’s poem “Phyllida and Corydon” is an example of a work that would mean far less to the average reader today than when it was composed due to the loss of the ability to perceive its intertextual relations. Breton was a popular poet and fiction writer in the Elizabethan Age, but his works were rapidly forgotten thereafter. (Often authors of what might be generally if informally regarded as the second rank -- such ratings are never demonstrable -- demonstrate more clearly than the geniuses of an age the taste of the time.) The poet’s practice reflects the norms of his period. Socially positioned in the haute bourgeoisie with a family that was affluent, though not aristocratic, he had an eye toward pleasing the taste of the nobility. [1] He strove to suit, however, not only courtiers but the general reader of the day for whom he wrote numerous religious works, a substantial body of poetry, and twenty-two prose publications.

On the rare occasions when Breton is remembered today, it is usually because of his love lyrics, especially those in the pastoral style, several of which have been set to music. Breton’s pastoral lyric “Phyllida and Corydon” has impeccable courtly credentials, having been originally presented as part of an “Honourable Entertainment Given to the Queen’s Majesty in Progress at Elvetham in Hampshire, by the Right Honourable the Earl of Hertford in 1591.” [2] Thus the reader may expect courtly and learned associations as well as popular ones.

With three explicit mentions of the month of May in the opening stanza, Breton invokes some of the oldest memories of humankind. Surely festivals celebrating the return of warm weather have been celebrated in the northern hemisphere since palaeolithic times. Breton was certainly aware of the rural maypoles in his own day as well as the medieval reverdie tradition. This sophisticated lyric thus has exceedingly deep archaic roots expressing delight at the marvelous fruitfulness of the earth and associating it with romance between a man and a woman.

Literary allusions in the poem are broad and deep. Corydon’s name is derived from the Greek for lark, a bird with significant associations in poetry. The lark is often praised in poetry for the beauty of its soaring flight and complex song, [3] which during the Middle Ages had appeared in both devotional religious poetry and secular love lyrics. Though Breton is unlikely to have been familiar with this specific poem, Bernart de Ventadorn’s “Can vei la lauzeta mover” (“When I see the lark beat his wings”) can represent the bird’s medieval connotations. In Bernart the persona’s lovelorn depression is contrasted with the high-flying bird, rising and falling “per la doussor c’al cor li val” (“for the sweetness that comes to its heart”).

The primary role of Corydon’s name, however is simply to establish a link to the pastoral tradition. As a pastoral name, Corydon has a most distinguished pedigree, appearing in Theocritus and Vergil as well as in Spenser. [4] Pastoralism, since Theocritus wrote in Alexandria, has been an urban, one might say artificial and “romantic,” view of rural characters. Identifying lovers with shepherds and other country folk and conflating their passion with the general regeneration of life to which people have paid homage throughout history. In the Middle Ages the Classical pastoral tradition survived and developed into the pastourelle. [5] While the peasants danced around country maypoles, their social betters amused themselves by imitation in a quaintly cute and modish manner typified by Marie Antoinette going about her Hameau in an elegantly contrived shepherdess costume.

Phyllida is no less burdened with association. The name, a variation of Phyllis, meaning “greenery” or “covered with leaves” is like Corydon a conventional pastoral name, appearing in Vergil, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid, as well as in the medieval Carmina Burana, . [6] The story in Ovid of her betrayal by Demophon pointedly reinforces the reservations of the woman in Breton.

There is no end to tracing the expanding circles of meaning, but I will conclude here with one comment on what seems a meaningful lexical choice. The second stanza opens with a vague declaration: “Much ado there was.” Modern readers will associate the word with Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in which the primary association of the word is all the fuss that arises about love-making. Here “ado” is euphemistic, similar perhaps to the modern expression “a little something something,” with a similarly jocular tone.

Among the semantic elements introduced by intertextual processes is the fundamental assent to life that marks the welcoming of spring and the delights of love in a cyclically renewed world in the references to May Day, reinforced by both names (birds and plants being part of nature) which also link this poem to the pastoral tradition, thereby suggesting its sophisticated literariness. Further Corydon is associated with earlier examples of love longing and Phyllida with betrayal, while I read “ado” as contributing to a sly high-spirited sexuality. The smooth meters and melodious rhymes reinforce the playful, joyful aspect of love.

Even a college textbook would probably provide notes on very few of these associations, yet the original audience might reasonably be expected to appreciate them to one degree or another. Furthermore, the very literary conventions that might irritate a twenty-first century reader delighted the listener in 1591. In addition to their semantic contribution, the intertextuality is decorative, providing a polished surface that invokes the authority of the Greek and Latin classics as well as secular popular custom and prior uses of the language. Readers enjoy their own competence in a relish of the familiar while the allusions render the themes more precisely, expressing at once the urgency of desire and the prudential reservations about risking oneself in love, the push and pull of ego out of which human relations are woven.

The ability of an audience to respond to such clues, to understand, though perhaps unconsciously, the connotations of every part of the poem is here a major portion of it signification. A reader, having recovered at least a part of this largely lost world of allusion, may return to the poem with greater appreciation of the joys and dangers of love and of the unique ability of the literary text to embody the contradictions of the most deeply human of experiences.


1. His stepfather was the poet and critic George Gascoigne who composed a great body of work, including extravagant rhetorical paeans to Queen Elizabeth.

2. It was then entitled “The Ploughman’s Song,” but when published in England’s Helicon, 1600, it was called “Phillida and Corydon.”

3. As Eliot correctly maintained in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” each new contribution to the ocean of words affects all earlier works. A brief mention of a few poems employing lark imagery that follow Breton’s may be suggestive. The name appears also in the popular collection The Passionate Pilgrim published shortly after “Phyllida and Corydon.” In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, published almost ten years after Breton’s poem, the lark is a figure of joyous flight to heights of sublimity, and in Milton’s “L’Allegro” the lark’s role is similar. For Milton the bird is the first of a catalogue of “unreprovéd pleasures free.” In Shelley’s “To a Skylark” the bird is the image of the poet. For Hopkins in “The Sea and the Skylark” the sense of jouissance associated with the lark is spiritual. In “the Caged Skylark” the bird represents the human soul.

4. Theocritus Idyll IV, Vergil Eclogues II, Spenser The Fairie Queen Bk. VI, Canto X.

5. Though early pastourelles typically concern the encounter of a country woman with a knight, the genre came to include many narratives in which both man and woman were rural folk. In Occitan the parallel convention is called pastorelas. In another development of medieval pastoralism Neidhart von Reuental wrote what critics call höfische Dorfpoesie (“courtly village poetry”).

6. Vergil in Eclogues 3, 5, 7, and 10; Horace Odes 2.4 and 4.11; Propertius IV.8; Ovid Heroides II; in the Carmina Burana “Phyllis and Flora.”



Phyllida and Corydon

In the merry month of May,
In a morn by break of day,
With a troop of damsels playing
Forth I rode, forsooth, a-maying,
When anon by a woodside,
Where as May was in his pride,
I espied, all alone,
Phyllida and Corydon.

Much ado there was, God wot!
He would love, and she would not:
She said, never man was true;
He says, none was false to you.
He said, he had loved her long:
She says, Love should have no wrong.

Corydon would kiss her then,
She says, maids must kiss no men,
Till they do for good and all.
Then she made the shepherd call
All the heavens to witness, truth
Never loved a truer youth.
Thus with many a pretty oath,
Yea, and nay, and faith and troth!--
Such as silly shepherds use
When they will not love abuse;
Love, which had been long deluded,
Was with kisses sweet concluded:
And Phyllida, with garlands gay,
Was made the lady of the May.