Marshall, John. Early English
Performance: Medieval Plays and Robin Hood Games: Shifting Paradigms in Early
English Drama Studies. Variorum Collected Studies. New York and Abingdon,
UK: Routledge, 2020. ISBN: 978-1138370937. $175.00. 367pp.
Reviewed by
Stephen Knight
University of
Melbourne
John Marshall is
well-known to scholars and students of earlier English literature as a
specialist on popular drama, notably the medieval town mystery cycles, and also
the more elusive Robin Hood activities usually called “play-games.” He has
published detailed explorations into the contexts and meanings of early English
public theatre, combining his personal interest as an actor, producer and
teacher of drama studies with a grasp of the scanty and often obscure financial
and public records that offer the only real evidence for what went on, and why
it went on, in the street theater of small English towns in the late medieval and
early modern periods.
Now retired, a research
fellow at Bristol University—at the heart of Robin Hood play-game country—he has
co-operated with Routledge in their Variorum project to reprint the research
essays of people recognized as specialists in their fields. This is one of a
series named, the same as this book’s subtitle, “Shifting Paradigms in Early
English Drama Studies,” edited currently by Philip Butterworth, a prolific
early theater scholar based at the University of Leeds.
The collection
offers nineteen essays published over thirty years up to 2017. Varying a good
deal in length—some are short special analyses, others quite wide-ranging
surveys of periods and contexts—they fall into four sections. First come five essays
on the Chester Whitsun mystery cycle plays, including the long and influential
essay from 1985 examining just how the Chester pageants were staged. The second
section is on the non-cycle plays Wisdom and Mankind and their
contexts and the third considers medieval depictions and modern productions of
the plays discussed in the previous two sections. The fourth set of six essays is
on “Robin Hood Games”: this material covers more than a third of the volume and
provides close, and closely-considered, research from 1998-2017 on these intriguing
performances which are still difficult to grasp fully, both in terms of their
own functions and meanings, and also their place in the larger tradition of Robin
Hood.
The sub-title for
Marshall’s “Robin Hood Games,” Section 4, is “Customary performance and raising
funds” and he brings the recording data into full analysis. Robin Hood scholars
will know that these events are elusive, in that no texts have survived, the
records are intermittent, and commentators have regarded them variously over
time. Occurring, or at least recorded, irregularly in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, with a clear emphasis on appearances in the south-west of
England and, somewhat later, in Scotland, they were first understood as ritualistic
regular late-May events, not linked to May-day but usually to a late May Whitsun,
when Robin would lead a procession from the nearby wood, or forest, to the center
of a town where celebratory events would place. As David Wiles showed in his 1981
book, this was eagerly interpreted by Robin Hood mythicists like Margaret
Murray and Robert Graves as Robin the Forest Lord, or simply the Green Man, enacting
a genial engagement with urban culture. But a closer study of the surviving records,
by Marshall and others, was to dismiss this mythic myth. Their analysis indicated
firstly that the play-game events were by no means regular—intermittently occasional
would be a better description. Then it was shown that the records had a
dominating interest in finance: both how much costumes, properties and services
cost, and also how much was raised to pay for local expenses, sometimes roads
and the like, but usually for the cost of repairs and improvements to the local
church.
Marshall’s work in
the reprinted essays substantially elaborates the anti-mythic elements of the “Robin
Hood Games.” He shows that the “Robin Hood Collections” were financially much
larger than the usual everyday activities—the Robin Hood income was usually up to
four pounds, while the Christmas “hogglers” (a term of mysterious origin and
implication), men going round beating on doors, would raise less than ten
shillings. The only financial rival he finds is the “St George Chapel Ale” held
at Christmas—as the play-games were also called “Robin Hood Ales,” the two
events were presumably parallel in structure, if temporally different.
Marshall is confident
that the merely occasional citation of Robin Hood play-game records is not
accidental, or a sign of casual record-keeping, but rather indicates that Robin
Hood urban activity was organized only when there was felt to be special and
substantial need for public money. This certainty is intriguing, and he
develops a context for it in the first essay in the section, a thorough account
of the records, especially financial ones, of the Robin Hood games in Croscombe,
Somerset, 1475-1538. These are churchwardens’ accounts, and the wardens
themselves usually were central in presenting the games—Marshall reports they
were “neither the wealthiest nor the poorest parishioners” and “for the most
part they were craftsmen of middling status” (260-1). Recent research has shown
that the south-western towns with Robin Hood play-games were not those run by
royalty or aristocracy, but by just those tradesmen and churchwardens who populate
the Croscombe records—hence Marshall’s judgement that Robin was a “hero of
communalism and autonomy, where the individual derives strength from the mutual
support of fellowship” (267).
If the play-games
in this way are not regular nature-myth activities, if in social terms they exploit
“horizontal ties,” not a “vertical line of hierarchy” (267), and also are special
and lucrative events for social purposes, there remains the question of how
they link to the Robin Hood outlaw myth, which is itself clearly in operation
at just the time when the non-outlaw play-game records begin to appear. This
interface is not a central theme for Marshall, but some of his detailed
evidence seems to cast new light on the issue. One link appears through his
description of the events of 1497 when Roger Marshall (well-named) was charged
with leading a riotous assembly in Willenhall, Staffordshire. To free two men
charged with assault, he came as Robin Hood and had, it was alleged, two
hundred followers. In his defense, he said they were imitating the people who
on “fere day” [fair] would gather money “to the profight of the chirches” [profit],
led by Robin Hood or the Abbot of Marham. (Marham was a real Norfolk place-name,
but was used at times—no doubt ironically suggesting “Mar-‘em”—in what seem to
have been church-satirical play-games.)
Other early
play-games and outlaw contacts exist. By about 1475 the Paston family were
sponsoring a short Robin Hood play which clearly involves freeing men from the
sheriff’s arrest, and seems to be a source for the later-recorded ballad “Robin
Hood and Guy of Gisborne.” It seems an easy step from the play-game communal
hero to the outlaw opponent of brutal law, especially after a period of human
and social strain like the mid-to-late fourteenth century. Another revealing link
is to be found in Richard Tardif’s essay “The Mistery of Robin Hood,” which argues
that the original audience of the ballads and the model for the outlaws were “urban
journeymen”—not now serfs, but not trade business owners either—they were free,
and variously oppressed, urban workers imagining through Robin Hood about a
near-town collective and resistant natural utopia. Tardif’s essay is in Words
and Words, ed. S. Knight and S. N. Mukherjee, Sydney, 1983.
The relative ease
of movement from respectable small-town funding-collectors to forms of social resistance
may well explain the sixteenth-century crack-down on Robin Hood play-games, as
in Edinburgh in 1561, but there are other interesting products of Marshall’s
research. His last essay, “Revisiting and Revising Robin Hood in Sixteenth-Century
London,” offers a detailed account of three contexts. First, the activities of a
robber who took the name “Greneleef” (also found in the Gest) and acted
in Robin Hood pageants. Then comes the very elaborate 1515 royal pageant at Shooters
Hill, near Greenwich. Finally he describes the mid-century account by Henry
Machyn of Robin Hood pageants, including one for midsummer—time is shifting, as
with the winter play-games in Scotland. Himself a tailor, Machyn probably
produced some of the settings and costumes. London itself, like the south-western
small towns, had its Robin Hood play-games/pageants that were intermittent,
money-oriented and elaborate—and fascinatingly, and knowingly, Marshall reports
that London itself was also not run by royalty or the aristocracy, but by its
own churchwarden-like freemen.
Marshall’s
long-standing interest in public pageants is recurrently informative in the
collection—the genre has not in the past been linked enough with the play-games,
and its special formality and importance may help to explain the irregularity
and also the lucrative nature of the Robin Hood urban activities; the pageants
too were far more than door-knocking. Marshall is also very interested in the
elaborate play-games costumes, major elements in the financial records: he has
a short essay on the appearance of Robin and others, including his compulsory “bycocket
hat” and sometimes even ostrich feathers, and suggests that the finely-outfitted
Robin had an impact not unlike that of Father Christmas.
Apart from the
Robin Hood third of this collection, recurrently enlightening is the close
study of the mystery plays. These are like the play-games church-oriented, but
thematically meaningful rather than church re-building-linked: there seems to
have been no special quest for income from them. They indeed have the regular
role of mythic practice formerly and wrongly imagined for the play-games, and in
general the mysteries have little overlap with the urban Robin Hood activities—apart
perhaps from the use of the pageant wagons, which interest Marshall a good deal.
They are one more item in the rich detail and searching analysis offered by
this valuable collection of the essays of a major medieval scholar.
