<i>Images of Robin Hood: Medieval to Modern</i>, and: <i>Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560: Texts, Contexts, and Ideology</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Images of Robin Hood: Medieval to Modern, and: Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560: Texts, Contexts, and Ideology Martha W. Driver Images of Robin Hood: Medieval to Modern. Edited by Lois Potter and Joshua Calhoun. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008. Pp. 286; 39 illustrations. $65. Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560: Texts, Contexts, and Ideology. By Thomas H. Ohlgren. With an Appendix: “The Dialects and Language of Selected Robin Hood Poems,” by Lister M. Matheson. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. Pp. 278; 12 illustrations. $55. Robin Hood has been the subject of poetry, ballad, prose fiction (most recently the novel Hodd by Adam Thorpe, published by Cape), illustration, film, and opera, among other media. The leader of the Sherwood Forest band of Merry Men continues to fascinate scholars as well, as the Seventh Biennial Conference of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies held in fall 2009 at the University of Rochester attests. The first of these two volumes is a close study of the early Robin Hood poems from manuscript to print. The second is a collection of essays on wide-ranging themes drawn from presentations at the Fifth Biennial Meeting of the International Association of Robin Hood Studies. Both illustrated volumes include copious notes along with helpful and detailed bibliographies. In his monograph, based on his reading and teaching of Robin Hood texts over fifteen years, Thomas Ohlgren brings together essays he has published elsewhere since 2000, and elaborates and develops them more fully. It is good to have these essays all in one place. This volume addresses the complete poems that date from the 1460s in manuscripts and from about 1495 to 1610 in printed editions. Among many new findings is a reference to a royal wedding in Cambridge University Library MS Ee.4.35 that has been perhaps misidentified, placing the date of the manuscript and of its Robin Hood poem, Robin Hood and the Potter, thirty-five years earlier than previously thought. Ohlgren makes a good case for the identification of the scribe-owner of Cambridge University Library Ff.5.48, a manuscript that contains Robin Hood and the Monk. While this is usually said to be the first extant full poem about Robin Hood, Ohlgren argues here that Robin Hood and the Potter is in fact the earlier surviving poem (p. 137). Ohlgren locates the owner-copyist of CUL Ff.5.48, one Gilbert Pylkyngton who was ordained as a subdeacon, deacon, and priest from 1463 to 1465, in Lichfield and presents a reasonable argument for the use of Robin Hood and the Monk as a preaching text, despite its overt anticlericalism. The other Cambridge manuscript, CUL Ee.4.35, contains Robin Hood and the Potter, which is one of many texts in a household miscellany that belonged for many generations to the same middle-class family. A merchant’s mark and a signature appear on the final folio, the latter the name of an early owner, Richard Call. The mark belonged to Henry Bacon, a prominent Norwich grocer and guildsman, who married into the Call family. Richard Call was the bailiff for John Paston I during the last half of the fifteenth century who secretly married Margery Paston, and some 120 references to him survive in the Paston letters. A list of foods served at a royal wedding in this manuscript has caused scholars to conjecture this refers to the marriage of Margaret Tudor in 1503. Ohlgren, however, argues that the wedding in question was that between Margaret, youngest sister of Edward IV, and Charles, Duke of Burgundy, in 1468, placing the date of the manuscript in or around that year (possibly). A related text is a dramatic fragment of 1475 (Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.2.64) that may originally have been among the Paston letters and may represent a version of a play performed in the Paston household in the 1470s. [End Page 416] In a subsequent chapter, Ohlgren turns his attention to A Mery Geste of Robyn Hoode, which was printed in London, Antwerp, and York in seven editions between ca. 1495 and ca. 1610. No manuscript copy of this poem survives. Ohlgren provides...