ABSTRACT
The medieval proverb, ‘many men speak of Robin Hood that never bent his bow’, has had limited effect in discouraging uninformed opinion. Resisting all constraints, Robin Hood has remained firmly in the popular imagination and on the lips of successive generations for eight centuries, an achievement that earned him the only properly fictional character entry in the first edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. For all the undoubted impact on the Robin Hood myth in the nineteenth century of ballad anthologies, historical biographies and novels, they were literary in form and, for the most part, solitary in audience experience. Robin reappeared as a star of pageantry when pageantry remodelled its ideological purpose. Robin had made an appearance in a pageant that was part military, part history and part allegory. The powerful presentation of Robin is maintained as he sings his first solo on horseback.
