For a century after the publication of Robin Hood and his Crew of Souldiers, the stage was one of the principal places where Robin could be found. Ballads continued to be published and already existing ballads were gathered together in anthologies and ‘garlands’. However, new depictions of the outlaw hero in this period were most likely to emerge from the world of the London theatre. Robin became a regular character in the ballad operas that were popular at the time and was just as likely to burst into song as to let fly an arrow. (The vast majority of these eighteenth-century works for the stage were notable more for their music than any other qualities and they are considered in the later chapter entitled ‘Musical Robin’.) It was only later in the century that an entirely new chapter in the literary history of Robin Hood was begun and, paradoxically, it was initiated by someone who was primarily interested in looking back at older versions of the story.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, a fashion for the folk poetry of the past developed. James Macpherson’s The Works of Ossian, supposedly verse by an ancient Celtic bard, was the literary sensation of the 1760s. Thomas Percy, a churchman and future bishop, published his Reliques of Ancient Poetry in the same decade which included a handful of references to the Robin Hood ballads. Other collections followed. The time was ripe for a re-assessment of all the Robin Hood ballads. In 1795, an eccentric scholar named Joseph Ritson published a book with the impressive title of Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, Now Extant Relative to That Celebrated English Outlaw: To Which are Prefixed Historical Anecdotes of His Life. It remains one of the most significant volumes ever published on the subject of the outlaw of Sherwood. Born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1752, Ritson moved to London as a young man and he earned his living as a conveyancer. His real interest, however, was in literature and he soon gained a reputation as a savage critic of those whose opinions on the subject he disliked. He was no respecter of reputation and even Dr. Johnson, then an old man, was on the receiving end of Ritson’s attacks, lambasted for what the younger writer claimed were glaring errors in his edition of Shakespeare. In his own life as well as in his literary opinions, Ritson was a man unafraid of marching to the beat of a different drum. He was a vegetarian at a time when not eating meat was unusual and one of the last of his works published in his lifetime was entitled An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, as a Moral Duty; he was a political radical who welcomed the French Revolution and continued to express admiration for what the revolutionaries were doing long after other English supporters had lost their enthusiasm as a result of the excesses of the Terror. Quarrelsome and argumentative, Ritson was a man whose inability to get on with almost everybody often seemed close to pathological. In 1803, eight years after the publication of his great work on Robin, he did indeed lose his mind. After barricading himself in his lodgings and trying to burn all his manuscripts, he was removed to an asylum at Hoxton where, within a short time, he died.
It is difficult to overemphasise the importance of Ritson’s work both in establishing the canon of Robin Hood literature from earlier centuries and in providing a sourcebook for those writers in later years who wanted to reinterpret and re-work that canon. Before Ritson there was a chaos of material which no scholar had properly organised; after him there was no comparable collection until the American Francis Child published his edition of the Gest and other ballads in 1888. The irascible scholar not only gathered together previously scattered material on the outlaw. He also provided his own interpretation of Robin Hood which has proved influential for more than two centuries. To Ritson, the reader of Tom Paine and the enthusiast for the French Revolution, Robin was a hero for all radicals. He was a man, as he wrote, ‘who, in a barbarous age, and under a complicated tyranny, displayed a spirit of freedom and independence which has endeared him to the common people, whose cause he maintained (for all opposition to tyranny is the cause of the people), and, in spite of the malicious endeavours of pitiful monks, by whom history was consecrated to the crimes and follies of titled ruffians and sainted idiots, to suppress all record of his patriotic exertions and virtuous acts, will render his name immortal.’
In the decades following the publication of Ritson’s massive work, and largely because of it, there was a resurgence of interest in Robin Hood. Writers of the Romantic era found much to attract them in the old legends and in the ballad form. In 1820, Leigh Hunt, perhaps best known today as a radical journalist and editor who was imprisoned for mocking the Prince Regent as a ‘fat Adonis of forty’, wrote four poems about Robin Hood in imitation of the medieval ballads he had read and admired. Reflecting Hunt’s own political beliefs, these show Robin as a champion of the poor and social justice, killing a deer in order to feed a starving peasant and defying corrupt churchmen, but they also celebrate the freedom and idealised community of the greenwood. ‘How Robin and his Outlaws Lived in the Woods’ describes, in cheery near-doggerel, the round of drinking, feasting, fighting and dancing in which Robin and his merry men engage. It was this liberating loosening of social constraints, as much as any political radicalism that could be read into the legend, that writers of the Romantic era found so appealing. Two years before Hunt published his poems in one of the magazines he edited, a minor poet named John Hamilton Reynolds wrote two sentimental sonnets in which he mourned the disappearance of ‘the sweet days of merry Robin Hood’. He sent them to a friend for his opinion. The friend was John Keats. In a reply to Reynolds, Keats included his own verse on the subject of Robin Hood. Keats, of course, was a much superior poet to both Reynolds and Hunt and his lines have a sophistication and ambiguity that neither of them could match. He has sympathy with the longing for an imagined past that features so strongly in his friend’s two poems but he turns his back on it. ‘No! those days are gone away,’ the very first line of Keats’s poem proclaims and, although he may regret their departure and be more than prepared to give, ‘Honour to bold Robin Hood/Sleeping in the underwood’, he clearly sees little value in the kind of nostalgic musings in which Reynolds indulges.
Another Romantic, the later Poet Laureate Robert Southey, was drawn to the Robin Hood story throughout his life. As early as 1804, when he was casting around for a suitable subject for the English epic he was planning, he considered the possibility of using the outlaw leader but finally decided that Robin was not sufficiently elevated a topic for his purpose. He ‘lowers the key too much’, Southey wrote to a friend, although he continued to nurse the ambition to write a Robin Hood poem for decades to come. All that ever saw the light of day were a few fragments of a longer work and these were only published in a volume edited by his second wife that appeared in 1847, four years after his death.
Thomas Love Peacock’s short novel Maid Marian was published in 1822 but, as its author was keen to point out in an authorial note, perhaps to avoid accusations of pinching ideas and characters from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (see below), much of it was written in 1818. The book is a curious combination of political satire and the same kind of romantic yearning for the simple pleasures of the greenwood that animates the poetry by Reynolds, Hunt and, in a more self-conscious way, Keats. For much of the first half of the book, Robin himself is an offstage presence and, even when he does put in an appearance in the second half to take his place in Peacock’s cleverly concise versions of some of the most familiar stories from the ballads, he is a singularly colourless character. Peacock puts far more creative energy into Brother Michael, the obstreperous and eloquent man of the cloth who is later revealed to be the character we know as Friar Tuck, and into the depiction of his eponymous heroine. He is an ingenious writer but much of his wit is dependent on a knowledge of debates and ideas in Regency society which few now have and Maid Marian is not an easy read today. Arguably its most important and influential element is the love triangle it establishes between Robin Hood, Maid Marian and the chief villain, a plot device that has been played out in dozens and dozens of adaptations in the years since 1822.
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sp; Of all the Romantic writers who found inspiration in the legends, by far the most influential was Sir Walter Scott. Scott had known and admired Ritson. Indeed, he was one of the few literary friends with whom the easily offended scholar never fell out. Scott himself was fascinated by the ballad form and one of the most successful of his early works, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, was a collection of the songs and ballads of Lowland Scotland. When he turned his attention to fiction, it was probably inevitable that sooner or later he would draw upon the Robin Hood material that his late friend Ritson had gathered together twenty years earlier. The only surprise is that the outlaw does not play a more central role than he does in Ivanhoe, the sixth in Scott’s series of ‘Waverley’ novels but the first to take its inspiration from English rather than Scottish history. Published in 1819, the book focuses not on Locksley, as Scott calls his Robin Hood figure, who appears in no more than ten of its forty-four chapters, but on the fortunes of the Saxon nobles Cedric of Rotherwood and his son Wilfred of Ivanhoe. Locksley supports the Saxons in their fight against the villainous Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert but he is not a central character. And yet, despite this, it is undoubtedly true to say that Ivanhoe, apart possibly from Howard Pyle’s 1883 book The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, is the single most important Robin Hood text of the nineteenth century.
In two significant respects, Scott’s presentation of Locksley/Robin Hood in the novel has shaped the way the outlaw hero has been seen ever since. In casting Robin Hood as a champion of the Saxons against the Normans and in setting the outlaw’s story firmly in the reign of Richard the Lionheart, he established a template which has been used time and again by other writers and, more recently, by filmmakers. Not only that but also, over the years, Robin has taken on some of the attributes of the eponymous hero of Scott’s novel. Like Wilfred of Ivanhoe, but unlike the outlaw of the ballads, Robin Hood is often portrayed in books and films as a warrior returning from the Crusades. Even in the smaller incidents of Ivanhoe, Scott created motifs that have become a familiar part of later re-tellings of the story. One of the novel’s great set-pieces is the tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouch where the knights display their prowess and an archery contest is part of the entertainment. One competitor hits the centre of the target and seems unbeatable but he is topped by Locksley who splits the arrow in the bullseye. How often has that miraculous feat of toxophily been acted and re-enacted over the years? Whether one looks at the larger sweep of the narrative or at the smaller details of the plot, Ivanhoe reveals itself as a crucial work in the development of the Robin Hood story. In the 1810s and 1820s, Scott was creating the tradition of the historical novel almost single-handedly and it was of great importance to Robin that the outlaw should have been made a part of that tradition. Thanks to Scott’s decision to place him in the story of Ivanhoe, he became much more readily available as a character for other nineteenth-century writers of historical fiction to employ.
None of these was a match for Scott in literary quality but some of them produced work that reached a large audience. Robin Hood and Little John or, The Merry Men of Sherwood Forest by Pierce Egan the Younger was published in weekly serialisation in 1839 and 1840 and in a single, huge volume in the latter year. Pierce Egan the Elder was one of the best-known authors of the Regency Era, a pioneering sportswriter with a particular interest in the prize fights of the day and the creator of the original ‘Tom and Jerry’, two men about town in his 1821 work Life in London. His son, also named Pierce Egan, was never as famous as his father but he became a prolific journalist and novelist in the Victorian era. His Robin Hood novel, published soon after another excursion into the medieval era entitled Wat Tyler, was one of his most successful and remains a lively read even today. Unlike Scott, Egan opts for a noble Robin, making the outlaw hero (as he is so often) the son of the Earl of Huntingdon and involving him in a series of breathlessly told adventures in the greenwood. Robin Hood and Little John was reprinted several times in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Its popularity even survived a journey across the Channel. Two books usually attributed to Alexandre Dumas, Le Prince des Voleurs (The Prince of Thieves) and Robin Hood le Proscrit (Robin Hood the Outlaw), both published in France in the 1870s, are actually little more than translated adaptations of Egan’s work with Dumas’s name attached to them. The likelihood is that Dumas knew the original book and suggested to the publisher that a French edition might sell, perhaps also suggesting a translator. He then agreed to lend his name to the project to provide it with more publicity.
Other similar novels followed Egan’s. Joachim H. Stocqueler’s Maid Marian, the Forest Queen was published in 1849 and focused, as its title makes clear, on Robin’s adventurous inamorata who has become ‘queen of the wood’ while her lover is away in the Holy Land. Stocqueler was a prolific journalist and intrepid traveller, many of whose other books recorded his adventures in Central Asia, Afghanistan and India. His great contribution to the Robin Hood story is that, combining the characteristics of two figures from Ivanhoe (Locksley and Ivanhoe himself), he established the outlaw as a returned crusader. Maid Marian, the Forest Queen is almost certainly the first novel in which Robin has fought against the Saracens in the Middle East and the idea soon became a common one. It has persisted to the present day. In the recent BBC TV series, for example, the hero is, to a great extent, defined by his experiences in the Holy Land.
One of the appeals of Robin in the Victorian era was his flexibility. He could be the hero of melodramatic fiction like Egan’s or Stocqueler’s. He could also mean something to both conservative and radical poets. To a romantic revolutionary like the wood engraver, poet and republican activist WJ Linton, the character could seem like a reminder of more human values on which the age had turned its back. In a lyric dating from 1865, Linton yearned ‘for the life of Robin Hood, to wander an outlaw free/Rather than crawl in the market-place of human slavery’. Robin becomes a symbol of what has been lost in the Industrial Revolution, someone who lived ‘out of the noisome smoke’ and ‘where the earth breathes fragrantly’. To Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate and (in most ways) pillar of the establishment, he was a representative of traditional English virtues. Tennyson turned his attention to Robin in a drama entitled The Foresters. He first wrote it, in a mixture of verse and prose, in the early 1880s. His previous play had been staged by Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre and he expected that this one would also be performed there. However, Irving thought it insufficiently dramatic and rejected it. Tennyson put the play on one side. Only in 1892, the last year of his life, was The Foresters staged and then it was in New York. American audiences liked it and productions in other American cities followed. Unfortunately, when it was performed in London a year later, after Tennyson’s death, English theatregoers were less impressed and tended to agree with Irving’s assessment of it a decade earlier. The Foresters lasted only seventeen performances.
In the century and more since its premiere, most writers on Tennyson’s work have dismissed it, one critic in the 1950s even wearily asking the question, ‘How did the author of The Idylls of the King come to put his name to such puerile rubbish?’ Read today, The Foresters is more interesting than such savage condemnation suggests. It undoubtedly has major faults. The plot, once Robin and Marian have fled to the greenwood, rapidly runs out of steam and it is not difficult to see why Irving considered the piece undramatic. There is far too much heavy-handed ‘humour’ of the kind which, for example, sees Robin, disguised as an old hag, swapping dull banter with the sheriff and Prince John. There are some irritating scenes in which Little John woos Marian’s maidservant. When Robin falls asleep, dreaming of the arrival on stage of the fairy queen Titania and her followers, the audience is treated to some of Tennyson’s least effective verse ever (‘We be fairies of the wood/We be neither bad nor good’). And yet The Foresters neatly embodies some of the nineteenth century’s most typical attitudes to the outlaw leader. Here is Robin as the vehicle for a very straightforward V
ictorian patriotism. When the foresters, at the beginning of Act 2, sing that, ‘There is no land like England,/Where’er the light of day be;/There are no hearts like English hearts,/Such hearts of oak as they be’, they are not inviting the audience’s ironic scepticism. They are anticipating its complete agreement with the sentiments they express. Here is the gentrified Robin, firmly established as the Earl of Huntington, who is unjustly exiled to the forest by the bad guys. (Although the outlaw hero turns his back on his aristocratic status once he takes to the woods. ‘Nay, no earl am I,’ he says, ‘I am English yeoman.’ In the final analysis, whether noble or not, it is Robin’s essential Englishness that is important.) Here is Robin the chaste lover of Maid Marian. Here is Robin as the embodiment of the natural world who soliloquises about the wonders of the ‘free forest life’ in contrast to the chafing restrictions of existence ‘among my thralls in baronial hall’. So many of the ideas about the outlaw that were either established or developed in the course of the nineteenth century find expression in Tennyson’s drama. In his telling of the Robin Hood story, the poet proves himself, as elsewhere in his work, eminently Victorian.
Tennyson’s engagement with the Robin Hood stories shows that he could be seen by Victorians as a serious subject for adult literature. And yet it was the nineteenth century that also saw the transformation of Robin into a figure from children’s literature. How did he come to be seen as primarily a character for the young to read about? In the early decades of the nineteenth century there were certainly versions of the stories that were very obviously aimed at a juvenile readership. Alfred Mills’s 1825 volume Sherwood Forest, for example, begins with the author’s address to ‘my little friends’ and re-tells some of the familiar ballad tales (the meeting between Robin and Little John, Robin’s adventure with the tinker) in straightforward, simple prose. Looking at the book today, it is striking how robust children’s imaginations were assumed to be in the 1820s. Mills’s book is illustrated by a number of crudely coloured wood engravings, one showing Robin lopping off an opponent’s head which tumbles to the ground. It’s a good deal more graphic than anything that might have been used twenty years later as the illustration for a children’s book.
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