The Adventures of Robin Hood [antikvár]

AUTHOR'S NOTE as to the sources from which his material is derived To retell the adventures of Robin Hood is a very different matter from writing of King Arthur and his Knights. The | ^ Arthurian poems and romances, even if we take Malory as the latest, would fill a bookcase - and in that bookcase we would find some of the great literature of the world, in ^^ several languages. Robin Hood had no Malory, and he has had few poets. A late medieval metrical romance, A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode: a collection of Ballads most of which are the merest doggerel and some of which may be as late as the eighteenth century; a prose rendering of several of the Ballads, and two plays by ^ Anthony Munday, a contemporary of Shakespeare, called ^ The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon constitute nearly all that we may call the original Robin Hood Literature. If we add to this several short scraps of medieval folk-plays which merely follow extant ballads, a brief appearance in Robert Greene's play George-a-Greene the Pinner of Wakefield and its exactly ^ parallel prose romance, and a rather fuller appearance in ;. Ben Jonson's unfinished pastoral play The Sad Shepherd, our sources are complete. & It was only after the ballads, romances, and plays were f collected and reprinted by Joseph Ritson at the end of the k eighteenth century that Robin Hood found his way into real literature. Even so he found his best expression as a minor i' character, as all readers of Ivanhoe will agree. The majority ^; of the ballads, with a glance at the dramatic background, | gave Thomas Love Peacock the outline for the best prose p' story of Robin Hood yet written, his Maid Marian (1822), and the same sources (to which Peacock and Scott also lent something) produced Tennyson's play of The Foresters (1881) » - a pleasant re-arrangement of the old materials, but of no special merit either as poetry or as drama. It was left for the 1 twentieth century to give us the finest poetic play yet written