Shakespeare and Robin Hood: Silence and Noyes

Miguel Alarcão

doi:10.5334/as.14

Abstract

“To re-enter the greenwood after twenty years is a somewhat daunting task. Obviously one should not march determinedly over the same old track, yet must avoid getting lost in new mazes” (Gray in Potter, ed., 21). With Douglas Gray’s sage words and advice on my mind, I will start by reopening an issue broached twenty three years ago in my PhD dissertation (1996): Shakespeare’s scanty references to Robin Hood and his legendary outlaw circle. I will then change scenes, from the Elizabethan to the late Edwardian-early Georgian age, and briefly present Alfred Noyes’s Sherwood, or Robin Hood and the Three Kings, a play first published in the US in 1911 and in Britain in 1926.

Highlights

To re-enter the greenwood after twenty years is a somewhat daunting task
With Douglas Gray’s sage words and advice on my mind, I shall start by reopening an issue broached twentythree years ago (1996) in my PhD dissertation (Alarcão, Príncipe): Shakespeare’s scanty references to Robin Hood and his outlaw circle
When Oliver asks Charles where would the Duke live, the latter replies: They say 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

Summary

Miguel Alarcão

Noyes’s play has been examined by Lois Potter, scanning the main (inter)textual influences and hints, like those of the medieval and early modern traditional ballads (A Gest of Robin Hood, Robin Hood’s Death, etc.), Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), Thomas Love Peacock’s Maid Marian (1822) or Alfred Tennyson’s The Foresters (1892).. Stephen Knight goes as far as to mention, in rather harsh terms, “Shakespeare’s entirely negative contribution to the outlaw myth” (Complete Study 134) He thereby dismisses As You Like It as “a non-Robin Hood play, a negative response to the emergence of the theatrical and gentrified version of the outlaw hero” (Mythic Biography 62).

Primary sources

Secondary sources