Literature – Historical Matters

Lord of the Land or Lord of the Forest?

The Gentrification of Robin Hood

In most popular retellings of the stories of Robin Hood from the 20th & 21st centuries our hero has been a nobleman, or at least, as in Ridley Scott’s case, pretending to be one. He has either been Robert the Earl of Huntingdon, or Sir Robin of Locksley. Now because Robin Hood is a folk hero and the idea of who he is and what he does, has changed over time and with each poem, ballad, story, play, or film that he appears in. So, it would be a bit gauche of me to say definitively who Robin Hood is or what he should be. However, I am going to look over the way Robin Hood has been a bit of a social climber (especially for a fictional character) over the last 500 years or so; and with this surprising social mobility how his motives and actions change. So: Robin Hood. He steals from the rich and gives to the poor. He battles against the evil Sherriff of Nottingham, exposes Prince John, saves Maid Marian, gets knocked into the river by Little John and saves the kingdom for Good King Richard. But also, Robin Hood, much like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. As a fairly amorphous figure, with a large corpus of literature to draw from it is easy to project whatever values you desire on to him. ^[1]

Robin of the earliest poems and ballads is a man very much of the times written, a time when violent acts could be seen as either justified or wrongdoing depending on local factors of superiority, or favour with the King.^[2] The earliest attempt at a single overarching narrative for Robin Hood is A Geste of Robyn Hood, a sort of epic poem, which is a series of ballads sewn together. The extant literary sources come from the 16^th century on, but these are probably based on, or are altered versions of older stories.^[3]In the Geste and the other early poems what makes Robin almost unique is his relatively humble social standing. ^[4]There are for instance many contemporaneous poems about Hereward the Wake, many of which are now lost to us;^[5]Hereward, ‘the lineal ancestor of the later English outlaws’,^[6]is a member of the nobility. The outlaw status is temporary for these men like Hereward and Gamelyn, they only turn outlaw with their dispossession of land and standing.^[7] Their removal from society. ^[8]

In Eric Hobsbawm’s model of the ‘social bandit’, Robin Hood is the archetypical Noble Robber.^[9] The idea of social banditry a form of class struggle, where robbery is supported by the working and lower classes.

An illustration from Howard Pyle‘s *The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood*. from wikimedia commons

The malleability of Robin Hood as a character comes down to the simplicity of the stories, which allow the teller to change and adapt the stories to tailor them to their audience, introducing new characters, and changing emphasis.^[10] The early ballads often began with an address to the audience, and often these are explicitly addressing the yeomanry and the gentry.^[11] Hobsbawm argued that the bandit as a social hero belongs entirely to the peasantry but concedes that as a cultural symbol, he holds a much wider appeal.^[12] This is indeed the case for Robin, as he does not come from the great masses of the people, but is explicitly from the yeomanry,^[13]and as such is a freeman who would have owned property in his own right, not a villain or crofter tied to a particular lord or holding. So already, even in the earliest sources, Robin’s social position only represents a small part of the population.

Over time in the ballads and stories he loses his anti-clerical, anti-authority stance for a more broad and smooth anti-injustice outlook. Robin’s stories become set at a specific time and space, Nottingham and Sherwood during the 3^rd Crusade. He is looking to restore the rightful rule of Good King Richard and resist the perfidy and rapaciousness of the evil Prince John and his cronies. In most modern incarnations he fits more into an idea of ‘The Gentleman Bandit’, like Hereward, or the popular image of 18^th century highwaymen like Dick Turpin. Since Anthony Munday’s two plays, The Downfall and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntington, Robin certainly fits into this image. Munday, a bit of a social climber himself as the son of a draper,^[14] recognised the difference in his representation of Robin Hood, and acknowledges the unusual step of granting peerage to his hero early in the The Downfall (1598):

This youth that leads yon virgin by the hand
(As doth the Sunne, the morning richly clad)
Is our Earle Robert, or your Robin Hoode,^[15]

Munday takes his step in this not from the ballads and May Day games, but from historical chronicles, such as Richard Grafton’s Chronicle at Large in 1568.^[16] Grafton is the earliest to suggest that Robin is from the nobility. Munday’s play both elevates Robin from his traditional local enemies, the sheriff and the abbot, to the court, and removes his political teeth so that he ‘[becomes] depoliticised and personalised, opposed only to noblemen who were personally treacherous to him.’^[17] Following on from Munday’s successes Robin Hood made an appearance in at least 5 plays in the first 3 years of the 17^th century,^[18] into including Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which while not a Robin Hood play explicitly, certainly takes many cues from Munday’s works.^[19]

Illustration by Charles Edmund Brock (1870-1938) for Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott (London: Service & Paton, 1897) from wikimedia commons

In Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott Robin Hood plays a secondary role to the titular character but returns to his yeoman status. Scott is drawing a dichotomy between the bluff, honest Saxon and the dissembling Norman (a difference which we will see again when we turn to look at film, though with Robin back above the salt).^[20]

Bibliography

DeAngelo, Jeremy. Outlawry, Liminality, and Sanctity in the Early Medieval North Atlantic. Amsterdam, 2019.

Doniger, Wendy. ‘Female Bandits? What next!’ in The London Review of Books Vol. 26, No. 14 (2004).

Firth Green, Richard. ‘Violence in the Early Robin Hood Poems in A Great Effusion of Blood’?: Interpreting Medieval Violence, edited by Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Thiery, & Oren Falk, pp. 268-286. Toronto, 2004.

Gerritsen, Willem P. & van Melle, Anthony G. A Dictionary of Medieval Heroes. Woodbridge, 1998.

Hobsbawm, Eric. Bandits. London, 1969.

Holt, J.C. Robin Hood. London, 1982.

Kaufman, Alexander L. ‘A Desire for Origins: The Marginal Robin Hood in the Later Ballads’ Medievalism on the Margins, edited by Karl Fugelso, Vincent Ferré & Alicia C. Montoya, pp. 51-62. Woodbridge, 2015.

Nicholl, Charles. The Reckoning. London, 1992.

Philips, Helen. Robin Hood: Medieval and Post Medieval. Dublin, 2005.

Scattergood, John. Reading the Past: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Dublin, 1996.

Seal, Graham. Outlaw Heroes in Myth and History. London, 2011.

Skura, Meredith. ‘Anthony Munday’s “Gentrification” of Robin Hood’ in English Literary Renaissance

Vol. 33, No. 2 (Spring, 2003), pp. 155-180.

Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws, by Frank Sidgwick. London, 1912. Accessed from Project Gutenburg http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28744/28744-h/28744-h.htm

[1] Douglas Gray, ‘Everybody’s Robin Hood’ in Robin Hood: Medieval and Post-Medieval, edited by Helen Phillips (Dublin, 2005), p. 21.

[2] J.C. Holt, Robin Hood, (London, 1982), p. 6.

[3]Willem P. Gerritsen & Anthony G. Melle, A Dictionary of Medieval Heroes (Woodbridge, 1998), p. 227.

[4] Timothy S. Jones, ‘Oublïé ai cevalerie’: Tristan, Malory and the outlaw-knight’ in Robin Hood: Medieval and Post-Medieval, p. 79.

[5] Gray, ‘Everybody’s Robin Hood’, p. 33.

[6] Maurice Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval Legend, quoted in Outlaw Heroes in Myth and History by Graham Seal, (London, 2011), p. 38.

[7] Jeremy DeAngelo, Outlawry, Liminality, and Sanctity in the Early Medieval North Atlantic, (Amsterdam 2019), p. 199.

[8] A poem exists where Gamelyn or rather Gandeleyn refers to himself and takes on a similar role to Little John, found in Frank Sidgwick’s Ballads of Robin Hood and Other Bandits, p. 92.

[9] Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (London, 1969), p. 23.

[10] Holt, Robin Hood, 12.

[11] Holt, Robin Hood, 105.

[12] Hobsbawm, Bandits, p. 141.

[13] Gerritsen & van Melle, A Dictionary of Medieval Heroes p. 228.

[14] Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning (London 1992), p. 174

[15] Anthony Munday, The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntingdon, ll 86-88.

[16] Liz Oakley-Brown ‘Anthony Munday’s Huntingdon Plays’ in

[17] Wendy Doniger, ‘Female Bandits? What next’ The London Review of Books 26, no. 14 (2004).

[18] Meredith Skura, ‘Anthony Munday’s “Gentrification” of Robin Hood’ Robin Hood: Medieval and Post-Medieval, p. 113.

[19] Nicholl, The Reckoning, p. 72.

[20] It would be overly long, or much to curt to put it here but I do want to discuss Robin Hood’s role and class perception on the silver screen, so I will hopefully return to this at some point in the future.

Sprezzatura and Disinvoltura – or “The Art of being cool in the 16th Century.”

Alternatively, Social anxiety for the Renaissance Man

What does it mean to be cool? How has this changed over time, and is the modern idea of coolness just that, a modern phenomenon? Western popular culture, in particular directed towards men, has for the last 70 or 80 years has put forward the idea of the cool man. The enigmatic character, who seems to always act without difficulty or strain. This idea can be summed up in a single word: the 16^th century Italian concept of sprezzatura. A word originating from Baldassare Castiglione’s 1528 work, The Book of the Courtier. Castiglione states that it is among the chief qualities that a courtier must possess. It means a studied carelessness, to possess sprezzatura is to make the difficult appear effortless. If you have sprezzatura you always have something to say, that is witty, clear, and measured; you never have l’esprit de l’escalair. You must act as if all tasks and conversation come naturally, and, crucially, ensure that those around you do not recognise the deception; they must never suspect the effort, concentration, and practice required to maintain this façade: without it you lack sprezzatura. When James Joyce first read The Courtier his brother told him he had become more polite but less sincere, Joyce contended that that was the point.[1]

01castig — Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione by Raphael

Castiglione’s work was incredibly popular and influential in the royal courts of Europe and with the growing number of gentry and burghers, all jockeying for position in the very limited space at the top of society. The book champions qualities that fit with the Renaissance ideal man, l’uomo universale: the courtier who ‘was regarded by the civilisation of the age as its choicest flower.’[2] Castiglione embodied this ideal himself in many ways in his long and varied career as courtier, poet, soldier, diplomat, and writer. These qualities were certainly admired by the great and the good, and upon the death of Castiglione in 1529, the Habsburg Emperor Charles V is said to have declared ‘One of the finest gentlemen in the world is dead.’

The book itself follows a series of fictional conversations between a number of Castiglione’s contemporaries at the court of Duke Federico of Urbino, where the various speakers discuss over the course of three nights what qualities make the perfect courtier. The Courtier is an example of performative writing, that is writing to prove the writer’s cleverness – art that is made so it is seen to be done. It was not originally intended only as a guide to help readers navigate the complex world of the court (which it would later come to be used as) but to show to peers how clever and capable Castiglione was.[3] Castiglione claimed to have written the book in a single week, but it was in fact an arduous labour that went through several drafts over the course of twenty years.

The spread of The Courtier helped and was helped by an increasing influence of Italian culture on the royal courts of Europe. In France, during Henri III’s reign many of the courtiers took to speaking Italian, and listening to Italian music, much to the consternation of more patriotic Frenchmen,[4] and the Italian styles which were favoured by Henry III and his mignons fuelled anti-Italian agitation in the literary sphere, examples including Jean Bodin’s République and Henri Estienne’s Deuz dialogues du nouveau langage francois Italianizé (Two dialogues of the new Italianised French), condemning the works of Machiavelli and Castiglione respectively.[5] Imported effeminate acts, such as the use of soap, white-tooth powder, and forks also came under fire from critics such as Thomas d’Embry in his work L’Isle des hermaphordites nouvellement descouverte (The Isle of the newly discovered hermaphrodites).[6] Despite these scathing critiques of The Courtier and its Italian culture it proved to be very popular in the French court and with the wider literate society in France throughout the 16^th century. Many French courtiers owned copies in Italian, and it was translated three times in French, with twenty-three editions being published in France between 1537 and 1592.[7] Its translation happened alongside those of other Italian works, such as Oristo’s Orlando Furioso, and Machievelli’s Il Principe.

The first translation of The Courtier into a foreign language was by Juan Boscán, a Catalan poet, in 1534. This Spanish version had between 12 and 16 editions, three of which were published in Antwerp, in the Spanish Netherlands.[8] There is an extant letter of Castiglione’s asking for a number of copies to be shipped to him in Toledo, when he served as ambassador, likely to distribute among his friends there. The main contemporary translation into English was by Sir Thomas Hoby, a diplomat and translator. Published in 1561 it was a key text of the English Renaissance. For Hoby proficiency in languages especially Italian, French, and Spanish was necessary for any English courtier; in order to flourish you had to be ‘seen in tongues’, to use his phrase. Queen Elizabeth encouraged this linguistic proficiency in her court and her tutor Robert Ascham spoke each of the three with ‘perfect readiness.’[9] Increased literacy throughout Western Europe, in particular the city-states of Italy where in almost all the cities free education was provided to the children of communal taxpayers[10], coupled with as we’ve seen the expansion of printing, allowed the book of the courtier to flourish.

Vittore Carpaccio - Recepção de um legado, c. 1490 — Reception of a legacy by Vittore Carpaccio c. 1490

But for all its popularity in the years after it was published, what value does it hold for us now? It could seem to the modern reader that Castiglione’s work only with its focus on the pleasing of a despotic ruler, on whose whims the courtier’s prosperity and even their life depended on pleasing. However, Joan Faust writing in the mid-1990s states that ‘Castiglione’s courtier is not dead, he wears a Brooks Brothers suit and a false face.’[11] Flattery and making one’s accomplishments and abilities seem greater than they are, are by no means dying skills. The presentation of oneself to one’s peers and wider society as capable, or thriving, successful is ever more important. The image you show to the world: of perfect happiness, of the result without the effort is not reality. It is but a simulacrum. Alison Brown contends that the courtier of Castiglione’s imaginings is a paragon that cannot be reached, and the creation of this untouchable ideal is in reaction to the waning power of the Italian states, as the kingdoms of France and Spain defeated and sacked Milan, Florence and Rome.[12] A reflection on a lost age that existed only in the mind. The performance of greatness belies the reality of weakness and helplessness of the Italian city-states.

Bibliography and Further Reading:

Berger Jr, Harry. The Absence of Grace: sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books. Stanford, 2000.
Black, Robert. ‘Education and the emergence of a literate society’ in Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, 1300-1550, edited by John Najemy (Oxford, 2004) pp. 1-19.
Brown, Alison. ‘Rethinking the Renaissance after the crisis’ in Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, pp. 246-266.
Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy translated by S.G.C. Middlemore. New York, 1954.
Burke, Peter. The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano. Cambridge, 1995.
Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier translated by George Bull. Bungay, 1967.
Collins, James B. The state in early Modern France. Cambridge, 1995.
Faust, Joan. ‘Shmoozing in the Renaissance: Castiglione’s “The Courtier” and Modern Business Behaviour’ Studies in Popular Culture Vol. 18, No. 2 (April, 1996), pp 69-79.
Knecht, Robert. The French Renaissance Court. New Haven, 2008.
Knecht, Robert. The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France. London, 1996.
Richards, Jennifer. ‘Assumed Simplicity and the Critique of Nobility: Or, How Castiglione Read Cicero’ Renaissance Quarterly Vol. 54, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), pp. 460-486.
Stengel, Richard. You’re too Kind: A Brief History of Flattery. New York, 2000.

Interesting links:

The Book of Life: How to be a Man – an essay proposing an alternative to sprezzatura

GQ Stories: Sprezzatura Style – What sprezzatura can mean today.

[1] Richard Stengel, You’re too Kind: A Brief History of Flattery (New York, 2000), p. 143.
[2] Jacob Burckhardt. The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy translated by S.G.C Middlemore (New York, 1954), p. 269.
[3] Stengel, You’re too Kind, p. 133.
[4] Robert Knecht, The French Renaissance Court (New Haven, 2008), p. 322.
[5] Knecht, The French Renaissance Court, p. 323.
[6] Robert Knecht, The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France (London, 1996), p. 489.
[7] Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (Cambridge, 1995), pp 63-64.
[8] Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier, p. 65.
[9] Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier, p. 61.
[10] Robert Black, ‘Education and the emergence of a literate society’ in Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, 1300-1550, edited by John Najemy, p. 24.
[11] Joan Faust, ‘Shmoozing in the Renaissance: Castiglione’s “The Courtier” and Modern Business Behaviour’ Studies in Popular Culture Vol. 18, no. 2 (April 1996), p. 70.
[12] Alison Brown ‘Rethinking the Renaissance after the crisis’ in Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, p 264.