This
unpublished paper was written for a talk at the University of Bath in about
2003 and has been updated since then as more material has appeared, none of it
making major changes to the somewhat elusive patterns of forest feeling
explored here
1.
A the end of the 1991 film Robin
Hood, not the stodgy Kevin Costner vehicle but the much more interesting
one starring Patrick Bergin and Uma Thurman as two decidedly feisty forest
dwellers, they marry with all the surroundings of a May festival – procession,
music, carnival, licence, merriment, sexuality. This is decidedly heterosexual
Robin Hood, with Thurman in one of her early roles exercising from the very
beginning a consciously desiring gaze on the handsome form of the hero.
It seems authoritative. So much so that it is one of the things most
firmly parodied by Mel Brooks in Robin
Hood, Men in Tights: there a Barbie Doll Marian, first seen in a bubble
bath, may just lurve her Robin but he, in the diminutive form of Cary Elwes,
and can never find the key to her chastity belt – and when he finally does, it
doesn’t fit.
And indeed the heterosexual romance of Thurman and Bergin doesn’t fit
the pattern of the Robin Hood story over the years. Various sorts of love are
found in the forest, some of them rather obscure and verging on hate, and the
Robin-Marian relationship is one of the foci of change that make the tradition
of the noble outlaw so interesting, and so revealing, as it holds the attention
of a mass audience over more than six centuries – holding that attention of
course largely through those many changes.
What might be the differences between the very early (i.e. late
medieval) tradition and the end of the 1991 film ? One, which I won’t press
much here, but is important to me as a nit-picking scholar, is that the Robin
Hood tradition is not associated with May Day, that time of fertility ritual.
It is associated with late May, Whitsuntide, and it’s a celebration of achieved
fertility, of the forest in summer, when the May is white with blossom – hence
Whit or White Sunday.
A clear marker of that difference is that the early Robin Hood ballads,
preserved from the later fifteenth century do not include Marian at all, or
indeed any other central female figure – no human at least – but they start
with a clear idea of love. It’s love of nature: the earliest of all Robin’s
loves. `Robin Hood and the Monk’ starts with a stanza that, in varied form,
reverberates through all the early
ballads.
In summer when
the shawes be sheyne,
And leves
be large and long
Hit is ful
mery in feyre foreste
To here the
foulys song
`Robin
Hood and the Monk’, 1-4
The shawes are sheyne, meaning the groves are bright; and the leaves are
large and long – spring is past. The language is quite erotic, close to that of
love lyric where the lady will be sheen, her arms and fingers will be long, her
spirit large, meaning generous; she is everything that is fair and the lover is
`ful mery’ to think of her; and bird song is a constant accompaniment to his
love. But in the ballads there is no love object, no Marian in the forest: it
is the forest itself that Robin and his men admire, shelter in, return to: that
alone is the encompassing and in many ways feminine force.
Robin does have a female object of adoration. It’s the Virgin Mary: his urge
to worship her at mass in Nottingham gets him into trouble, but thinking of her
when he is in a tough fight will help him too, as in `Robin Hood and Guy of
Gisborne’ – just as the thought of his love of Guinevere can inspire Lancelot
in a difficult battle.
Nature and a saint seem plenty to love in the Robin Hood ballad world
without women. Maybe there is more. The men are clearly close to each other,
and Little John is like an equal partner in the early texts than when later on
he becomes more a strong but stupid assistant, Obelix to Robin’s Asterix. Robin
and John re a sort of couple – and interestingly John always swears by the
masculine Christ where Robin always swears by the feminine Mary. Indeed in the
two earliest lyrics there seems something like a domestic difference as John
refuses to do what Robin asks him to: they argue, fight and separate. Just like
real life.
A few years ago there was a mild media flurry about the possibility of
Robin Hood being gay. It was August, the silly season in the media – and also
Robin Hood time, as the lord of summer. Nothing I have ever suggested has been
remotely as interesting to the media: this was the first and only time I was
interviewed by both Der Spiegel and
the South China News. My point was
not that Robin was a closet gay, but that the Robin Hood texts include the
values often associated with the gay community – a sense of mutual exclusion, an
awareness of social disapproval, even oppression: but also merriment and wit
and same-sex solidarity and loyalty. Robin is often depicted as handsome in a
more than merely male way – think of Errol Flynn’s tights or Michael Praed’s
hair. This too is something that Mel Brooks joked about in Robin Hood: Men in Tights – though he it was only joking: in fact
nobody in the film is gay; it’s just a comic mainstreaming of the male-on-male
aspect of the tradition.
So perhaps male homosocial love, even homosexual love, has a place in
the forest as well in the past and, even in more recent times. The early
twentieth century English Georgian poets, Noyes, Newbolt, Drinkwater, Squire certainly
come close to a gay Robin. The maleness of the early ballads is of course a
representation of the real conditions of outlawry – there were many outlaw
groups in the late medieval period, small numbers of men living in difficult
and often violent conditions and there are very few traces of any women with
them. There were different circumstances where the figure of Robin Hood was in
routine contact with women, and the general public, and it is here that we see
the first signs of the Marian figure.
But first a brief bit of Robin
Hood history, to be found much more fully in my own work and that of colleagues
-- see the reading list. Though we have early ballads, and they are
fascinating, there was in fact a more widespread location for Robin Hood in the late middle ages – records
don’t indicate any traces before the early fifteenth century. These were the
`play-games’: a village or small town
would, around Whitsun time – Sunday or Monday usually – holds processions
focused on Robin Hood, from
the forest to the village and ending in its centre, near the church. There
Robin would preside over games, sports, and sometimes at least plays; there
would finally be a feast, often called a Robin Hood Ale. A good time was had by
all and Robin’s men would often collect money for the village – for the upkeep
of the roads and bridges for example.
Robin here is a
communal figure to focus the celebration of summer not a figure of social
resistance. The plays and ballads might include him fighting the distant
sheriff or perhaps resisting the demands of the grasping monastic landowners,
but there are no traces of that in the Robin Hood’s day activities – though the
records of what actually went on are very sketchy. But we know there was a
procession and there was dancing – the records often record the cost of the
shoes for the dancers, a crucial item then as still in dance companies. And it
is clear that Robin was partnered in the procession and the dancing by women –
probably a couple, one to dance with him and one to dance with Little John.
Theatre has its own force, even in this simple form.
Quite often the other figures are not named but when, especially in the
sixteenth century, the woman dancer is named, she is named as Marian, and as
the insertion of a partner for Robin occurs in theatre, as we will shortly see,
this is no doubt her first appearance in English at least. It is probable that
she comes from an earlier context. In medieval French poetry there is a genre
called the pastourelle, a fairly short poem about lovers and their problems.
One group of poems focuses on a young lady named Marion , who loves a handsome and usually
slightly lower-class lad called Robin. There is a fine 13th century
opera about them by Adam de la Halle. We can assume that when there is a woman
who partners Robin, she by traditional association becomes named Marian, it’s
as simple as that.
Of course you can be more complicated, and some scholars like to be. One
startling suggestion is that the name is a simplification of a figure who
dances in the early Morris dance. Morris means Moorish, that is for certain,
and there is one figure with a black face who is called the Moor or, sometimes,
the Moorean. It is by no means
impossible that this figure helps the Marion
name come into this popular dance tradition. There’s a thought – Robin’s
original girl- friend is a dark-hued Arab. Then there is another notional source.
You will notice I have not discussed the real Robin Hood. In my view the real
Robin Hood is the mythic one. But there are people who like to find the hero’s
address, age and pin number. There were quite a few people called Robert Hood,
and there were a few of them with wives called Matilda – the other name Marian
sometimes bears. But about a third of the women born in Norman families in the
middle ages were called Matilda, so let’s not worry about them. We have enough to
fret about.
The dancing partner, sometimes called Marian, isn’t a direct connection
with our Lady Marian, or Matilda, just a
distant source. She would not have been a lady for start. We get an idea of
what she might have been like in a
sixteenth century play version of the story of Robin Hood and the fighting
friar. The friar has successfully fought Robin and – this usually happens in
these Robin meets his match’ fights – he
is invited to join the outlaw band. By way of introduction he is presented
with a woman; the friar is pleased, and dismisses the outlaws so he and the
girl can have fun:
Here
is a huckle duckle an inch above the buckle
She
is a trull of trust to serve a friar at his lust,
A
prycker, a prancer, a tearer of sheets
A
wagger of ballockes when other men sleeps.
Go
home ye knaves and lay crabs in the fire
For
my lady and I will dance in the mire.
A huckle-duckle, which the friar no doubt theatrically reveals, is an
artificial phallus. This is lust in the forest, not love. And it’s not Marian -
in spite of some rather excitable scholarly opinion to that effect. If she had
a name it might well be Jenny, the name usually linked with the Friar in other
sources. But the name Marian has been connected in popular performance with
Robin, and the playwrights take it from there.
2.
This is in the context of a major development and change in the Robin
Hood story, which we call gentrification. To be brief about it, in the
sixteenth century there were many moves towards controlling what seemed the
disorderly elements of the past, from
burning witches to enclosing common land, and in this spirit the Robin Hood
tradition was radically reconceived when the rough-handed yeoman of the early
ballads was transmuted into an earl who rebelled against bad Prince John and
was reinstated by true King Richard. Suddenly the outlaw’s vigorous resistance,
which had been against officers of the state and the church, is swung behind
the state and the newly reformed church. The yeoman social bandit did not
disappear: he was still celebrate in ballads through the eighteenth century,
but there were now two layers – and basically there still are, as around 1990
between the Lord of Locksley, in the
form of Kevin Costner,. and the peasant rebel in the form of Michael Praed as
Robin of Sherwood. But when he is made a lord, with a land, Robin, or now
Robert, has a lady. Her forest name is Marian, as his is Robin, and her noble
name is Matilda, the daughter of another lord.
This is how she appears in the ground-breaking double play by Anthony
Munday, The Downfall and The Death of Robert Earle of Huntingdon,
of 1598-9. This introduces Marian as Robin's faithful aristocratic lady, lusted
after by Prince John, and before her forest exile known as Matilda Fitzwater,
an aristocratic lady drawn from Michael Drayton's 1594 poem Matilda the Fair and Chaste Daughter of
Baron Fitzwater. The figure of Matilda provides the lineage and
aristocratic identity required for the gentrified Robin's equally gentrified
Marian.
Munday’s Marian does not influence successive stories much: in his
version she survives Robin and is
pursued by Prince John, to a tragic death. Marian as martyr did not catch on
(though there are examples in nineteenth-century fiction), but Munday
introduced a motif which has seemed almost compulsive for authors who give
Marian a substantial role. This is the False Marian – a Marian who is really a
witch-like betrayer of Robin. Knight’s rule is that the more sexually aware and
active is the love of Robin and Marian, the more likely there is to be a witch
double for her. Nasty stuff. In Munday, Queen Eleanor lusts after Robin as much
as her son does after Marian, and early on, as Robin and Marian flee, she
persuades Marian to change clothes with her - ostensibly for Marian's safety,
but in fact because she herself wants to be off to the woods with Robin. This
is a strange, even disturbing, response to love in the forest, or perhaps just
to a woman in the forest. The `false Marian' motif starts from here, and is
remarkably common. It appears to relate to male anxiety that woman can be
delusive and dangerous as well as -- or instead of being -- passive and
supportive.
Munday’s Marian is first seen in a thoroughly controlled light: the
dumbshow that opens the play speaks of Robin and Marian as `This youth that
leads yon virgin by the hand’ (86). That’s a fair way from the lusty dancing
partner or indeed the free spirited lady of the medieval French Robin et Marian
poems. In fact Munday’s Marian is little more than a cipher. She takes to the
woods, but does nothing there. Robin does apostrophise her as a pastoral lover,
but the emphasis is entirely on the natural world, asserting in fully pastoral
mode that the forest is a free version of the court, and an mention of her
beauty is swamped in the natural world:
For thy steele glass,
wherin thou wonst to looke,
They Christall eyes,
gaze in a Christall brooke. 1377-8
It as is if Marian is just a human reification of the beauty and love of
the forest.
But woman and forest could have a quite different association, equally
classical. The image of a huntress was one other direction for the notion of a
lady of the forest, and this was worked out in some detail by Michael Drayton (a
rich source for Marian) in the Sherwood section of his Poly-Olbion, representing her as:
...
chief Lady of the Game:
Her
Clothes tuck'd to the knee, and daintie braided haire,
With
Bow and Quiver arm'd, shee wandred here and there,
Amongst
the forests wild; Diana never knew
Such
pleasures, nor such Harts as Mariana slew. (354-8)
This Marian loves hunting rather than Robin. But she developed her
interests elsewhere. The classical huntress Marian was firmly in Ben Jonson's
mind as he developed The Sad Shepherd,
an unfinished masque published in 1641 and probably written not long before.
But he also appears to have pursued the classical idea that the bow and arrow
is also amatorial, and Jonson's Marian may enjoy unmaidenly pleasures. The
forest lovers meet as Marian returns from hunting and exchange enthusiasm,
affection and what seems like an off-colour joke (inch-pin, a small bone inside
the deer, can also mean `penis’):
Marian: How
hath this morning paid me, for my rising!
First, with my sports; but most with meeting
you!
I did not half so well reward my hounds,
As she
hath me today: although I gave them
All the sweet morsels, Calle, Tongue, Eares
and Dowcets !
Robin: What ?
And the inch-pin ?
Marian:
Yes.
Robin: Your
sports then pleas'd you ?
Marian:
You are a wanton.
Robin: One,
I do confesse,
I wanted till you came. But now I have you,
I'll grow to your embraces, till two soules
Distilled into kisses, thorough your lips
Do make one spirit of love.
Marian:
O Robin! Robin! I.6.1-13)
Some real love in the forest appears here, and some lust too. In spite
of this – or is it because of this ? - Jonson develops strongly the `false
Marian' motif with a wicked witch called Maudlin (and sometimes Maud, which,
interestingly, and perhaps not accidentally is the short form of Matilda), so
suggesting a black/white splitting in the figure of the outlaw heroine. Maud
impersonates Marian with some success, and she alarms and confuses Robin. All
these problems are headed for reconciliation in Jonson's apparent plan, but he
only got about half-way through the masque.
This amatorial Marian, Lady Fitzwalter, does ultimately defer to Robin's
authority, both aristocratic and male, but she is also represented as having
real agency, even some power, including physical and gendered power. It is not
a settled or ideologically stable role. But it recurs. Marian plays a very
minor role in the seventeenth-century broadsides, a popular Robin Hood genre
basically deploying the woman-free yeoman outlaw. But there is one ballad,
surviving in only one copy, and apparently never very successful or
influential, which realises both love between the two and a partly
masculinised Marian in male costume: a sort of compromise between the
hunter Marian and the lover Marian. In love with the outlawed Earl Robin, she
follows him into the greenwood, dressed as a man and well-armed:
With
quiver and bow, sword buckler and all,
Thus
armed was Marian most bold,
Still
wandering about to find Robin out
Whose
person was better than gold.
But
Robin Hood hee himself had disguisd,
And
Marian was strangely attir'd,
That
they provd foes, and so fell to blowes,
Whose
vallour bold Robin admir'd.
They
drew out their swords, and to cutting they went,
At
least an hour or more,
That
the blood ran apace from bold Robins face,
And
Marian was wounded sore.
`Oh
hold thy hand, hold thy hand,' said Robin Hood,
`And
thou shalt be one of my string,
To
range in the wood with bold Robin Hood,
And
hear the sweet nightingall sing.'
When
Marian did hear the voice of her love,
Her
self shee did quickly discover,
And
with kisses sweet she did him greet,
Like
to a most loyal lover. (34-53)
They end up agreeing, and cosying up together -- though in a curiously
homosocial way, with Little John and Will Scarlet.
The Marian who appears regularly in eighteenth-century ballad opera is
not this belligerent Rosalind-like figure -- rather she is a diluted version of
the Munday tradition, a lady with not much to do except sing songs and end up
partnered by the handsome gentlemanly outlaw. She does sometimes have an
admirer, but he is not a real sexual threat to Robin, just someone like Sir
Humphrey Wealthy in the 1751 ballad opera. I stress this treatment for a
reason. Marian's exposure to a real alternative hero is in fact a new feature
of the early nineteenth century when there is not only love n the forest but
also a triangle of love conflict. The male rival to Robin, and so villain, now
replaces the false Marian as a focus of duplicity, and anchors the texts in a
less anxious, or at least differently anxious, masculinism. It is now a matter
of possibly losing your lovely partner to another man, not her turning into a
virago. The key feature of the nineteenth-century Marian, who survives in many
twentieth-century films, novels and plays, is as the noble but vulnerable
woman, that prime way of enhancing and validating the status of her male
consort. I call this Marian Mrs Robin Hood, not Lady Fitzwater. Nineteenth-century
concerns about gender, the family and woman's role vis à vis man seem evident
in Marian's construction in this stage, mostly appearing in the new mode of the
novel.
3.
The first fully formed version is in Thomas Love Peacock's Maid Marian of 1822. Characteristically,
this Marian is capable of vigorous action and strong values but is also
foreclosed by the masculine world. She does have point of view - but Robin
comes to control it. She can shoot, and fight, but she needs rescuing in the
crisis. She is not only lovely and vital: she is also an object of desire by
another man, Sir Ralph Montfaucon, a good fighter and quite noble, in both
birth and behaviour, but rival for her love to the hero, Robin Hood. Marian is
in this way both subject and potential object and in the same way Peacock's
prose both privileges and gazes at its heroine:
Matilda,
not dreaming of visitors, tripped into the apartment in a dress of forest
green, with a small quiver by her side and a bow and arrow in her hand. Her
hair, black and glossy as is the raven's wing, curled like wandering clusters
of dark ripe grapes under the edge of her round bonnet; and a plume of black
feathers fell back negligently above it, with an almost horizontal inclination,
that seemed the habitual effect of rapid motion against the wind. (p.26)
She has vigour, but not seriously so -- it is a small quiver. She is
ultimately contained in marriage as a valued but subaltern part of the family
Hood -- or rather Huntington ,
and the first scene of the book is their marriage -- disrupted by Sir Ralph.
His rivalry with Robin can be seen as another sort of love in the forest.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her ground-breaking book Between Men, argues that around the start of the nineteenth century
literature emerges a new fable, the rivalry of two men for a woman. But she
argues, this is actually a coded way of realising homoerotic attraction between
two men, merely mediated by a woman. If this seems a startling idea, I have to
say that she makes her case well from the texts she discusses, and had she looked
at the Robin Hood material, from Peacock through to modern films, she might
well have chuckled with pleasure at the evidence available. Do you recall the
moment in the fight between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in the great 1938
film we, at the climax of their fight, they almost kiss. The handsome rival is
a standard feature of the nineteenth-century Robin Hood novel.
Whatever is going on between the guys, Marian is Mrs Robin Hood, and even has a child in one
version – it dies. Heroes only have surviving children if they are going to
betray them, as Mordred did King Arthur. But it is also striking that Mrs Hood
spends much of the story off- stage – when she is not being a victim for
villains or wild animals, described with the sadomasochism that permeates
Victorian popular literature. When she
does appear, her forest love is entirely pure and responsible, the husband’s
handmaid. Not surprisingly a classic example is in Tennyson's The Foresters, as if modelled on Queen
Victoria, or even Lady Tennyson.
Here she is the purest of the
pure, as husband Robin insists in their opening scene:
The
high Heaven guard thee from wantonness
Who
art the fairest flower of maidenhood
That
ever blossomed on this English isle. (p.753)
And her love for him is potent indeed:
`The Sheriff dare to
love me ? me who worship Robin the great Earl of Huntingdon ?
I love him as a damsel of his day
might have loved Harold the Saxon or Hereward the Wake
(The Foresters, p.750)
Though Marian does have some agency, it is no more than ethical and
charitable and though she finally speaks in the plural of what they have
achieved, the only name mentioned is that of her lord and husband:
And
yet I think these oaks at dawn and even
Or
in the balmy breathing of the night
Will
whisper evermore of Robin Hood.
We
leave but happy memories to the forest.
We
dealt in the wild justice of the woods.
All
those pale serfs whom we have served will bless us,
All
those pale mouths which we have fed will praise us The widows we have holpen
pray for us
Our
Lady's blessed shrines throughout the land
Be
all the richer for us. (p.782)
Notice that Tennyson, scholarly and sensitive as ever to tradition, has
reintroduced the love of nature and the love of Mary, effectively extinguishing
the human love of Marian and Robin.
4.
This active but also dutiful Marian is transferred directly into that
enormously influential genre film – through which Robin, and to some degree
Marian, have become international figures in our time. In film she is a
spirited young woman, a flapper-like medieval Pauline in Peril as in the 1922
Douglas Fairbanks film. The triangle of Robin, Marian and a vigorous villain
relates to the generic patterns of stage play and film, but it also redefines the
role of the woman and provides her with both glossy appearance and, for all her
charm and often wit, the role of a prized object. These Marians do not, in my
experience, appear as the sorceress-like false Marian; their violent
possibilities and capacity for desire are firmly under control. This is the
children's fiction Marian, the Hollywood Marian and, interestingly enough, the
Marian of the 1984 HTV series, which in other respects, political, racial and
magical, was thoroughly radical in presentation but it had a teenage Laura
Ashley style Marian, with pale skin, big eyes, waves of hair and long white
dress.
However, that is not the only modern Marian. Like gentrification and
bourgeois institutions, feminism has also had a clear impact on the outlaw tradition,
and there has been in recent years a striking range of Marians who are more or
less, often less, energised in terms of contemporary ideas of women's roles and
capacities in love and what they would call a relationship. They do love Robin,
but they focus more on what he and she might do together, Robin and Marion as
the Clintons ,
perhaps the Blairs. I suppose you might call this Marion Ms Fitzwalter, but in
view of the fact that she often has real skills and can often operates in
traditional male roles, I prefer, in this context at least, to use our own
academic gender-neutral honorific and call her Dr Fitzwalter.
The first sign of this capable, achievement-focused, yet still Robin-loving
Marian was Olivia de Haviland in the 1938 Errol Flynn vehicle, who in addition
to wearing superbly silky dresses also shows herself late in the film of
bustling about to help the hero. The very long running and immensely popular
television Adventures of Robin Hood
starring Richard Greene which began in 1954 and ran on both sides of the
Atlantic with huge audiences for 147 episodes had a strong-minded, even rather
bossy, Marian, played mostly by Bernadette O’Farrell: just as this series’s
Robin has been seen as Squadron-Leader Robin Hood so she seemed much like an energetic
ATS officer from some British wartime film. This active, decisive Marian was
continued in the perhaps improbable form of Audrey Hepburn who played Marian in
Richard Lester's Robin and Marian of
1976. This Marian is wiser, calmer, much more far-seeing than the credibly
soldier-like Robin and Little John, and in particular it is she, knowing his
wound will incapacitate him seriously, who decides they should die together
from drinking the potion she gives him. The witch-like Prioress of the Gest becomes a wise woman, and Marian
has for the first time a major part in the plot and meaning of the text. Robin’s
love is inarticulate, but so is hers. At the end the Hepburn eyes tell the
whole story ! A sort of Tristan and Isolde of modern British realism.
That love in death did poorly at the box office, and a more robust form
of love in life, with some clear traces
of feminism have been visible in two
major Robin Hood films have been made since then; both give Marian a more
significant role than did the 1938 film, though neither gives her as much
impact as she had in the Fairbanks film, which has not been appreciated for its
gender complexity. 1991 saw both Robin
Hood : The Prince of Thieves starring Kevin Costner and Robin Hood with Patrick Bergin. Massively
successful as it was, the Costner vehicle has gained few favourable critical
opinions, and Maid Marian studies would see little reason to prize it. True,
the first view of Marian is in armour fighting Robin: the novel of the film
puts it like this:
Robin
hurled the deer's head at his assailant and threw himself after it. He managed
to grab the hand holding the dagger, spun his assailant round, and smashed the
hand against the wall until the dagger fell from numbed fingers. They struggled
together, and Robin quickly realised he was by far the stronger. He waded into
his assailant with both fists, and the masked man collapsed. Robin stood over
him for a moment, panting for breath, and then reached down and tore off the
metal mask. Long hair tumbled free, and Robin stared blankly back at the
beautiful woman staring back at him.
The door flew open and Azeem burst in,
scimitar at the ready. Robin looked round, startled, and the woman seized the
opportunity to punch him viciously in the groin. Robin sank to his knees beside
her and smiled with clenched teeth.
`Hello, Marian.' (p.66)
It is not explained why, having previously heard he is Robin, Marian
fights him at all; still less why, when seeing him in front of her, she clouts
him in the groin. Perhaps it is an unmotivated manoeuvre to construct a double
Marian -- both fiercely aggressive and then sweet and supportive. But this
tough love disappears, as most threats do in a Hollywood
movie. By the end she has been as usual thoroughly imprisoned and in need of
rescue in her final enfeebled state and stereotypical gender position:
He
took Marian into his arms, and for a long moment they stood together, losing
themselves in each other. Marian raised a trembling hand to Robin's face, as
though half-afraid he might disappear like a dream.
`You
came for me ! You are alive!'
Robin
held her eyes with his. `I would die, before I let another man have you.'
They
kissed as if they were never going to stop.
(pp.232-3)
We do not have the advantage of a novel or script of the 1991 Bergin as
Robin picture but it had, along with a lower budget, a much simpler story, a
more roguish hero, a more dynamic concept and playing of Marian and a more
interesting version of their love. Uma Thurman plays Marian as strong and
self-willed, refusing outright to marry the husband chosen by her guardian. From
the start we are shown Marian gazing repeatedly and secretly at the handsome
Robin, an interesting reversal of the usual scopic relishing of her beauty. She
is committed as a lover before Robin is. This Marian herself frustrates the
`false Marian' when disguised as a boy: as she and Robin escape she, still as a
boy, plants a warm and initially gender-disruptive kiss on his mouth. The film
both raises and dismisses the homosocial;/homosexual possibility of forest
love. Nevertheless it would hardly be true to describe this Marian as a
feminist figure or the film as in any significant way feminist or changing the
structure of a spirit but eventually submissive Marian. Her feeling and vigour
is naturalised, elided into a sort of mythic womanhood as she says of Robin `he
makes the bees buzz’, and they are married in a
distinctly fertility-linked May-ritual context.
Since Thurman’s fine rendition Marian has not done too well in visual
form. In the largely regrettable 1996 New
Adventures of Robin Hood, notable for being shot in Lithuania and
introducing elements of Californian psychobabble to the narrative and dialogue,
a posturing matinee idol Robin has as
partner a busy, stocky, leather-shorts-wearing Marian who was clearly, if
unfortunately, related to Xena the Warrior Princess. Just as lurid, in a less
unselfconscious way was Disney’s Princess
of Thieves where the very young – even younger – Keira Knightly played
Gwen, daughter of Robin Hood, who leads a geographically very improbable
resistance against bad Prince John and ends up as willing mistress to an
invented King of England, Phillip I. The American love of simulacra rather than
reality sometimes does seem quite perverse.
But Keira was at least very pretty. That has been denied more recent
Marians. Then the BBC television series beginning in 2006 and starring Jonas
Armstrong as a trendily stubbled youthful Robin, returned in despair from the
crusades, laced all positive romance and, perhaps to attract a very young
audience, also lacked a girly Marian: Lucy Griffiths played the part with
solidity of manner and physique. The 2010 film featuring Russell Crowe was
planned in the aftermath of 9/11 as showing how Robin was in fact an agent of
state security: that plan was, perhaps sadly, dropped but uncertainty remained.
Reports hold that the chosen Marian, Siena
Miller seemed far too young and delicate against the portly and not very young
Crowe. She was replaced by Cate Blanchett, who showed her real acting skills by
appearing without any trace of glamour, much as the film plodded toward a banal
conclusion about thirteenth-century politics, as found in very dull
nineteenth-century novels.
5.
Novelists have worked hardest at recasting Marian and seeing love in the
forest as an egalitarian, or even woman on top, relationship. In Robin
McKinley's The Outlaws of Sherwood
(1988) Marian is a well-born lover who repeatedly visits Robin in the forest,
knows its topography better than any of the newly arrived outlaws, and is also
the best of them with a long-bow: in an elegant reversal it is she, disguised
as Robin Hood, who wins the archery tournament and indeed at the end King
Richard wants her to be the new Sheriff when the pardoned outlaws go with him
on crusade. But the novel sees her as a facilitator of resistance rather than
an agent of it; she is never really one of the outlaws, and it is they who
provide the title of the book.
A shift towards Marian as central figure is indicated in the title of
Jennifer Roberson's novel Lady of the
Forest (1992), the fullest and so far the most serious of the Marian-focused
texts. Marian's father died on crusade
and the message brought back by the surviving Robert of Locksley, son of the Earl
of Huntington, is that she should, for her protection marry the Sheriff of
Nottingham. There is in the presentation of Marian something of Jane Austen's
sense of the constrained nature of woman's life and desire, and the difficult
path towards the liberation of true love, which is here also a shared love of
freedom and resistance. In general, Roberson's Marian is a rather responsible
figure who is with some skill put into the centre of the plot and made the
focal intelligence of the book and of the love between her and Robin.
Gayle Feyrer's The Thief's
Mistress (1996) marks a new stage in Marian's renovation partly by making
her a serious and successful fighter and also by following the sexually
explicit lines of recent fiction. Love in the forest becomes sex and shopping.
The handsome Guy of Gisborne takes her shopping in Nottingham market, not quite
up to Harvey Nichols, it’s true, but he is also a forceful lover whose skills
are relished by both Marion
and the text. But she of course falls for the gentler charms of the true hero
Robin. Up-front as this novel is, and perhaps indicating love of royalties in
the forest as its prime target, it is still a notable modernisation of the
Marian-Robin relationship.
If these novels have moved towards a post-feminism Marian, it has not in
some ways gone very far in the direction of real feeling. But nor has it in
films, as discussed above. Comedy has, curiously, done more for love in the
forest. In The Zany Adventures of Robin
Hood (1984), an amusing farce from the makers of Love at First Bite, apart from a less than heroic Robin in
ill-fitting green tights played with relaxed spirit by George Segal, there is a
Marian out of Valley of the Dolls,
played to the hilt by Morgan Fairchild: languishing in a negligee she cries
out, in wry frustration, `I'll soon be Old Maid Marian.' Equally Amy Yasbeck as
Marian in Mel Brooks' Robin Hood: Men in
Tights (1993), is definitely in love with her Robin, just as her huge
Teutonic maid is consumed with lust for the equally large, though very shy,
Little John.
Another parodic version, the best I think, of love in the forest is
realised through the Marian of Robin Hood
: A High Spirited Tale of Adventure (1981), a Muppet production. Robin is `
a bold and chivalrous frog who is seized by Sheriff Gonzo. In the text version,
it reads:
Maid
Marian was in truth an extremely glamorous pig who had fallen in love with
Robin Hood and had come to live in the forest to cook and sew for her frog and
his merry men. The problem was that she hated living under the greenwood tree,
or any trees for that matter...
However,
at this moment of crisis she surpassed everyone by quickly organising a
brilliant campaign to rescue their leader. `We go to the Sheriff's castle and
take him back.'
Leading a band of brave chickens, she rescues Robin.
`Nice
work, guys,' said Robin to his merry men. `I knew you could do it.'
`Hem,
Robbie,' said Maid Marian. `It wasn't all done by the guys, mon cher. So how
about an itsy-bitsy kissy for moi, your lady fair and mastermind of this
gallant rescue.
She
closed her eyes and puckered up her lips, expectantly. Robin Hood leaned
towards Maid Marian, then picked up her hand and shook it heartily.
`Thanks
a lot, Maid Marian,' said Robin. `Now I've got to rescue the Judge.'
This is painful love, but another feminist comedy avoids even that. The
BBC television series Maid Marian and her
Merry Men constructs a relationship between a highly competent woman and a
total weakling. Marian, played
vigorously by Kate Loneragan, in charge of a rag-bag of dissidents among whom
the last and definitely least is a melodramatically handsome dress-designer
entitled Robin of Kensington. Any possibilities of a feminist effect are
massively carnivalised - in spite of the memorability of some playfully
liberationist lines as when Marian plans to recruit a band of `highly
attractive respectable young men who are just a little bit rough.'
In most
recent visual versions love in the forest is assumed, and found distinctly
limited, a good basis for a joke, or in
need of some spicing up via generic forms of vitality, from the final
procession in the 1991 Bergin film to the girlish glamour of Keira Knightley. But
it may well be that a real representation of love in the forest as is attempted
in the Costner film and some of the novels, is a shallow-rooted part of the
outlaw story. It seems to be only the sentimental traditions of the last two centuries that have
in fact incorporated love into the forest in a traditional boy and girl way
-–and even then it has not taken thrived very well, so leading to the parodies
and largely negative variations I have just been discussing.
But there has always been a love of something in the forest of the
outlaw stories – the love of freedom of course, and that has been much in
evidence in the past century as well as in the middle ages, and in many
different versions. The essence of the outlaw tradition is that Robin, and his
associates, are good outlaws: they resist the
existing law when it is seen to be oppressive. In recent times, this has
also been true of the treatment of human love in the forest, whether the
resistance is feminist, gay, ironic, or just asserting true emotional bonds
between two people. In love as in arrow-shooting – and the two may have a basic
connection after all – the Robin Hood tradition is both rich and variable, and
one of those variations is the redevelopment of the attitudes to love in the
forest have led to a position where we now need increasingly to call it the
Maid Marian tradition. Whatever form the love may take, audiences certainly
love the story of the forest and the varying, exciting, insistently political,
interactions of the people in the forest.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
`Robin
Hood and the Monk’, ballad, c.1450
The Gest of Robin Hood, ballad epic, c.1500
Anthony
Munday, The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington , play, 1598
Michael
Drayton, Poly-Olbion, poem, 1622
Ben
Jonson, The Sad Shepherd,
play/masque, c.1632
`Robin
Hood and Maid Marian’, ballad, c.1680
Thomas
Love Peacock, Maid Marian, novella,
1822
Pierce
Egan, Robin Hood and Little John,
novel , 1840
Alfred
Tennyson, The Foresters, play, 1891
Robin
McKinley, The Outlaws of Sherwood,
novel , 1988
Jennifer
Roberson, Lady of the Forest, novel,
1992
Gayle
Feyrer, The Thief’s Mistress , novel,
1996
Theresa
Tomlinson, The Forestwife, 1993
Films
and television:
Robin Hood (Douglas Fairbanks),
1922
The Adventures of Robin Hood (Errol Flynn), 1938
The Adventures of Robin Hood (Richard Greene), 1955
– 8
Robin of Sherwood, (Michael Praed), 1984
Maid Marian and Her Merry Men (Kate Lonergan), 1988
Robin Hood: A High-Spirited Tale
of Adventure (Kermit),
1981
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Kevin Costner), 1991
Robin Hood (Patrick Bergin), 1991
Robin Hood: Men in Tights (Cary Elwes), 1993
The New Adventures of Robin Hood (Matthew Porretta),
1997-9
Princess of Thieves (Keira Knightley),
2001
Robin Hood (Jonas Armstrong),
2006
Robin Hood (Russell Crowe), 2010
FURTHER
READING :
The ballads can be found in Rymes of Robin Hood, ed. R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor (new edition,
Sutton, Stroud, 1996) and also in Robin
Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. S. Knight and T.Ohlgren (Western Michigan
University, Kalamazoo, 1998).
For
commentary and analysis on the tradition, see Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English
Outlaw (Blackwell, Oxford, 1994), Jeffrey Singman, Robin Hood: The Shaping of a Legend (Greenwood, Westport, 1998) and
Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic
Biography (Cornell University Press, Cornell, 2003). Collections of
scholarly essays on the tradition are Robin
Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression and Justice, ed. Thomas
Hahn (Brewer, Cambridge , 2000), Robin Hood Medieval and Post-Medieval,
ed. Helen Phillips (Four Courts Press, Dublin , 2004). .
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