Robin Hood History of Robin Hood ballads

2.Robin Hood on the early modern stage

James VI of Scotland was entertained by a Robin Hood play at Dirleton Castle produced by his favourite the Earl of Arran in May 1585, while there was plague in Edinburgh.
In 1598, Anthony Munday wrote a pair of plays on the Robin Hood legend, The Downfall and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington (published 1601). These plays drew on a variety of sources, including apparently "A Gest of Robin Hood", and were influential in fixing the story of Robin Hood to the period of Richard I. Stephen Thomas Knight has suggested that Munday drew heavily on Fulk Fitz Warin, a historical 12th century outlawed nobleman and enemy of King John, in creating his Robin Hood. The play identifies Robin Hood as Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, following in Richard Grafton's association of Robin Hood with the gentry, and identifies Maid Marian with "one of the semi-mythical Matildas persecuted by King John". The plays are complex in plot and form, the story of Robin Hood appearing as a play-within-a-play presented at the court of Henry VIII and written by the poet, priest and courtier John Skelton. Skelton himself is presented in the play as acting the part of Friar Tuck. Some scholars have conjectured that Skelton may have indeed written a lost Robin Hood play for Henry VIII's court, and that this play may have been one of Munday's sources. Henry VIII himself with eleven of his nobles had impersonated "Robyn Hodes men" as part of his "Maying" in 1510. Robin Hood is known to have appeared in a number of other lost and extant Elizabethan plays. In 1599, the play George a Green, the Pinner of Wakefield places Robin Hood in the reign of Edward IV. Edward I, a play by George Peele first performed in 1590–91, incorporates a Robin Hood game played by the characters. Llywelyn the Great, the last independent Prince of Wales, is presented playing Robin Hood.
Fixing the Robin Hood story to the 1190s had been first proposed by John Major in his Historia Majoris Britanniæ (1521), (and he also may have been influenced in so doing by the story of Warin); this was the period in which King Richard was absent from the country, fighting in the Third Crusade.
William Shakespeare makes reference to Robin Hood in his late-16th-century play The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In it, the character Valentine is banished from Milan and driven out through the forest where he is approached by outlaws who, upon meeting him, desire him as their leader. They comment, "By the bare scalp of Robin Hood's fat friar, This fellow were a king for our wild faction!" Robin Hood is also mentioned in As You Like It. When asked about the exiled Duke Senior, the character of Charles says that he is "already in the forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England". Justice Silence sings a line from an unnamed Robin Hood ballad, the line is "Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John" in Act 5 scene 3 of Henry IV, part 2. In Henry IV part 1 Act 3 scene 3, Falstaff refers to Maid Marian implying she is a by-word for unwomanly or unchaste behaviour.
Ben Jonson produced the incomplete masque The Sad Shepherd, or a Tale of Robin Hood in part as a satire on Puritanism. It is about half finished and his death in 1637 may have interrupted writing. Jonson's only pastoral drama, it was written in sophisticated verse and included supernatural action and characters. It has had little impact on the Robin Hood tradition but earns mention as the work of a major dramatist.
The 1642 London theatre closure by the Puritans interrupted the portrayal of Robin Hood on the stage. The theatres would reopen with the Restoration in 1660. Robin Hood did not appear on the Restoration stage, except for "Robin Hood and his Crew of Souldiers" acted in Nottingham on the day of the coronation of Charles II in 1661. This short play adapts the story of the king's pardon of Robin Hood to refer to the Restoration.
However, Robin Hood appeared on the 18th-century stage in various farces and comic operas. Alfred, Lord Tennyson would write a four act Robin Hood play at the end of the 19th century, "The Forrestors". It is fundamentally based on the Gest but follows the traditions of placing Robin Hood as the Earl of Huntingdon in the time of Richard I and making the Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John rivals with Robin Hood for Maid Marian's hand.^[61] The return of King Richard brings a happy ending.