Bandit Territories resembles, more than anything else, a collection of essays from a focused conference. Like papers from focused conferences, all of the essays in this book deal with British outlaws, especially Robin Hood; but under that heading, there is a lot of diversity. Several essays deal with the Robin Hood story in modern literature (including 1950s comic books) and film, three essays are close studies of Welsh and Scots outlaws, two essays deal with specific nineteenth-century authors’ treatments of the Robin Hood story, one essay looks at the development of the character of Little John, and the concluding essay of the book looks at the use of the Robin Hood story by young prison inmates. This diversity may work against the book for some, but the articles are well written, for the most part, and are “interesting reads.”
The collection begins with two provocative essays. The first, “‘Exempt me, Sire, for I am afeard of women’: Gendering Robin Hood,” by Thomas Hahn and Stephen Knight, takes its title from the 1922 Douglas Fairbanks film and looks at both the development of masculinity in the relationship of Robin and Marian and the nature of the masculinity of the outlaws as “merry men.” The essay builds toward a discussion of the 1999 flap over Stephen Knight’s article, “The Forest Queen,” which offended some people with its suggestion of a gay Robin Hood. The second essay, “Maid Marian in Twentieth-century Children’s Books,” by David Blamires, looks at the development of the character of Marian in both children’s and young adults’ literature. Blamires argues that the changes in Marian’s character are the result of changing patterns in society, and especially the changing ideas about women’s roles, and concludes by commenting that these changes in Marian’s character are possible because her role in the old ballads is so small.
The next three essays, “Welsh Bandits,” by Adrian Price, and “Fouke Fitz Waryn III and King John: Good Outlaw and Bad King,” by Glyn Burgess, and “Rabbie Hood: The Development of the English Outlaw Myth in Scotland,” by Stephen Knight, shed light on traditional stories about the Welsh outlaws Fouke Fitz Waryn, the outlaws known as “Owain’s Children,” those who became outlaws after the defeat of Owain Glyndwr, and Twm Sion Cati, often called the Welsh Robin Hood, and the Scottish outlaw, “Rabbie Hood.” Price’s essay is a meticulously researched essay discussing the traditional stories about the outlaws. Burgess discusses the ways in which the Fouke Fitz Waryn tales create the character of King John as well as the character of Waryn such that John is clearly a bad ruler, politically and morally, especially in contrast to the wronged Waryn, who proves to be a good leader. Knight argues that the figure of Robin Hood was “reformulated” as Rabbie Hood, who “emerged, remodeled along the lines of [William] Wallace” (115).
Two essays, editor Helen Phillips’s “Scott and the Outlaws” and “Sketches by a Green Crayon: Washington Irving, Robin Hood and the American Frontier,” by Marcus A.J. Smith and Julian N. Wasserman, examine how specific authors “use” the Robin Hood materials and shape them to their own ends. Phillips makes a case for Scott as an ambivalent portrayer of outlaws, never writing completely on the outlaw’s side because of his fear of reformists and his conservative support of proper hierarchical rule. Smith and Wasserman suggest that, in Robin Hood, Irving found the figure who could represent both the British values Americans could safely adopt as well as the frontier spirit of the new land. In a logical step from Knight’s essay on “Rabbie Hood,” Phillips and Smith and Wasserman assert that the Robin Hood stories are “useable” and can, without changing the basic events of the story, be made to express an author’s individual concerns.
The final four essays range farther afield but, in one way or another, deal with Robin Hood in various twentieth-century guises—and one wonders why the Blamires essay was not included here. Jeffrey Richards’s “Robin Hood, King Arthur, and Cold War Chivalry” examines the British and American films depicting these two heroes and suggests, among other things, that the popularity of these films was due to the fear of Cold War invasions (King Arthur) and to the need for models of decorum (King Arthur and Robin Hood) to counter filmdom’s juvenile delinquents, especially Marlon Brando and James Dean. Laura Blunk’s “‘And for best supporting hero . . . Little John’” looks at the film characterizations of Little John, begun by Alan Hale, starring with both Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn, and concludes that the relationships between the Robin Hoods and the Little Johns over the years have been about changing “relationships of power and authority.” Allan Wright’s “‘Begone, knave! Robbery is out of fashion hereabouts!’ Robin Hood and the Comics Code” discusses the ways in which Robin Hood was reconfigured to become a respectable figure of law and order. The concluding essay, “Robin Hood is Alive and Well in Cityton Prison,” by John Beynon, is well placed given that its subject stands quite apart from those of the other essays: the ways in which the young inmates of the prison mediate (or justify) their crimes by thinking of themselves as Robin Hoods, righteous outlaws acting against “unjust justice.” Benyon’s evidence comes from multi-year ethnographic work at Cityton Prison in South Wales, during which time he collected accounts from prisoners about their crimes and the justice system that sentenced them to prison.
My problems with this volume are not with the scholarship but with the writing, specifically the punctuation and grammar. There are compound sentences without commas, introductory subordinate clauses without ending commas, and commas stuffed in between subjects and verbs. There are other technical problems as well. In Price’s “Welsh Bandits,” an otherwise excellent article, two of the blocked quotations escape their margins (63), probably not Price’s fault, unless he saw final copy, but something that should have been caught by Phillips or by an editor at the University of Wales Press. And in Smith and Wasserman’s article on Washington Irving, I am sure that it is “the din of the hammer and the loom” that scares away all rural delights, not “the din of the hammer and the loon” (155). The worst offender, I am sorry to say, is Helen Phillips’s introduction, “Bandit Territories and Good Outlaws,” which cannot seem to make up its mind as to whether it is a preface, discussing the contributors’ essays, or an introduction, discussing the outlaw traditions, and the literature about them, in Britain. There are other problems as well. In one place, she labels a category as “Third” without ever having labeled the two previous as “First” and “Second” (4–5). At another point, she gives the dates of Owain Glyndwr’s battle with the English but not William Wallace’s, whom she mentions in the same sentence (8). In one place, she refers to “Maid Marion” (17) and in another to “Maid Marian” (18), but both authors to whose essays she refers spell the name the same, “Maid Marian.” I know that such errors creep into academic articles and books and can cite some in my own, but there seems to be an unusually large number of them in this book. My final problem is that many of the authors refer to the Robin Hood “myth.” In my understanding of the differences between folktale, legend, and myth, Robin Hood has always been an example of legend.
In spite of my problems with this collection of essays, I do recommend it, especially to library collections and to those individuals, like myself, who enjoy a collection of interesting articles that range widely within the given territory of the subject of the book.
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[Review length: 1295 words • Review posted on January 19, 2010]