However, it was not just in England that the outlaw provided a subject for opera in the second half of the nineteenth century. Albert Dietrich was a German composer, born in 1829, who studied with Robert Schumann and was a close friend of Brahms. His three-act Robin Hood was first staged in Frankfurt in 1879. Rarely performed since this premiere, it was revived in Erfurt in 2011. More significantly the prolific American composer Reginald De Koven produced a comic opera entitled Robin Hood in Chicago in 1890. De Koven had studied in England as a young man and was an admirer of Gilbert and Sullivan so it is perhaps no great surprise that his musical take on the legend was a success when it was staged in London at the Prince of Wales Theatre the following year. The opera remained popular with audiences for years to come and was staged in very nearly every major US city in the 1890s and 1900s. (At least one song from it, ‘Oh Promise Me’ which Robin sings to Marian, was regularly performed at weddings for decades after that and was recorded in the 1940s and 1950s by artistes as different as Nelson Eddy and The Platters.) Together with Howard Pyle’s immensely successful re-telling of the stories in The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, De Koven’s light opera was instrumental in the process of transforming the outlaw into a hero that appealed to Americans as much as to the English, a process consolidated in 1922 by Douglas Fairbanks’s cinematic triumph as Robin.
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen Robin inspire work by all kinds of musicians. Classical composers such as Michael Tippett have chosen to use him in their music. Tippett was born in 1905 and his first opera emerged from his work in Yorkshire mining communities ravaged by unemployment during the 1930s. After helping a group to stage a version of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, he went on to write his own ballad opera of Robin Hood, first performed by villagers, miners and students in Boosbeck, North Yorkshire in 1934. In Tippett’s words at the time, the work ‘enabled me to reinterpret the legend of the famous outlaw in terms of the class war then dividing English society’ but the composer later came to see it as an apprentice piece and refused to let it be performed. Robin was an ideal hero for the 1930s but, for decades, there was no other opera which featured him. However, in the last ten years, the gap has been filled, perhaps surprisingly, by two European composers of modern classical music. In 2007, the Komische Oper in Berlin staged a children’s opera in fifteen scenes by Frank Schwemmer in which a young boy, playing a computer game about the hero, presses a wrong key and is plunged back into medieval Sherwood Forest where he joins forces with Robin to defeat Prince John. Four years later, the Finnish composer and big band leader Jukka Linkola produced a comic opera Robin Hood at the Finnish National Opera House in Helsinki which made use of the traditional stories but also added new characters such as a Saracen girl who assists the hero and, a more unlikely addition to the cast list, the Sheriff of Nottingham’s mother.
During the decades when he was absent from the operatic stage, Robin continued to be a popular subject for pantomimes and there was also at least one attempt to construct a musical around the character. In the 1960s, searching for a follow-up to his spectacular success with Oliver!, the songwriter and composer Lionel Bart chose to write about Robin Hood, depicting the folk hero as a medieval con-man. Unfortunately, he gave it the title Twang!. Worse even than his choice of title was Bart’s decision to use his own money to finance the musical and to sign away the rights to Oliver! to ensure that the new show was put on. The omens for the musical were not good. ‘Do you know what it’s like bringing this show into London?’, one producer said. ‘It’s like giving a crazy man £30,000 and having him flush the notes down the toilet one by one.’ The sceptical producer was right. Opening in 1965, Twang! was mercilessly rubbished by the critics and was a disastrous flop. However, the passing years have shown that Bart may just have been ahead of his time. Other musical versions of the legend have followed. West End impresario Bill Kenwright commissioned Robin: Prince of Sherwood from Rick Fenn and Peter Howarth in the 1990s and it went on to have a respectable run at the Piccadilly Theatre. The introduction of a witch named Morgana and a chorus of ‘Satanists’ and ‘Sisters of Sodom’ may have had something to do with its appeal. In the last ten years, Robin Hood – Das Musical has also been one of the success stories of the German musical theatre.
Throughout the twentieth century, of course, Robin has achieved his biggest impact not on stage but on the screen. The music which has accompanied his cinematic and TV exploits over the years has undoubtedly played its part in creating the outlaw’s status in the popular imagination. By most rational criteria, the theme song for the 1950s TV series starring Richard Greene is dreadful. The lyrics (‘Robin Hood, Robin Hood/Riding through the glen/Robin Hood, Robin Hood/With his band of men’) are silly doggerel. What’s Robin doing riding through a (Scottish) glen other than providing an easy rhyme for ‘men’ in the later line? The cheerily but daftly catchy tune, composed by the American songwriter Carl Sigman, seems fit only for the parody that the Monty Python people made of it. (‘Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore/Galloping through the sward/Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore/And his horse Concorde’.) And yet not only did the song provide a top 20 hit for Dick James in the 1950s, it has since become arguably the best-known piece of music ever associated with the outlaw. Its chief rival for the accolade – ‘Everything I Do I Do It For You’, the wildly inappropriate but hugely successful ballad sung by Bryan Adams at the end of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves – is equally awful, although the rest of Michael Kamen’s music for that film is often very good.
Other talented film composers, including John Barry (Robin and Marian) and Clifton Parker (The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men), have worked on Robin movies and Andy Price’s heroically energetic music is one of the great successes of the recent BBC TV series. However, the man who was undoubtedly the finest composer to produce music to accompany Robin Hood on screen was Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Born in what is now the Czech Republic in 1897, Korngold was a child prodigy who produced his first ballet at the age of eleven and two well-received operas before he was out of his teens. His opera Die Tote Stadt was a huge international success in 1920. He went to Hollywood for the first time in 1934 to work on the Max Reinhardt film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, adapting Mendelssohn’s incidental music for the play and introducing his own to a finished score. He stayed to work on music for other films, including the Errol Flynn swashbuckler Captain Blood and he was the obvious choice to produce the score for The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938. The richly romantic music he wrote for the film won him an Oscar. Although he returned to more traditional classical music in his later life (he wrote a Violin Concerto, a Cello Concerto and a Symphony amongst other works), Korngold was never dismissive of his scores for Hollywood. He had large ambitions for them and always believed that they could be performed successfully in the concert hall. He died in 1957, at a time when the best film music was rarely given the credit it deserved, but his confidence in his work has proved justified. Starting in the 1970s, Korngold’s Hollywood music has been reassessed. Concert performances and recordings of his major scores, including that for The Adventures of Robin Hood, have followed.
So Robin, in the last hundred years, has provided the inspiration for musicians ranging from a wunderkind of the late Austro-Hungarian empire to the Cockney composer of Oliver!, from one of the giants of twentieth-century English classical music to a Finnish jazz pianist. It’s perhaps best to conclude this chapter with a reminder of where musical Robin began. Before he was the subject of eighteenth-century ballad operas, before he took a tenor role in Sir Arthur Sullivan’s attempt at grand opera, before he rode across the cinematic screen to the accompaniment of Korngold’s soaring melodies, Robin was a figure in English folk music. As Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams discovered when they toured the villages of Somerset and Dorset and other counties, folk musicians had been singing Robin’s praises for generations. The tradition has continued. The Irish band Clannad drew extensively on the English folk tradition i
n creating the music for the 1980s TV series Robin of Sherwood and their BAFTA-winning album Legend, gathering together this music, was a great success. Other exponents of folk rock have produced their Robin songs. Steeleye Span’s ‘Gamble Gold’, for instance, a track from their most famous album All Around My Hat, is a version of the old ballad entitled ‘The Bold Pedlar and Robin Hood’. Robin, the hero of English folk music, in all likelihood, will survive well into the future.
Computer Robin and the Future of a Legend
Legends only survive through the centuries if successive generations can find something meaningful and inspirational within them. They only survive when people can adapt them to new social circumstances and, perhaps even more importantly, to new technologies. For more than six hundred years, men and women have been reinventing and reshaping the Robin Hood story for changing times. When printing arrived at the end of the fifteenth century, Robin made the transition from oral ballad to printed broadside. When the stage developed as an important cultural medium in the Shakespearean era, he became a character on stage. After cinema began at the end of the nineteenth century, it was not long before Robin Hood stories were being written for the new medium. If Robin is going to survive into the future, he needs to find his place in a world where computers dominate. Signs that he will easily do so are very promising.
Board games based on Robin’s adventures have been around for many decades. Any upsurge of interest in the character following a particularly successful film or TV series has always been accompanied by an increase in the production of Robin Hood merchandise. Games have appeared in the 1930s on the back of the Errol Flynn film, in the 1950s as a consequence of the popularity of the Richard Greene TV series and in the 1970s because of the Disney animated feature. It was important for their future that, with the advent of video and computer games, Robin and his Merry Men should be used as characters in these new formats. They soon put in their appearance. The first video game to feature them was produced in the early 1980s. More than a dozen have followed. Some, like their dice and board predecessors, have been based on Robin stories in other media. A 1985 game for the Amstrad took its inspiration from the Robin of Sherwood TV series. A Virgin game from 1991 for the Nintendo Entertainment System was called Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and was an authorised offshoot from the Kevin Costner movie of the same title.
However, the most important games as an indication of Robin’s future are those which are not directly linked to his appearances in cinema or on the TV but which show the character being used only in a new medium. The last decade has seen the release of more than a dozen such Robin games. Not all have been successful. Robin Hood: Defender of the Crown, created by Cinemaware in 2003, was a remade version of an earlier medieval game, simply called Defender of the Crown, which had been a big moneyspinner for the company in the late 1980s. Second time around, game critics were not hugely impressed. They were even less enamoured of Robin Hood’s Quest, an adventure game for PlayStation which came out in 2007. One writer on a games website described it uncompromisingly as an ‘almost entirely unplayable piece of garbage’. Luckily for Robin fans who are also games enthusiasts, there have been successful releases. Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood from 2002, for instance, is an award-winning strategy game devised by the German games developer Spellbound. Based on a premise familiar from dozens of print and cinema versions of the stories (that Robin is a crusader returned to England who finds his inheritance has been seized by the chief villain), the game allows players to control characters like Robin himself, Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, Little John and others as they attempt to outwit the Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John. And, as the platforms for games increase in number and variety, so each one seems to get its Robin Hood game. Robin Hood: The Return of Richard is a shooting game for Wii and the iPhone, although again the reviews of it were not particularly kind.
In a sense, the fact that Robin has been featured both in games that have been utterly slated by the critics and in games that have met with considerable approval is a sign that the character has successfully made the transition to a new medium. The history of Robin at the cinema is more than just the tale of big productions like the Flynn film and the Ridley Scott version; it also includes cheap Hammer movies and low-budget sixties swashbucklers from Italy. The more Robin computer games there are, the merrier. Meanwhile Sherwood Dungeon, a free-to-play MMORPG (Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Game), set in a medieval fantasy world, borrows its name, if very little else, from the old stories, and is produced by a company calling itself Maid Marian Entertainment. Robin has very definitely migrated into the digital and online world and, in years to come, the stories will adapt themselves to the new media as they did when the movies first arrived. The signs of a lasting legend are its flexibility and openness to change and the tales of Robin Hood have long shown that they possess these qualities in abundance.
Merry Men (and Others)
Little John
The figure of Little John, Robin’s huge and trusted lieutenant, makes his appearance in the earliest of the ballads and stories. He is present in the Gest, where he is one of the men who initially capture the knight Sir Richard of the Lee. Indeed, he is the focus of one section of the poem when the narrative attention turns away from Robin and follows Little John as he wins an archery contest, takes service with the Sheriff, and eventually lures the outlaws’ most famous opponent into Sherwood. John is also the only one of Robin’s band to be mentioned in the earliest references to the outlaw in historical chronicles. His presence there and his importance in the Gest, where he is the hero of a quite distinct episode, both suggest that there may once have been a separate tradition of stories about him in which his name was not necessarily linked with that of Robin. If there was, it has been lost.
The most famous story about John, which explains both his name and the origins of his friendship with Robin, dates to a later period than the Gest. It is first found in a ballad which probably dates to the middle of the seventeenth century, although there may well have been earlier versions of it which didn’t survive. In ‘Robin Hood and Little John’, the outlaw leader encounters a giant, seven feet tall, on a narrow bridge over a brook. Neither man is prepared to give way and they fight with quarter staffs. The giant knocks Robin off his feet and into the stream but both adversaries are so delighted with the rough-and-tumble bout that they become fast friends. The tall man reveals that his name is John Little but one of Robin’s band, Will Stutely, jokes that he should rather be called Little John and the name sticks. The brawl on the bridge has become one of the most popular of all scenes from the Robin Hood legend and is repeated again and again in books and on screen. It is a rare version of the story that does not include it.
Like his master, Little John has had his name given to a number of features of the landscape of northern England (Little John’s Cave, Little John’s Well, etc.) but the place that has been most often associated with him is Hathersage, a village in the Derbyshire Peak District. He is reputedly buried in the churchyard there. Although this is unlikely to be ‘true’, the tradition that it is has been around for a long time. The story is mentioned as early as 1620 and, later in the century, the antiquarian Elias Ashmole, founder of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, wrote that, ‘Little John lyes buried in Hathersage Churchyard within three miles from Castleton, near High Peake, with one stone set up at his head and another at his feete, but a large distance between them.’
John has been a near-indispensable figure in the legend for close to six centuries. Very nearly all plays, poems and novels about the Sherwood outlaws include him. (Although, curiously, Walter Scott ignores him almost completely in Ivanhoe. There is only the briefest throwaway reference to the fact that he is away on the borders of Scotland when the events of the novel take place.) When Robin Hood became a movie hero, his second-in-command was once again at his side. The best-known Little John on screen was Alan Hale, the American character actor who took the role in Douglas Fairba
nks’s silent movie of 1922 and was still playing it nearly thirty years later. Hale, who first stepped before a camera in 1911 and went on to appear in more than 230 films in his career, was also a rumbustious Little John to Errol Flynn’s Robin in 1938. Fittingly, his last screen appearance was as the character he had made his own. In 1950, the year he died, Hale played Little John once more in Rogues of Sherwood Forest. Little John has been increasingly sidelined in screen versions of the last fifty years. In the 1950s TV version, Archie Duncan’s John is still quite clearly right hand man to Richard Greene’s Robin and Clive Mantle has a significant part to play in Robin of Sherwood in the 1980s. However, in the Kevin Costner film in 1991, his place as most loyal lieutenant has been rather usurped by the Saracen Azeem. And in the 2006 BBC series, Little John, as played by Gordon Kennedy, is often not much more than a big man who stands in the background when Robin is delivering rousing speeches to the Merry Men. Other characters attract more of the limelight.
Friar Tuck
Friar Tuck does not appear in the Gest nor does he appear in any of the very early ballads. The character was certainly known in the early fifteenth century. The royal writs of 1417 refer to a chaplain from Sussex named Robert Stafford who adopted the alias of ‘Frere Tuk’ when he was the leader of an outlaw band in the county. However, the friar seems to have become associated with Robin Hood through the May Games rather than through the ballad tradition. The first clear record of Tuck as one of the Merry Men is in the fragmentary playscript usually entitled ‘Robyn Hod and the Shryff of Nottingham’. This is thought to date from about 1475 and to be a partial record of one of the folk dramas about Robin and his men that were regularly performed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Because of the fragmentary nature of the piece, it is difficult to interpret but Tuck’s role appears to be to attack the Sheriff and his men with his bow. ‘Behold wele Frere Tuke’, one outlaw says, ‘Howe he doth his bowe pluke.’ In these plays, action mattered much more than words and we can imagine the person playing the ecclesiastic engaging in vigorous mime as these words were being spoken.
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