Studies of varied aspects of Robin Hood legends and associated topics: the greenwood, archery, outlawry, and 20c response to the legends. The Robin Hood tradition has had a continuing appeal from the middle ages to the present day, the hero himself holding a distinctive place within popular culture, his exploits, and those of his companions, being celebrated in multiple forms, from the earliest rituals, plays and ballads to musical theatre, lyric poetry, modern popular fiction, cinema and TV. The essays in this volume provide a rich and coherent perspective on this enigmatic figure and the legends which have grown up around him, offering a wide range of approaches. Topics include place-name study; examinations of surviving manuscripts and their cultural context; appraisals of the links between Robin Hood and medievalarchery; other medieval outlaws; mythic figures such as the Green Man; patterns of masculine and feminine identity; and the popularity of Robin Hood on stage and screen, in comic books and videos, and in modern Japan. There are also extended overviews of the hero's origins and status; and the future of Robin Hood studies. Professor THOMAS HAHN teaches in the Department of English at the University of Rochester, New York. Contributors: THOMAS HAHN, FRANK ABBOTT, SARAH BEACH, LAURA BLUNK, KELLY DEVRIES, R.B. DOBSON, MICHAEL EATON, KEVIN J. HARTY, STUART KANE, STEPHEN KNIGHT, DAVID LAMPE, GARY YERSHON

“Impressively researched . . . an extraordinary combination of biography and cultural history” from the author of Heroes and Villains of the British Empire (Midwest Book Review). Robin Hood is a national English icon. He is portrayed as a noble robber, who, along with his band of merry men, is said to have stolen from the rich and given to the poor. His story has been re-imagined many times throughout the centuries. Readers will be introduced to some of the candidates who are thought to have been the real Robin Hood, before journeying into the fifteenth century and learning about the various “rymes of Robyn Hode” that were in existence. This book then shows how Robin Hood was first cast as an earl in the sixteenth century, before discussing his portrayals as a brutish criminal in the eighteenth century. Then learn how Robin Hood became the epitome of an English gentleman in the Victorian era, before examining how he became an Americanized, populist hero fit for the silver screen during the twentieth century. Thus, this book will take readers on a journey through 800 years of English cultural and literary history by examining how the legend of Robin Hood has developed over time. “Here we learn not only about a national hero but also about our rich heritage of literature . . . this really is a worthwhile book, rich in facts and nicely illustrated. If you are interested in literature, history and legends, this book is for you.” —Yorkshire Gazette and Herald “Fun and insightful.” —Adventures of a Tudor Nerd

Robin Hood is one of the most enduring and well-known figures of English folklore. Yet who was he really? In this intriguing book, Lesley Coote reexamines the early tales about Robin in light of the stories, both English and French, that have grown up around them—stories with which they shared many elements of form and meaning. In the process, she returns to questions such as where did Robin come from, and what did these stories mean? The Robin who reveals himself is as spiritual as he is secular, and as much an insider as he is an outlaw. And in the context of current debates about national identity and Britain’s relationship with the wider world, Robin emerges to be as European as he is English—or perhaps, as Coote suggests, that is precisely the quality which made him fundamentally English all along.

Following in the tradition of recent work by cultural geographers and historians of maps, this collection examines the apparently familiar figure of Robin Hood as he can be located within spaces that are geographical, cultural, and temporal. The volume is divided into two sections: the first features an interrogation of the literary and other textually transmitted spaces to uncover the critical grounds in which the Robin Hood ’legend’ has traditionally operated. The essays in Part Two take up issues related to performative and experiential space, demonstrating the reciprocal relationship between page, stage, and lived experience. Throughout the volume, the contributors contend with, among other things, modern theories of gender, literary detective work, and the ways in which the settings that once advanced court performances now include digital gaming and the enactment of ’real’ lives.

Thomas Hahn’s work laid the foundations for medieval romance studies to embrace the study of alterity and hybridity within Middle English literature. His contributions to scholarship brought Robin Hood studies into the critical mainstream, normalized the study of historically marginalized literature and peoples, and encouraged scholars to view medieval readers as actively encountering others and exploring themselves. This volume employs his methodologies – careful attention to texts and their contexts, cross-cultural readings, and theoretically-informed analysis – to highlight the literary culture of late medieval England afresh. Addressing long-established canonical works such as Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Malory alongside understudied traditions and manuscripts, this book will be of interest to literary scholars of the later Middle Ages who, like Hahn, work across boundaries of genre, tradition, and chronology.

Introduction / Lois Potter and Joshua Calhoun -- Part I: Medieval -- Origins and others -- Robin Hood: the earliest contexts / Stephen Knight -- The outlaw's song of Trailbaston, the Green man, and the facial machine / Stuart Kane -- Reynardine and Robin Hood: echoes of an outlaw legend in folk balladry / Stephen D. Winick -- Picturing Robin Hood in early print and performance: 1500-1590 / John Marshall -- Image and society -- "Merry" and "Greenwood": a history of some meanings / Helen Phillips -- The late medieval Robin Hood: good yeomanry and bad performances / Kimberly A. Thompson -- "From the Castle Hill they came with violence": the Edinburgh Robin Hood riots of 1561 / Michael Wheare -- Part II: Post medieval -- Image and word -- The work of Robin Hood art in an age of mechanical reproduction / Henry Griffy -- Robin Hood's home away from home: Howard Pyle and his art students / Jill May -- Word and image -- "There was something about that spoke of other things than rags and tatters": Howard Pyle and the language of Robin Hood / Alan T. Gaylord -- The play's the thing: Tom Sawyer re-enacts Robin Hood / Patricia Lee Yongue -- "A song of freedom": Geoffrey Trease's Bows against the barons / Michael R. Evans -- Picturing Marian: illustrations of Maid Marian in juvenile fiction / Sherron Lux -- Image and performance -- Male cross-dressing in Kabuki: Benten the thief / Yoshiko Uéno -- Figures of "Robin Hood" in the Chinese cultural imaginary / Jianguo Chen -- The images of Robin Hood and Don Juan in George Bernard Shaw's Man and superman / Judy B. McInnis -- To steal from the rich and give to the poor: Reginald de Koven's Robin Hood / Orly Leah Krasner -- Recovering Reginald de Koven's and Harry Bache Smith's "Lost" operetta Maid Marian / Lorraine Kochanske Stock.

Detailed research into documentary sources offers an exciting new identification of the "real" Robin Hood.For over a century and a half scholars have debated whether or not the legend of Robin Hood was based on an actual outlaw and, if so, when and where he lived. One view is that he was not a legend as such but a myth: an idea, rather than a person who could possibly be identified in historical records and placed in a real historical and geographical context. Other writers have gone even further, arguing that he is a literary concoction, with no traceable original, and that seeking to pin him down to a particular time and location is futile and unnecessary. This survey begins by tracing the development of the legend, and contemporary views about it, between the thirteenth and early twenty-first centuries, taking account both of new interpretative literature on the subject and fresh discoveries from the author's own research in the early records of the English royal administration and common law. It then gives a detailed account of the places that came to be associated with the legend, and of evidence illustrating the importance of the outlaw's name in the development of English surnames. The concluding chapters deal with the administration of criminal law in medieval England, and the evidence that points to the possible origins of the legend in the activities of a notorious Yorkshire criminal, tracked down and beheaded in the county in 1225.s a detailed account of the places that came to be associated with the legend, and of evidence illustrating the importance of the outlaw's name in the development of English surnames. The concluding chapters deal with the administration of criminal law in medieval England, and the evidence that points to the possible origins of the legend in the activities of a notorious Yorkshire criminal, tracked down and beheaded in the county in 1225.s a detailed account of the places that came to be associated with the legend, and of evidence illustrating the importance of the outlaw's name in the development of English surnames. The concluding chapters deal with the administration of criminal law in medieval England, and the evidence that points to the possible origins of the legend in the activities of a notorious Yorkshire criminal, tracked down and beheaded in the county in 1225.s a detailed account of the places that came to be associated with the legend, and of evidence illustrating the importance of the outlaw's name in the development of English surnames. The concluding chapters deal with the administration of criminal law in medieval England, and the evidence that points to the possible origins of the legend in the activities of a notorious Yorkshire criminal, tracked down and beheaded in the county in 1225.

Intertextual encounters occur whenever an author or the author's text recognizes, references, alludes to, imitates, parodies, or otherwise elicits an audience member's familiarity with other texts. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West use the fiction of Horatio Alger, Jr., as an intertext in their novels, The Great Gatsby and A Cool Million. Callie Khouri and Ridley Scott use the buddy-road-picture genre as an intertext for their Thelma and Louise. In all these cases, intertextual encounters take place between artists, between texts, between texts and audiences, between artists and audiences. Michael Dunne investigates works from the 1830s to the 1990s and from the canonical American novel to Bugs Bunny and Jerry Seinfeld.

Breaking new ground by considering productions of popular culture from above, rather than from below, this book draws on theorists of cultural studies, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Roger Chartier and John Fiske to synthesize work from disparate fields and present new readings of well-known literary works. Using the literature of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson, Mary Ellen Lamb investigates the social narratives of several social groups – an urban, middling group; an elite at the court of James; and an aristocratic faction from the countryside. She states that under the pressure of increasing economic stratification, these social fractions created cultural identities to distinguish themselves from each other – particularly from lower status groups. Focusing on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream and Merry Wives of Windsor, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Jonson's Masque of Oberon, she explores the ways in which early modern literature formed a particularly productive site of contest for deep social changes, and how these changes in turn, played a large role in shaping some of the most well-known works of the period.

In this engaging and deeply informed book, Knight looks at the different manifestations of Robin Hood at different times and places in a mythic biography with a thematic structure. Illustrations.