Robin Hood and the Outlaw/ed Literary Canon

Lesley Coote, Alexander L. Kaufman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138336919
• eBook ISBN: 9780429810053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This cutting-edge volume demonstrates both the literary quality and the socio-economic importance of works on "the matter of the greenwood" over a long chronological period. These include drama texts, prose literature and novels (among them, children's literature), and poetry. Whilst some of these are anonymous, others are by acknowledged canonical writers such as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Keats. The editors and the contributors argue that it is vitally important to include Robin Hood texts in the canon of English literary works, because of the high quality of many of these texts, and because of their significance in the development of English literature.

1 Robin Hood and the Margins of Romance

Insights on Canon Formation and Maintenance

Henry Griffy

Statement of Claims and Preview of Argument

This chapter will discuss how the connection between the early Robin Hood poems¹ and the canon of medieval English romance has been treated in literary histories, reference works, and criticism from the nineteenth century through the present day. Specifically, it will examine why Robin Hood has been excluded from the romance canon. My goals in doing so are 1) to provide insight into the construction and maintenance of the romance canon specifically, 2) to clarify the exceptionalism of the study and teaching of Robin Hood and why it has been treated as an exception, and 3) to understand better the ways medieval literature has been categorized generally over that time span.

Before delving into the details, I should first summarize my arguments that the genre of the early Robin Hood poems matters and that it makes sense to consider Robin Hood in relation to the romance canon. After all, if genre were unimportant or if the Geste and other works simply are not romances, these questions would be moot.

In brief, genre matters because it helps interpretation escape the hermeneutic circle. Associating a work with historically similar works provides a privileged external set of references for interpretation, precedents, and points of comparison. Identifying appropriate genres for a work thus promises a valuable head-start and set of tools for finding meaning in that work. Conversely, inappropriate identification of genre can mislead interpretation by suggesting the work holds meanings it was neither intended to convey nor understood to convey by contemporaries.

Regarding the genre of the early Robin Hood poems, there is a strong prima facie case that contemporaries considered them as romances. In brief, the best evidence linking Robin Hood to romance before 1600 includes:

• Book History: The Geste was printed by the same people who printed other romances: Richard Pynson, Wynkyn de Worde, and William Copland, especially.² Manuscripts with copies of the early poems also associate them with romance.³
• Adaptations: Throughout the sixteenth century, Robin Hood was adapted into historical narratives,⁴ performative forms,⁵ and broadside ballads⁶ by the same or similar people, around the same time, and in similar ways as other romance stories.⁷
• Testimony: Perhaps most tellingly, over two dozen people, including poets, theologians, and others, listed Robin Hood alongside other romance figures in lists of similar works, starting in the early fifteenth century. To cite only three of the earliest and most telling:
  • An early fifteenth-century manuscript of Piers Plowman refers to “romaunces of Robynhod and of Randolf þe Reve.”⁸
  • The c.1428 Physician’s manuscript copy of Chaucer’s Sir Thopas substitutes Robin Hood’s name for Bevis of Hampton in a list of canonical romance heroes:
    • Men speken of romances of pris
    • Of Hornchild and of Ypotys
      • Of Beves Robynhoode and [goode] sire Gy
    • Of sire Lybeux and Pleyn damour
    • But sire Thopas he bereth the flour
      • Of real chiualry.⁹

• William Tyndale in the 1528 Obedience of a Christian Man lumps Robin Hood with a rogue’s gallery of popular romance figures while complaining about prohibitions against vernacular theology:
  • Fynally that this thretenynge and forbiddynge the laye people to readethe scripture is not for love of youre soules (which they care for as y[e] foxe doeth for y[e] gysse) is evide[n]te & clerer the[n] the sonne/in as moch as they permitte & sofre you to reade * Robyn hode & bevise of ha[m]to[n]/hercules/hector a[n]d troylus with a tousande histories & fables of love & wa[n]tones & of rybaudry as fylthy as herte ca[n] thinke/to corrupte y[e] myndes of youth with all/clene co[n]trary to the doctrine of christ & of his apostles.
  • * [marg. note next to the name Robyn]: Reade what thou wilt: ye a[n]d saye what thou wylt save the trueth¹⁰
• Interpretation: An attentive close reading of the Gest reveals that it shares a wide range of narrative elements and structures with other canonical romances. There are sword fights and ambushes and sieges and feasting and disguise and displays of courtesy and generosity, as well as whole subplots shared with other romance works, such as the rescue of an impoverished knight who later comes back in altered form to repay the generosity with bounteous, but problematic gifts.¹¹

Details are open for quibbling, but there is more evidence for a connection between Robin Hood and romance than has sometimes been required to link other works to the romance canon.

And yet that connection has only rarely been addressed, even more rarely in any depth. Why not? This essay will explore that question by considering several moments when the decision was made to omit the early Robin Hood poems from the romance canon and attempting to reconstruct the reasoning. Spoiler alert: inertia is perhaps the simplest explanation. However, the logic and methods for studying romance and Robin Hood at various moments also played major roles. Two explanations will be offered. In the first explanation, the logic and rationales expressed or implied by the critics are taken more or less at face value, in order to understand how larger-scale ways of thinking about literary history influenced this specific genre choice. In the second, more speculative explanation, it will be suggested that the nature of the materials available to the critics at different moments may have influenced the decisions reached: as technology provided easier access to increasing numbers of editions of and critical works about the works in question, critics’ perception of the connections among them seem to have changed.

The Three Phases

Because limited space necessitates simplification, I will reduce the critical history to three phases: the Foundational, the Definitional, and the Paradigmatic. During the Foundational Phase (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), the canon of medieval English romances (and most other genres of medieval English literature) solidified, as editorially sound print editions formed the basis for the first generation of scholarly reference works. During the Definitional Phase (early-to-late twentieth century), a wide range of theoretical models were deployed to propose satisfactory rule-based explanations for, but only occasionally to revise, those canons. During the Paradigmatic Phase (mid-twentieth century through current), critics abandoned hope of finding or making a total system that would account for medieval genres satisfactorily and instead began to attend to smaller groupings of works, identified either by compelling similarity or known historical relations, which often cross the genre boundaries drawn during the Foundational Phase.

Phase 1: The Foundational Phase

Beginning in the wake of the intense editorial and publishing work of nineteenth-century editors like Frederick Furnivall and Thomas Wright, continuing through the more genre-specific work of Francis James Child and his generation, and culminating in the influential Manual of the Writings in Middle English of John Edwin Wells, decisions were made during these years about the proper distribution of medieval works into groups that continue to provide the basis, or at least the starting point, for critical work today. Examining how those decisions were made will reveal where many of our own pre-conceptions come from and, more usefully, help clarify how we might reach better judgments.

The most influential work of canon formation took place in bibliographic works, which set out to identify categories and align works with them. However, to understand the logic of canon formation during this phase, it is helpful to begin by considering the interpretive works of the time, because the underlying rationales are most openly laid out in the course of argument. In these decades, as characterized by Hans Robert Jauss, critics would “promiscuously use […] original characterizations, classical genre concepts, and later classifications” to express his or her understanding of the essence of various genres.¹² With medieval English literature, this meant using the classical genre concept of epic as baseline. The earlier native Germanic heroic poems were correlated with Homeric epic, while romance was viewed as a French import and disruption of the natural evolution of this tradition.

William Paton Ker (1908) expresses the underlying assumptions especially clearly. The shift from “epic” in the early Middle Ages to “romance” in the thirteenth and following centuries is, for Ker, a symptom of cosmopolitan decadence:

The fate of epic poetry was the same as that of the primitive German forms of society. In both there was a progress towards independent perfection, an evolution of the possibilities inherent in them, independent of foreign influences. But both in Teutonic society, and in the poetry belonging to it and reflecting it, this independent course of life is thwarted and interfered with. Instead of independent strong Teutonic national powers, there are the more or less Romanised and blended nationalities possessing the lands that had been conquered by Goths and Burgundians, Lombards and Franks; instead of Germania, the Holy Roman Empire; instead of Epic, Romance; not the old-fashioned romance of native mythology, not the natural spontaneous romance of the Irish legends or the Icelandic stories of gods and giants, but the composite far-fetched romances of the age of chivalry, imported from all countries and literatures to satisfy the medieval appetite for novel and wonderful things.¹³

Ker’s emphasis on the differences between the beginning and end-points of medieval culture leads him to a contrastive approach to reading their literature:

The two great kinds of narrative literature in the Middle Ages might be distinguished by their favourite incidents and commonplaces of adventure. No kind of adventure is so common or better told in the earlier heroic manner than the defence of a narrow place against odds. […]

The favourite adventure of medieval romance is something different,—a knight riding alone through a forest; another knight; a shock of lances; a fight on foot with swords, “racing, tracing, and foining like two wild boars”; then, perhaps, recognition—the two knights belong to the same household and are engaged in the same quest.

This collision of blind forces, this tournament at random, takes the place, in the French romances, of the older kind of combat. In the older kind the parties have always good reasons of their own for fighting; they do not go into it with the same sense of readiness as the wandering champions of romance.¹⁴

The important point here is less the accuracy of Ker’s assertions than the power of autochthony in shaping them. Northern literature did, after all, change significantly over the course of the Middle Ages, in large part through the influence of literary trends first extant in Southern culture. And Ker is not wrong that depictions of combat changed significantly (though his claim that unmotivated violence was a late addition would need to account for episodes like Beowulf’s pointless challenge with Breca and subsequent fight with the sea-monsters, among others). However, there is a reductive quality to Ker’s geo-cultural model that warps those generalizations and pre-ordains categories that might otherwise have been determined differently.

The Robin Hood poems are especially problematic for this framework, since they fall between the cracks of the stark binaries based on Germanic versus Continental culture. They appear late, but show almost no direct influence from continental sources and little from the Germanic tradition. Technically, they do not feature alliteration, but neither does their verse exactly align with the most frequent forms of metrical romance. Finally, they seem to have been a more-or-less autochthonous English creation, but they lack the “epic” seriousness that Ker finds in Germanic ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Medieval Outlaw/ed Canon: Literary and Ideological Thresholds and Boundaries
• 1 Robin Hood and the Margins of Romance: Insights on Canon Formation and Maintenance
• 2 By Words and By Deeds: The Role of Performance in Shaping the “Canon” of Robin Hood
• 3 Robin Hood and the King and Commoner Tradition: “The best archer of ilkon,/I durst mete hym with a stone”
• 4 Robin Hood’s Passions: Emotion and Embodiment in Anthony Munday’s The Downfall and The Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington (c. 1598)
• 5 Canonicity and “Robin Hood”: The Morris Dance and the Meaning of “Lighter than Robin Hood” in the Prologue to Fletcher and Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen
• 6 Ben Jonson’s The Sad Shepherd, the Theme of Compassion, and the Robin Hood Canon
• 7 “Gone, the Song of Gamelyn”: John Keats and the Medieval Robin Hood
• 8 The Legend of Janosik and the Polish Novel About Robin Hood as Continuations of the Medieval Outlaw Tradition
• 9 What A Canon Wants: Robin Hood, Romance Novels, and Carrie Lofty’s What A Scoundrel Wants
• 10 Children’s Literature Canon, Robin Hood, Children’s Literature Criticism
• 11 Doing Yeoman Work: Uses of the Robin Hood Tales in the Undergraduate Survey
• Contributors
• Index