On one hand, the Robin Hood from medieval tales, who would stick an enemy’s decapitated head on a pike, was too raw for Restoration audiences, who preferred light operas and pantomimes. Robin Hood again became a stage favorite when theaters re-opened in 1661, but most writers didn’t know what to do with the hero. The broadsides kept the innovation of the dispossessed earl, but borrowed older plots from the Gest to keep Robin’s adventures fresh. These single sheets of paper, sold for a penny, told a story of Robin Hood and printed an accompanying tune to which it was sung. William Shakespeare, who worked for a rival theater company, never wrote a Robin Hood play but he did get in a subtle jab at the Admiral’s Men in As You Like It, his take on the outlawed aristocrat theme, when a character dismisses the banished Duke Senior, saying that he and his men “fleet the time carelessly,” living like “old Robin Hood of England.”Īlthough the Puritan government closed English theaters in 1642, broadside printers kept the legend of Robin alive. The Admiral’s Men, who produced Munday’s plays, soon did a roaring trade in Robin Hood entertainments. Munday pillaged a 1521 history book for the most enduring detail-that Robin began robbing from the rich to give to the poor.ĭespite the political subtext, theater audiences loved this new Robin Hood. Robert flees into the forest with his beloved Maid Marion and loyal followers, rechristens himself Robin Hood, and picks up a bow to fight for the king’s justice. In these plays, Munday backdated Robin Hood to the twelfth century: Sir Robert is outlawed by Prince John, ruling while the rightful king, Richard I, fights in the Crusades. Thus, Robin changed from thuggish thief to dispossessed earl when Anthony Munday published The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon in 1598. Robin Hood received a makeover in the late sixteenth century, as a character who preferred forest life to a king’s beneficence made those in power uneasy. In these tales, Robin is a simple yeoman who always returns to the greenwood richer and triumphant, preferring the dark and mysterious wood to the society of the King and court. The Gest packs Robin’s adventures with plenty of thieving, double-crossing, and murdering-committed by both stock bad guys like the Sheriff of Nottingham and the Merry Men. The first written account to appear was in the late fifteenth century as a Middle English ballad-poem: A Little Gest of Robin Hood. It might come as a surprise then that Robin Hood started life happily robbing the rich…and keeping the spoils for himself. The character possesses a protean quality that has allowed his legend to survive over five centuries of vigorous rebranding, finally producing the Robin Hood we know and love today-an outlaw, but a charming one, whose band of Merry Men rob from the rich to give to the poor, nobly defending the common man from injustices with a wit as quick as his arrow. The pages devoted to his adventures might equal a Sherwood Forest’s worth of trees, and he has appeared in all manner of guises, from a Saxon freedom fighter to a singing gangster and even a cartoon fox. Unlike other outlaws from the Middle Ages, Robin Hood has proved extraordinarily difficult to kill.
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