It is one of the strengths of the field of Robin Hood studies recently that it doesn't take itself too seriously. Robin Hood is, as Stephen Knight once remarked at a conference--unfolding and putting on a green, gaily feathered hat as he did so--simply fun. Helen Phillips' well-edited essay collection, Robin Hood, Medieval and Post- Medieval, gives a fine demonstration of serious scholarly play, interweaving meticulously documented and original archival research with equally penetrating humor and intelligence. It reassesses venerable landmarks such as Dobson and Taylor and Stephen Knight, in order to tread out new boundaries. More importantly, it demonstrates how much mutual illumination can result if scholars are willing to tease open the borders of traditional literary and cultural studies-- in their many periods, approaches, and generic guises--and admit interchange with a irremediably popular tradition that is long-lived, multivalent, and constantly mutating.
The collection also presents a self-conscious diorama of the state of the field. The research in virtually every essay is both rigorous and up to the minute, meticulously archival and open to the reassessing of half-forgotten methodologies such as folk-lore studies. A beginning student could do no better than to start here and work backward-- seminal works are both clearly signposted and reexamined, and many hitherto unnoted textual, literary, documentary, and historical contexts are brought to light.
Phillips has assembled the collection logically and progressively; the literary essays within it proceed chronologically, from medieval to early twentieth-century texts that are relevant to Robin Hood traditions, some of them surprising--such as Charlotte Bronte's Shirley--and others field mainstays, such as the medieval ballads and the early modern plays by Mundy and Jonson. The chronological arrangement in the main works beautifully--given the intertextual dialogue between so many of the essays--so that the reader frequently passes from one essay to find its main text the back story for the next. There are two essays that seem not to have found a secure place in this literary chronology, probably because they are more historical in their approaches, and take a very wide temporal sweep: David Hepworth's investigation of the documents surrounding Robin Hood's purported grave site, placed in the collection's middle, and Michael R. Evan's mythological exploration placed at the collection's end. But some loose ends seem excusable in a collection whose center track is literary but which admits other approaches and temporal frames with such success.
The Introduction by Helen Phillips focuses on the mass and diversity of the material that makes up the Robin Hood tradition, giving a topography of its critical history, and characterizing the essay collection, correctly, as both informed and revisionist, exploring the contradictions and strange temporal eddies of the popular hero, without trying, as so often in the past, to fit him into any a simple ideology, politics, or historical moment. It is followed by Douglas Gray's retrospective, "Everybody's Robin Hood," which discusses the changes in Robin Hood scholarship over the past several decades, exploiting the ambiguity of the title as it emphasizes the sheer range of issues--from communitas to individual initiative, conservative politics to radicalism--that Robin Hood texts engage with. Ultimately this range assures ongoing study for, "the greenwood is a genuinely "merry" place in which academic "boundaries have little importance and where searchers--even if they cannot quite hunt down the elusive hero- -can still find some of his strange and rich treasures" (41).
There follow four essays focusing on the variety to be found in medieval ballad-romances of Robin Hood. Derek Pearsall's "Little John and Robin Hood and the Monk" continues the theme of flexibility and change within the tradition, arguing that the titular ballad heroizes not Robin but Little John who articulates a radical idea of fellowship. His behavior disturbs the late medieval universe of hierarchical assumptions, embodied, surprisingly, in the character of Robin Hood himself. Ultimately, the ballad proleptically criticizes the gentrification of the hero that will overtake the tradition over the next century, as well as busting up several of the master narratives through which scholars have tried to rein in the contradictoriness of the medieval Robin hood ballads. Throughout, Pearsall emphasizes the elliptical richness of the elliptical ballad form. Richard Firth Green, in "The Hermit and the Outlaw: New Evidence for Robin Hood's Death," departs from the brief account of Robin Hood's death at the end of the Gest to argue for the influence of a lost early ballad of Robin Hood's death upon the fifteenth- century ballad, "The Hermit and the Outlaw," which is unique among its analogues in having the repentant outlaw bleed to death. In another analogue that thematizes the repentant outlaw, the mid-thirteenth century Chronicle of Dale Abbey, Green finds a figure who might have been an early incarnation of Robin Hood himself. Roy Pearcy's "The Literary Robin Hood: Character and Function in Fitts 1, 2, and 4 of the Gest of Robin Hood," examines the Gest through the countertexts of Jaques de Vitry's exemplum and a French fabliau, Le povre mercier, to argue that the outlaws of the Gest constitute a kind of conservative government in exile--"certainly not revolutionaries preparing the way for the implementation of some new order but profoundly conservative proponents of an anachronistic social system," waging war against "the corrupt officialdom of a burgeoning profit-based economy" (68). By contrast, Thomas H. Ohlgren's "Merchant Adventure in "Robin Hood and the Potter," finds a decidedly mercantile tinge to the titular ballad, immersed in mercantile language, concepts, and pleasures, calculated to appeal to an English audience of merchants and tradesmen.
The next essay, Timothy S. Jones's "Oublie ai chevalerie: Tristan, Malory, and the Outlaw-Knight," traces the shadow of the outlaw in a surprising place--late medieval prose versions of the Tristan story, arguing that crucial elements of outlaw legend make their way into romance, as "a representation of alienation, of conflict in value systems, even of criticism of structures of authority" (90). David Hepworth's "A Grave Tale," is a meticulous historical examination of reliability and borrowings between the documentary record of Robin Hood's grave, and analyzes the influence of the Armitage family on both site and record; this essay clears the ground for future scholarship on the subject.
The following three essays explore the dramatic Robin Hood. Liz Oakley-Brown's "Framing Robin Hood: Temporality and Textuality in Anthony Munday's Huntingdon Plays" mobilizes post-structural theory to focus on the way Munday's text draws attention to "the socio-political context of gender construction" (127) and "the problematic nature of representation" (128) itself, by explicating its own textuality and reliance on other texts operating in a politicized and dangerous sphere. Stephen Knight's "Meere English Flocks": Ben Jonson's The Sad Shepherd and the Robin Hood Tradition" highlights the irremediable popularity of medieval Robin Hood sources as he corrects the tendency of Jonson scholars to ignore native English sources. He analyzes the influences of Drayton's Poly-Olbion, Munday's Downfall, and the Gest of Robin Hood upon Jonson's incomplete play, and ends by suggesting that the play's incompletion stems not from the author's death but rather from the over-domestication of the Robin Hood tradition itself: "By Englishing the pastoral, Jonson also pastoralized the English Robin Hood, abandoning the popular (in both senses) plot material that gave it such robust narrative health. Jonson's meere English floces prove too hybrid to be productive, and it is quite possible that the author realized this was going nowhere and recognized that, like other gentrifiers of the English outlaw tradition, he had become lost in an over-genteel forest of his own making" (144). Linda Troost's "The Noble Peasant" disregards the eighteenth-century Robin Hood operas with their excessively gentrified Robin Hoods and looks instead at Thomas Holcroft's The Noble Peasant, an eighteenth-century comic opera that excavates an outlaw tradition that is populist, democratic, and aggressively anti-authoritarian: "Holcroft makes us all acknowledge that a peasant can be as noble--perhaps even more noble--than a person born to higher rank." The next essay, Helen Phillips's "Robin Hood, the Prioress of Kirklees, and Charlotte Bronte," surprises by illuminating a Robin Hood context for Charlotte Bronte's Shirley. It is a sensitive recontextualization that will serve Bronte scholars at least as profoundly as Robin Hood scholars. Phillips reads Bronte's Shirley as a complex polysemic debate which refuses to offer either simple dichotomies or easy closures and which aptly uses the equally multivalent Robin Hood tradition to deepen and complicate its referential web. She argues that Bronte evokes echoes of Kirklees abbey and Robin Hood's death at the hands of its deceptive prioress to transform "the prioress, the death-bringing female healer, and the nunnery... into a rediscovered, loving and healing female sisterhood" (159). The site of Robin Hood's death, Kirklees abbey, is reimagined as a place where he lived and still haunts--in the same way that the rebellious poor, the suppression of female agency, and the legendary past haunt early nineteenth-century master narratives of industrialization, patriarchy, and modernity.
Lois Potter follows with a perceptive investigation of Alfred Noyes's Sherwood, which contextualizes it in terms both of the author's life and of the shift toward literary modernism, against which Noyes became a vociferous critic. Potter counters Stephen Knight's dismissal of Noyes's play as both fanciful and nationalistic by illuminating its strange quadruplex imbrication of Robin Hood play, Shakespearean comedy, children's fairy tale, and Christian redemption story. The last essay of the collection, Michael R. Evans's "Robin Hood in the Landscape," returns us to more historical approaches as he investigates the possibility of a mythic origin for Robin Hood and fails to find it in the many mythic-seeming Robin Hood place names, that seem to have sprung from the tradition rather than inspired it.
This collection is a useful, meticulous, illuminating exposition of the present healthy state of Robin Hood studies, but it will be of interest not only to greenwood aficionados but also to scholars in the many and often surprising fields in which the shadow of the unruly popular outlaw can be traced.