ABSTRACT
It is hard to imagine a medieval character more relevant and persistent in the twenty-rst century than Robin Hood. Although King Arthur, as a model gure of authority, has likewise persisted in the popular imagination, he is nowhere as popular as the greenwood outlaw, who has been used to criticize and glamorize antiauthoritarian ideologies everywhere from videogames to movies to toys to television to presidential politics. Robin, as a mythic character, has been highly adaptable:
Robin Hood … has appeared and re-appeared, disappeared and been reinvented for at least six centuries. He is not tied to any single ethnic group, political ideology, national identity, or even sexual orientation. He has represented the Normans,1 the Anglo-Saxons against the Normans,2 the British against the continental Europeans,3 and even the Americans against the British.4 He has been the conservative against the progressive, the progressive against the conservative, the Christian against the pagan,5 and the pagan against the Christians.6 He has been used to slander American political candidates, and in the same election, to praise them.7 He has provided charity while he has broken the law,8 and upheld the law uncharitably.9 He has been both man and woman,10 old and young,11 straight and homosexual, effeminate and masculine.12,13
Insofar as Robin has appeared as a literary gure, we tend to think of him as a character of both the screen and the printed page. But the historical Robin was much more a character of ludic texts, of play-games and festival culture, than of writing. Robin has a special connection with the physical, kinesthetic, and energetic style of storytelling associated with the festival and the play-game, a relationship evidenced in the overlapping semantic elds of the medieval (and to some degree, modern) words game, play, spell, and tale. In the Middle Ages, Robin is an outlaw character surrounded by athletic contests, martial arts displays, nighttime frivolity in the forest, Maypoles, Morris dancing, and most of all by the transformation of the familiar space of the village square into a virtual literary setting.14 As Robin
moved into the Tudor period of Elizabethan drama, he retained something of his ludic element: Anthony Munday’s (much maligned) two plays frame Robin’s narrative as a recursive play performed by a set of historical players ( including Sir John Eltham as Little John and poet laureate Skelton as Robin, both long since deceased), in effect, a play (of Robin Hood) in a play (by historical actors) in a play (of actual actors). The actors playing Skelton and the other players discuss the staging of their Robin play, referencing it as a game (whence comes the line in the title of this essay), and alluding to its spontaneous nature. Their dialogue suggests that their Robin Hood play is supposed to be an attempt to recover the familiar, domestic space of the Robin Hood games played in the village green, even scripting digressions from the play, as though the actors were playing a game with friends:
“Stoppe, master Skelton; whither will you runne? Gods pittie, Sir John Eltam, Little John, I had forgotte myselfe; but to our play.” (v, 890-92)
Munday constantly reinforces the game-like nature of his play. Skelton as Robin invites his fellows, “come, John, friends and all, for now beginnes the game” (vii, 1022), and more explicitly references the play-games: “I promist him a Play of Robin Hoode, / His honorable life, in merry Sherewood … And other mirthfull matter, full of game” (xiii, 2217-18; xiii, 2225).
