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Why does Robin Hood keep coming back?
SourceWhy does Robin Hood keep coming back?
Green tights. Pointy cap. Bow and arrow. Russell Crowe is the latest actor to play the folk hero, and Chancellor Alistair Darling has also been cast as Robin Hood for taxing the rich. Why the enduring fascination with this bandit?
Nearly 800 years after he first featured in medieval ballads and stories - this mysterious outlaw called Robinhood, Robehod or Rabunhod - the legend now universally known as Robin Hood remains big news.
Robin and his Merry Men may be mythical creatures, the stuff of bawdy, beer-spilling folk tales from about 1228 onwards, but they are the most sympathised-with outlaws in history.
Best known for stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, Robin (depicted by some as a commoner, and others as the dispossessed Earl of Huntingdon) and his Merry Men (a group of "three score", or 60, outlawed yeomen, according to an early source) have become symbols of justice against greed and tyranny.
The band are said to have lived in Sherwood Forest in Nottingham, from where they launched raids on the wealthy and the wicked.
Although mentioned in documents in the 13th and 14th Centuries, it is in handwritten, ballad-style narratives of the 15th and 16th Centuries that he really takes shape.
In these, most of what we recognise as the stuff of Robin Hood's legend is already in place - his affection for the lower orders, his brilliance as an archer, his suspicion of clerics and sheriffs, his special respect for women (although Maid Marian, Robin's well-known love interest, does not appear in stories until later in the 16th Century).
A heady mix of camaraderie, rebellion, rich-bashing, living in the open air and a "will they/won't they?" romance, it's hardly surprising the story remains such powerful fictional fare, particularly on the silver screen.
The story received its first screen treatment in 1912 with a silent version, followed, variously, by Errol Flynn's technicolour romp, Disney's anthropomorphic foxes, Mel Brooks' comic take on the men in tights, and Kevin Costner's po-faced Robin whose thunder was comprehensively stolen by Alan Rickman's scenery-chewing Sheriff of Nottingham.
Now the wheels of the publicity machine are turning for the latest take, with newly-released photos of Russell Crowe playing the green-clad hero for Ridley Scott.
According to reports, it will be a gritty, historically accurate affair - no men in tights, no wistful conversations around open fires, just an armour-wearing, lightly bearded Crowe launching bow-and-arrow attacks on his ruthless enemies.
Epic battle
The appeal of the story to Hollywood as an action romp, good v evil affair, is clear. But might there be more to it than that? Was Robin Hood also a proto-socialist figure, even a very early one-man version of the welfare state, whose theft from the rich and provision to the poor encapsulates a deeper human desire for equality?
Might that explain why, at a time of recession and widespread criticism of "greedy bankers", it's expected that we will lap up another film?
At the same time, the BBC's Robin Hood is now in its third series.
And just as the new President of the United States has been renamed "Barack Robin Hood" by a leading American economist for his various bailout initiatives, the UK's Daily Mirror and Daily Telegraph depict Alistair Darling as the folk hero after he hiked the top tax rate in Wednesday's budget.
Thomas Hahn, professor of English at the University of Rochester, and author of numerous essays and books on Robin Hood, says the character's popularity has long represented people's frustrations with life in capitalist society.
"Robin Hood's appeal arises from primal desires for justice and equity," he says. "And though medieval in origins, this is a fantasy broad and deep enough to possess the imaginations of people in almost all times and places."
It's telling that the legend really sky-rocketed in the 16th and 17th Centuries - an era of the "earliest capitalist enterprises", says Prof Hahn - amongst ordinary people who found new economic systems alien and oppressive.
"His independence and anarchic resistance to all forms of authority - from corrupt local officials to the clergy - stood out against the expansive, complex, mysterious economic networks.
"Today, connecting Robin Hood to bailouts or demands for pay cuts [for the rich] draws upon the same suspicions and unease that his earliest readers and listeners felt about economic systems which, in far exceeding any common-sense experience, seemed out-of-control, oppressive and threatening."
Financial behaviour
But name-checking Robin Hood in debates about policy - whether on social justice, welfare, tax rates or bailouts - misses the essentially anarchic character of his legend.
"In the best retellings, Robin Hood almost always represents the opposite of 'policy' or rationalising our financial behaviour," says Prof Hahn.
"The Monty Python sketch gets it exactly right when it has a beleaguered Robin, having tried to develop a systematic programme of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, say: 'You know, this redistribution of wealth thing is considerably harder than it looks.'"
Rob Killick, a company chief executive in London and a writer on the recession, thinks the resurgence of Robin Hood isn't necessarily a good thing. Instead, it captures the low horizons gripping us in this economic downturn.
"Characters like Robin Hood have existed across culture and history, fulfilling a need for the helpless and hopeless to believe that someone is on their side."
Yet today's Robin Hood-style attack on bankers and fat cats is problematic, he says, because it can shut down serious debate about the recession, and super-simplify issues in terms of "good" and "evil".
Dr Julian Luxford, an expert on medieval writing at the University of St Andrews, also sounds a note of caution on the legend of Robin Hood. He recently caused a media storm when he uncovered a document, from the 1460s or 1470s, which described a Robin Hood who "infested Sherwood" with "continuous robberies" - suggesting he was not always so popular.
"Lack of provable historical status makes Robin Hood particularly malleable," says Dr Luxford, "And different ages and interests have fashioned their own Robin Hoods accordingly".
Indeed, he points out that, even as Barack Obama and Russell Crowe play heroic Robin Hood roles, "a new novel, casting Robin as a brutal murderer, is soon to emerge".
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