ABSTRACT
Indeed, even as Munday’s work is concerned with history and historicity, it is also historically important in the context of Robin Hood and outlaw studies, being itself a pivot in that literary history. The text at once retrospectively signposts a long and disparate tradition of oral and written texts and folkloric customs and practices, and unquestionably inuences the future of the Robin Hood legend and its performative and textual traditions. This duality can also be discerned in the manner in which the playwright composes his work: rather than creating something new that adds to the “linear” progression of the narrative, Munday brings together different elements of a tradition to regenerate it. He achieves this by combining information gleaned from historical chronicles, such as those, in particular, of John Major and Anthony Grafton, mediated by John Stow,3 with the widely dispersed elements of the more popular renderings of the legend of Robin Hood: the mayings and the ballads that, taken together, and in their oral and material manifestations, represent a narrative tradition that, by the year 1600, had become culturally powerful. However, even as he attempts to inuence and stabilize an ever-shifting tradition, it is evident that the playwright is aware of the contradictions inherent to that process, and inscribes
into his play discomfort with that very process. This chapter demonstrates how Anthony Munday harnesses the uidity of spaces, frames, boundaries, and perspectives in his performance text to express his particular disquiet with the reception and treatment of a disparate and undisciplined tradition. This tradition is apparently, by nature, always contradictory: it has proved popular with peasants and royals alike, has been the sometime subject of weighty historical chroniclers as well as anonymous balladeers, and has associations with popular disorder and customary practices, or at least with expressions of dissatisfaction and unrest. Those contradictions are confronted by Munday, who asks his audience to grapple with a tradition that is at once established and developing, populated with xed mores and touchstones, delivered by the playwright in a xed yet unreliable form: the printed play-text, itself containing an unstable and uid medium. These contradictions and binaries, and indeed his own particular perspectives and experiences, all inform Munday’s version of what is a fractured yet denable, ofcial yet folkloric set of narratives.
