ABSTRACT
As a prelude to his murder by “a wicked woman \ The pryoresse of Kyrkely” and her lover “Syr Roger of Donkesly,” Robin Hood’s final act in the epic ballad A Gest of Robyne Hode (c.1530) is to announce that “Tomorrow” he “muste to Kyrkely, \ Craftely to be leten blode” (lines 1803–16). Taking its cue from the poem’s phlebotomical scene—an episode which draws attention to the complex theological and medicinal discourses bound up in blood—this essay works out from the humoral implications of sixteenth-century venesection to examine how Anthony Munday’s pre-Cartesian metatheatrical tragedies The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntington (c.1598) embody the figure of the English outlaw. In The Downfall’s induction, Skelton (the play-with-the-play’s author and director) explains that “At Huntingtons faire house a feast is helde, \ But envie turnes it to a house of teares” (102–3). By contrast with earlier critics who have cogently discussed Munday’s exiled Earl via a neo-Stoic cultural politics of weeping, “Staging Robin Hood’s Passions” situates the plays within a wider phenomenological context to consider the ways in which their treatment of “mad moodes” (The Downfall 680) and “soule-ravishing delicious sound” (The Downfall 1368) affects not only the dramatization of their titular figure but also the audience’s pleasure (The Downfall 110–1) and patience (The Death 862).
