Canonicity and “Robin Hood”

Abstract

The Prologue of Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s 1634 dramatic romance The Two Noble Kinsmen (TNK), an acknowledged adaptation of The Knight’s Tale, opens with both adapters explicitly identifying their medieval source and worrying that their “new play” may offend Geoffrey Chaucer, the already-canonical poet whom they adapt. Having added new characters and episodes and a somewhat comic tone, they fear they may be distorting Chaucer’s tragic and Boethian-influenced epic-romance, already adapted from Boccaccio’s less seriously philosophical Il Teseide. They fret that “If we let fall the nobleness of this [adaptation], . . . this child [Chaucer]” in his grave might hear a “hiss” from an unappreciative audience member. This disapproving “hiss” would so “shake the bones of that good man [Chaucer],” that he would “cry from under ground,/ “O, fan/ From me the witless chaff of such a writer/ That blasts my bays and my fam’d works makes lighter Than Robin Hood!” This last phrase raises the provocative question of what the playwrights and/or Chaucer mean by “works . . . lighter/ Than Robin Hood.” My essay shall interrogate the range of pre-1634 literary adaptations of the Robin Hood (RH) legend that audiences of TNK would recognize. These include the original medieval oral “rimes of Robin Hood” that Langland mentions in Piers Plowman, demonstrating that in 1377 the RH narratives were already “popular culture,” surviving in the literary record chiefly because late medieval printers (Caxton, De Worde, Pynson) chose to publish them alongside what are now more canonical authors’ works, such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. These also include ballads like The Death of RH or RH and Guy of Gisborne, preserved in seventeenth-century miscellany collections such as Bishop Percy’s Reliques, which would have been available to the reading public throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There is also the dramatic corpus: ranging from now-lost, improvisational plays involving Robin Hood and Maid Marian, enacted in late medieval Church Ales and May Games; “quasi-theatrical entertainments” like Robyn Hod and Shyrff off Notyngham, performed in Sir John Paston’s household ; printed dramatic works, such as Robert Greene’s 1599 George a Greene the Pinner of Wakefield, and Anthony Munday’s 1598 Downfall and Death of Robin Hood plays. After examining these printed and performed contexts, I raise the issue of why these Robin Hood contexts could be considered “chaff” at which a 1634 audience might “hiss.” Did the non-canonicity of Robin Hood start already when authors like Shakespeare (and behind him Chaucer) defined/maligned them as such? Do the oral origins of the Robin Hood narratives relegate the entire corpus to being considered “popular culture” and not more canonical “high” culture? Would TNK’s Chaucer consider anything recited or performed onstage “chaff” to the “wheat” of more traditional texts originating in manuscript culture? In that case, shouldn’t Shakespeare and Fletcher deservedly feel the Bloomian “anxiety of influence” they evince in this Prologue?