The minimal dialogue and the active verbs underscore the real appeal of the play - improvisational action. The second scene, however, is much less clear in speaker identity and action, although it is reasonable to conclude that it requires seven or more actors to play two unnamed outlaws, Friar Tuck, the Sheriff, his deputies, and Robin Hood. Likewise, the simple active verbs identify most of the actions and act as stage directions: caste the stone (line 11), blowe myn horne (line 17), and off I smyte (line 22). The dialogue, much of it in direct address, often mentions the addressee's name: Syr Sheryffe (line 1), Robyn Hode (line 5), Syr Knyght (line 15), indicating a cast of three actors for the scene, possibly others if Robin's men appear when summoned (line 17). We say "fictional" because the staging conventions of the time required little more than a spacious outdoor playing area - perhaps a field near the Paston household, where archery, wrestling, and stone-throwing competitions could take place freely. The mentions of the lynde in line 3 and the prysone in line 20 indicate that there are two fictional settings: the greenwood and a prison. While there are certainly ambiguities in the text, the settings, speakers, and actions, especially in the first scene, are relatively easy to follow, which suggests that the script may be complete as it stands. It would appear, therefore, that this script is of a Robin Hood play sponsored by the household of this well-to-do Norwich gentleman and performed by his servants in the early 1470s.Īs the transcription of the manuscript version, which lacks speaker rubrics, scene divisions, and stage directions, makes clear, the text is more of "a scenario or mnemonic providing a framework for improvisation" than a finished script (Wiles, p. yer to pleye Seynt Jorge and Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Notyngham" (Gairdner, p. Paston further remarks that "I have kepyd hym thys iij. Wood has "goon into Bernysdale" (i.e., left his service). Scholars connect the manuscript to Sir John Paston, who, in a letter of April 1473, complains that his horse-keeper W. The text is written on one side of a single sheet of paper, now housed in Trinity College Library, Cambridge the other side of the page, in a hand thought to be from the same period, contains accounts of money received by one John Sterndalle in 1475-76 (Dobson and Taylor, p. 134), the earliest extant play text, a twenty-one line dramatic fragment from East Anglia known as Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Notyngham, is dated half-a-century later. But there are other reasons for overlooking Robin Hood spectacles: few Robin Hood play scripts survive (folk plays were rarely written down and published) and only in the past few years have archivists and provincial historians (many working on the Records of Early English Drama project) begun to document in a systematic way records of theatrical entertainment in early modern England.Īlthough the first record of a Robin Hood play is from Exeter in 1426-27 (Lancashire, p. This is generally unrecognized by both literary and theatrical historians, many of whom assume that the Tudor Reformation quickly put an end to such popular pastimes - it did not (White, p. Indeed, it is not exaggerating to say that Robin Hood plays and games were the most popular form of secular dramatic entertainment in provincial England for most of the sixteenth century (for records of performance, see Lancashire, index under "Robin Hood"). Revels featuring the legendary outlaw appear to have surged in growth towards the close of the fifteenth century and remained popular from the royal court to the rural village green throughout the following century (Lancashire, p. Most took the form of ceremonial games, dances, pageants, processions, and other mimetic events of popular culture of which we only get a fleeting glimpse in surviving civic and ecclesiastical records. Notwithstanding his important role in ballads and prose fiction, Robin Hood would have been best known in communities throughout fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Britain as the subject of a wide range of theatrical and quasi-theatrical entertainments.
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