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  • Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography
  • Robert A. Segal
Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography. By Stephen Knight. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xxi + 247, index.)

In this most readable and thorough work, Stephen Knight, the leading authority on Robin Hood, argues that there have been at least four types of Robin Hoods. He describes each version of the character in an engaging chapter—"Bold Robin Hood," "Robert, Earl of Huntingdon," "Robin Hood Esquire," and "Robin Hood of Hollywood."

The earliest Robin Hood, found in late medieval ballads and still more in "plays, village rituals, passing references (legal, historical, moral), and even proverbs" (p.3), is not the one with which most contemporary readers will be familiar. The character whom Knight calls "Bold Robin Hood" is a mere yeoman—"a free man who is not a bound serf" (p. 2)—rather than a lord. Whatever his income, he ranks among the lower orders of society and is not a member of the gentry, at least not automatically. He has no female companion: his is a man's world. He has no nobility. He is not a Saxon confronting Normans. He does not live in the time of Prince or King Richard. He serves no one king but whichever is on the throne. He has not taken to hiding in the forest but is naturally a part of it. He leads only a handful of companions rather than a large band. He does still rob, but for himself rather than for the poor. He succeeds by cunning more than by skill. He is a trickster.

The second variety of Robin Hood, Knight's "Robert, Earl of Huntingdon," arose in the sixteenth century and is a "distressed aristocrat" (p. 44). Here Robin is an earl rather than a yeoman. He cannot pay his debts, and to escape the law, he has fled to the forest. Far from despising life at court, he seeks to return to it. He is the leader of a hundred men, not just of a few fellow robbers. He still robs, but he robs only the rich and does so in a properly gentlemanly manner. And he has a lady, Marian.

By the late eighteenth century, a third Robin Hood has emerged: "Robin Hood Esquire." This Robin is the subject of full biographies and not merely, as before, of proverbs, songs, and stories. "A myth," Knight argues, "had become biography" (p. 96). Robin is now the embodiment of values. This new Robin represents modernity. His nemesis is now not local authority but tyranny: "the medieval church and oppressive kings" (p. 98). Alternatively, modernity is itself his target. Thus, John Keats sees Robin and Marian "as a means of criticizing the inorganic, alienated character of modern society" (p. 105). Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe is a "displaced" Robin Hood, who now represents the English race fighting against the conquering Normans. This Robin manages to combine elements of the first two Robins: he is at once trickster and lord.

The fourth and final version of Robin Hood is largely an Americanized product of Hollywood. Robin is now an "action hero" (p. 151), yet he is also a gentle, caring fellow. In this especially detailed fourth chapter, Knight considers not only films but also children's fiction and historical fiction. He ties the various renditions of the subject more tightly to the times than he does anywhere else in the book.

Knight's book is refreshingly old fashioned. He does not, in postmodern style, argue that the varying versions of Robin Hood undercut one another, merely reflect the time and place of their origin, or serve some crassly ideological function. He writes to show the richness, not the tenuousness, of the legend. Knight is hardly the first to present the varieties of Robin Hood (for just one example, see John Clarke Holt, Robin Hood, 2nd ed., Thames and Hudson, 1989), but he offers his own emphases and evaluations. For example, he rejects Holt's efforts at deriving Robin Hood from a thirteenth-century yeoman or from any other historical figure. Rather, he stresses Robin's "mythic" character, which he pits against the historical.

Knight might have been more...

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