Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (review)

Abstract

Reviews 193 Parergon 21.1 (2004) Knight, Stephen, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography, Ithaca/London, Cornell University Press, 2003; cloth; pp. xix, 247; 16 b/w illustrations; RRP US$25,£15.95; ISBN 0801438853. Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography is Professor Stephen Knight’s most recent contribution to the established field of Robin Hood studies. As the title suggests, this work both explores the historical development of the English outlaw figure and educes a rich array of cultural meanings associated with Robin Hood at the various stages of his mythical life. Complementing the approach of his Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (1994), in which he extensively analysed the sources contributing to the greenwood myth, Knight now deconstructs the myth itself in order to understand how each addition to the medieval Robin Hood stories related to the demands and desires of successive periods. In so doing, Knight seeks to redress what he calls the critical ‘monointerpretation ’ of Robin Hood, by which he means the scholarly tendency to characterise the mythic outlaw as necessarily either a historically real or unreal figure. He argues that such a tendency effectively inhibits our openness to the variety and vitality inherent in the Robin Hood myth. It is precisely these characteristics which Knight’s study brings to the fore. In order to investigate the representational history of Robin Hood, Knight employs a diachronic approach across four chapters to consider what he regards as the main themes informing the outlaw myth. These themes are adopted in the following chapter headings: ‘Bold Robin Hood’, ‘Robert, Earl of Huntington’, ‘Robin Hood Esquire’ and ‘Robin Hood of Hollywood’. Although these key aspects of Robin Hood’s characterisation are explored in a broadly chronological way, Knight’s thematic approach means that his analysis of the cultural importance of these themes is not bound by the constraints of chronology in any single chapter. Additionally, the diachronic perspective enables the author to compare and contrast both literary and dramatic sources in order to demonstrate the independent and interdependent nature of these themes as they contributed to a range of images of Robin Hood at any one time. For instance, although the later medieval Robin Hood of the play-games, early ballads and chronicle references is characterised by his anti-authoritarian stance and bold actions against oppressive church and state forces, the early modern gentrification of the outlaw as a wrongfully dispossessed lord attained prominence amongst an elite society concerned with social order from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. However, as Knight demonstrates, the 194 Reviews Parergon 21.1 (2004) conservative hero was not the only manifestation of the myth in the early modern era since the physically active and hardy outlaw continued to influence popular broadsides and later garland publications. These two guiding themes coalesced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to produce an image of the outlaw hero as a vigorous and active figure of gentle birth whose defence of his inheritance rights increasingly coincided with his defence of principles of social justice. In this way, argues Knight, Romantic writers and their successors were able to link a physically robust outlaw embodying concepts of nobility and natural law with an idealised past at a time when the social ills of industrialisation were becoming evident. In parallel with this movement, Victorian juvenile culture also appropriated the legend, simplifying the outlaw as an exemplar of English freedom and morality. Notwithstanding the variety of media in which Robin Hood has been represented over the last six hundred years, Knight argues that the outlaw’s very malleability was facilitated by the absence of any one dominant ‘masterpiece to enshrine and to transmit’ a particular vision of, and cultural meaning associated with, the hero (p. 150). However, this flexibility diminished considerably with the conquest of the myth by film in the last century. Since film, by its very nature, is concerned with action, it was the physically active hero of the medieval ballads who regained prominence in the cinema. In another example of the continuity of historical attitudes and interests, the nineteenth century’s concern to uncover the real life of the hero – his origins, how he became an outlaw, how he...