Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography. By Stephen Knight. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xxi + 247, notes, works cited, index, ISBN 0-8014-3885-3, cloth.)

Stephen Knight’s Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography is a thorough overview of the Robin Hood tradition in literature, performance and popular culture, from the earliest medieval references to modern film versions. Between the historical and mythic approaches to the study of the legend, Knight treads the middle ground of literary interpretation. In his analysis, Knight posits four roughly chronological (though sometimes overlapping) manifestations of the hero — “Bold Robin Hood”, the medieval social bandit; “Robert, Earl of Huntington”, the gentrified hero of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries; “Robin Hood, Esquire”, the product of nineteenth century Romanticism; and “Robin Hood of Hollywood”. These four categories serve as chapter divisions within the book. At times, however, this organizational structure seems overly simplistic and awkward. For instance, the last chapter, “Robin Hood of Hollywood”, becomes a catch-all for twentieth century versions of the legend, including children’s storybooks, feminist popular fiction, and scholarly analyses, many of which have very little to do with the filmic tradition. Knight’s overview of the legend is quite comprehensive. In his survey of the extant theatrical versions of the legend from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many of them obscure, he traces the origins and development of plot and character motifs that have become canonical. By focusing on these obscure dramatic works, Knight elegantly elucidates the cultural continuity between the much-studied medieval beginnings of the tradition and its more familiar form in modern popular culture. Strangely, this monograph is not Knight’s first comprehensive study of the Robin Hood tradition. In 1994, he published Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw, which, by its title, would seem to need no sequel. In fact, despite differences in organization and focus, there is an enormous amount of overlap between the two volumes. New scholarship in the field has certainly arisen over the intervening decade, perhaps most notably Jeffrey Singman’s startling new survey of the tradition, Robin Hood: The Shaping of the Legend, published in 1998. Using material from the Records of Early English Drama project [REED], which had previously been overlooked by Robin Hood scholars, Singman was able to demonstrate that the “May Games” were likely the dominant medium of transmission for the legend during the sixteenth century. However, although Knight endorses Singman’s findings, Knight’s discussion of this intriguing new material is quite brief. Indeed, since he personally views the Robin Hood of the play-games as more “benign,” less “confrontational” and less “risky” than the “bold” hero of the ballads (12-13), Knight seems almost uninterested in decoding the social and symbolic meaning of these festivities, which he actually dealt with in greater detail in his earlier book. While Knight acknowledges the “multifaceted potency” (xiii) of Robin Hood as an enduring cultural icon, and criticizes what he considers “mono-interpretation” (xiii) by some other scholars, his own analysis of the outlaw hero is ultimately a reductionist one as well. Knight concludes, in quite a definitive tone, that “Robin Hood always represents resistance to authority” (208), and that this resistance is the “key element” (210) of the myth. For Knight, the multiplicity and complexity of meaning encoded in the legend arises primarily from the variety of ways in which this central theme of resistance has been played out within the changing sociopolitical contexts of the past six centuries. Other potent symbolism within the myth, such as that evoked by the fertile forest setting and the consistent seasonal timing of both the ballads and the play-games, receives scant attention in Knight’s interpretation. Nevertheless, Knight expresses a fascination with, and an admiration for, interpretive approaches that explore the potential mythic meaning of the …