“If they must have a British Worthy, they
would have Robin Hood”
Stephen Basdeo
Leeds Trinity University
stephen.basdeo@outlook.com
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Fig. 1. Frontispiece of Joseph Addison, from Robert Cochrane, ed., The English Essayists: A Comprehensive Selection from the Works of the Great Essayists from Lord Bacon to John Ruskin (London:
William P. Nimmo, 1876).
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Amongst the great writers of eighteenth-century
literature, the names of two men stand out: Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729) and
Joseph Addison (1672-1719). These two quintessentially “Augustan” [1] writers
dominated the literary marketplace between 1709 and 1715 through their essay
periodicals The Tatler and The Spectator. Due to the expiration of
the Licensing Act in 1695, which saw the end of government censorship, there
was an explosion of printed material, [2] and Addison and Steele’s periodicals
were part of this expansion in the availability of print culture. The public
appetite for literature it seemed could not be sated. Although these
periodicals had a seemingly modest circulation of just 3,000 copies, Addison
claimed a readership for The Spectator
that was somewhere approaching 60,000. [3] The fame of The Tatler and The Spectator also
spread overseas: James Madison (1751-1836), the fourth President of the United
States, recalled having read these periodicals daily (which by his time had
been bound into 8 volumes and gone through numerous editions). [4] Addison’s
high estimate for the number of readers is not unreasonable, for periodicals
such as The Tatler, like many of the
other periodicals available in the early eighteenth century, were designed to
be read and debated in public arenas such as the coffeehouse and the tavern,
and periodicals, or “moral weeklies” as Jurgen Habermas calls them, contributed
to the birth of the bourgeois public sphere, or as we might phrase it today,
public opinion. [5] Through the essays in these periodicals these authors
promoted a culture of aristocratic politeness among urban readers, in which learning
and self-improvement were the order of the day. [6]
It
is Addison’s reference to Robin Hood in the eighty-first issue of The Tatler which I would like to bring
to your attention. He opens his essay with a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid:
Hic Manus ob Patriam pugnando
Vulnera passi,
Quique pii Vates & Phaebo
digna locuti,
Inventas aut qui Vitam excoluere
per Artes,
Quique sui memores alios fecere
merendo.
Here are the hands that suffered wounds by fighting for their country
And those devoted poets, who spoke words worth of Phoebus
Or those who improved life through learned arts
And those who by their merits caused others to remember them. [7]
Addison
tells his reader that he was musing upon the notion of immortality: “There are
two Kinds of Immortality; that which the Soul enjoys after this Life, and that
imaginary Existence by which Men live in their Fame and Reputation.” [8] It is
with the second type of immortality that Addison concerns himself with in his
essay, and he says that he spent the whole afternoon mentally cataloguing the
various heroes and “military Worthies” that have appeared throughout world
history. [9] He was so preoccupied with this matter, he says, that after many
hours awake thinking it over, he fell into a deep sleep and proceeded to have a
dream in which he was invited into a great hall in which a number of
prestigious persons entered:
The
first who step’d forward, was a beautiful and blooming Hero, and as I heard by
the Murmurs round me, Alexander the Great.
He was conducted by a Crowd of Historians. [10]
Other ancient worthies enter: Xenophon,
Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, Cicero, Hannibal, Cato, Pompey the
Great, Augustus; it is all very classical, which of course ties into the
neoclassical modes of the eighteenth century.
All of these worthies sit at a table, but it
is revealed that there is an empty seat at the table where these illustrious
heroes are seated. They begin to whisper among themselves and discuss who, from
British history, is worthy to join them at their table. Would they choose King
Arthur? He had, after all, been called a “British Worthy” only a few years
prior in John Dryden’s opera King Arthur;
or, the British Worthy (1691). How about King Alfred, the only English King
ever to have been given the epithet “the great”? No—neither of these men are
good enough in the estimation of men such as Caesar and Augustus. They conclude
by saying that, “if they must have a British Worthy, they would have Robin Hood.”
[11] An outlaw who (supposedly) lived in the thirteenth century was greater
than all of the other heroes of English history, and worthy enough to take his
place amongst the likes of Alexander and Caesar.
In Addison’s essay all of the ancient
worthies are from the Classical period, with the exception of Robin Hood. Indeed,
Addison’s placing of Robin Hood—a medieval figure—among all those classical
heroes seems incongruent. In the early part of the eighteenth century,
whilst it was recognised that the Middle Ages were integral to Europe’s past, the
period was “not much liked” by scholars and thinkers.[12] And 1750 is the date
that Peter Raedt cites as having been the year when eighteenth-century scholars
stopped being dismissive of the Middle Ages as a barbaric interlude between
antiquity and the “enlightened” eighteenth century and the period began to be
appreciated in its own right.[13] Raedt concentrates his article on Germany,
and while some of his points are applicable to England, at the same time
England seems to have never truly “lost” an appreciation of its medieval past
during the early part of the eighteenth century. Dryden’s and Purcell’s King Arthur has already been cited, and
Dryden also “translated” (into perfectly rhyming couplets) parts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in his Fables: Ancient and Modern (1700).
Handel also produced a medievalist opera Rinaldo
(1711) set during the time of the First Crusade (1096-1099). Thomas Arne and
James Thomson also authored the libretto for the opera Alfred (1740), known most famously today for its finale Rule Britannia! An appreciation for
England’s medieval past also manifested itself in architecture, most famously
in the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe, designed in 1734 by William Kent.
Whilst the marble busts of most of the great men on display there are mostly
from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, there are two medieval figures
present: King Alfred and Edward, the Black Prince.
Yet Addison’s idealisation of Robin Hood as a
British Worthy is an anomaly when compared to the works of Arne who venerated a
King, Alfred, and the establishment figures that were sculpted in marble by
William Kent. Robin is different to these other illustrious persons because he
is an outlaw. And Addison’s reference to Robin Hood is certainly more positive
than the one which would appear in Alexander Smith’s A Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious
Highwaymen (1719) only a few years after Addison was writing, where Robin
is described as a “wicked, licentious” individual. [14] This makes it seem odd
that Addison would choose Robin Hood to make a point in a “moral weekly.” I
have two theories about this. Firstly, it would seem that Robin Hood was by the
early eighteenth century gentrified enough in the public consciousness for him
to be used in such a way. The gentrification process had begun with Anthony
Munday’s two plays The Downfall of Robert
Earl of Huntington and The Death of
Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1597-98) where Robin is recast firmly as an
establishment figure. [15] The second is that an idealisation of Robin Hood
fits in with eighteenth-century contemporaries’ love of liberty. In a later
issue of The Tatler, Addison wrote
about another vision he had in which he witnessed the goddess of Liberty
presiding over the prosperity of the nation. [16] Although crime was
increasingly viewed as a problem during the eighteenth century, as indicated by
Fielding’s lament that the streets of London would soon become impassable
except “without the utmost hazard,” [17] liberty-loving men of Georgian England
resisted any attempt by the government to form a professional police force. In
a rather odd sort of way, highwaymen (and Robin is the original highwayman)
were loved by the people because to many they were seen to embody liberty. [18]
People of all ranks held a degree of admiration for highwaymen. At the trial of
the “Gentleman Highwayman,” James Maclaine (1724-1750), for example, “many
persons of rank of both sexes attended his examination, several of whom were so
affected with his situation that they contributed liberally towards his support.”
[19] This admiration of outlaws and highwaymen perhaps then explains why Smith,
whose Highwaymen is a heavily
moralist text, is so keen to recast Robin Hood in a negative light, for he
evidently disagrees with the prevailing admiration for both Robin Hood and contemporary
criminals.
Addison’s and others’ representations of
Robin Hood raise questions as to whether the so-called ‘medieval revival’ of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was actually much of a
‘revival’ at all. In the eighteenth century, however, the Robin Hood tradition
has a neoclassical overlay, in a similar manner to Ben Jonson’s play The Sad Shepherd; or, a Tale of Robin Hood
(1631), where the story of Robin Hood is portrayed as a classical and
quasi-tragic story of lost pastoral love. [20] Drawing further connections with
antiquity, in the play Maid Marian is equated with the goddess Diana. [21] After
Addison was writing, Ely Hargroves, in Anecdotes
of Archery (1792), catalogues all of the greatest archers in history,
highlighting many of the illustrious archers of history such as Pandarus,
Ulysees, Aeneas, and Robin Hood. [22] As Robin Hood scholars we are often told
that the credit for popularising the medieval period rests largely with Sir
Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), a
novel which, in the words of John Henry Newman (1801-1890), ‘first turned men's
minds in the direction of the Middle Ages.’ [23] Whilst Scott’s historicist vision
of the Robin Hood tradition was different to the neoclassical eighteenth-century
interpretations of it discussed above, a sustained interest, admiration even,
for medieval figures can be traced throughout the eighteenth century, not just
from the Gothic Revival of mid-to-late part of the century onwards.
In conclusion, whilst many early eighteenth-century
appropriations of Robin Hood are negative, Addison’s elevation of Robin Hood
into the status of a “worthy” in the face of negative interpretations is
interesting for it confirms to us that the gentrification process was not a
linear process but an uneven one. Addison’s essay is the only “gentrified”
representation of Robin Hood (gentrified in the sense that he is elevated into
someone equal to the heroes of antiquity) which I have managed to find between
c.1700 and c.1730 and is certainly deserving of consideration. It is often
fleeting comments about Robin Hood in later texts such as The Tatler which allow us to map and construct an idea of how
people in past ages interpreted the legend at various points in its history. By
1709 it seems that Robin’s status was firmly gentrified in public consciousness
for Joseph Addison to speak about him in a “moral weekly.”
Notes
[1] “Augustan,” named after the Roman
Emperor, Augustus, is the term usually applied to “high” culture in England
which flourished during the reigns of Queen Anne and George I. It is so called
because artists and writers imitated Classical styles in their works, e.g.
Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (in
imitation of the Iliad), or his Imitations of Horace.
[2] Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England, 1689-1727, The New Oxford History of
England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 177.
[3] Joseph Addison, “The Spectator, Number
10.” [1711] The Spectator: A New Edition,
Reproducing the Original Text, Both as First Issued and as Corrected by its
Authors. Ed. Henry Morley (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1880), 19.
[4] Ralph Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 1971), 39.
[5] See Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (London: Polity,
1989).
[6] James V. H. Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe, New Approaches to
European History 22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 96.
[7] “No. 81,” in The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond. 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1987), 2: 13-21. Bond notes that but “for the last two sentences, this number
is by Addison,” 13. The Latin verse from Virgil included at the beginning of
Addison’s article for my essay is translated by Richard Thomason (Ph.D. student
at the University of Leeds).
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 2: 19.
[10] Ibid., 2: 17.
[11] Ibid., 2: 20.
[12] Peter Raedt, “Representations of the
Middle Ages in Enlightenment Historiography,” The Journal of Medieval History 5, no. 1 (2002): 1-20 at 1.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Alexander Smith, A Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious
Highwaymen. Ed. Arthur Heyward
(London: George Routledge & Sons, 1933), 412.
[15] Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2003), 44.
[16] “No. 161,” in Bond, The Tatler, 2: 397-401. This issue is also authored by Addison.
[17] Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (Dublin:
G. Faulkner, 1751), 1.
[18] Lucy Moore, Conmen & Cutpurses: Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld
(London: Penguin, 2001), xiii.
[19] Andrew Knapp & William Baldwin ed.
“JAMES MACLANE Called ‘The Gentleman Highwayman.’ Executed at Tyburn, 3rd of
October, 1750, for Highway Robbery.” The
Newgate Calendar. http://www.exclassics.com/newgate/ng234.htm
(accessed 26 August 2015).
[20] Stephen Knight, “‘Meere English Flocks’:
Ben Jonson’s The Sad Shepherd and the
Robin Hood Tradition,” in Robin Hood:
Medieval and Post-Medieval, ed. Helen Phillips (Dublin: Four Courts Press,
2005), 129-44 at 131.
[21] Ibid., 134.
[22] Ely Hargroves, Anecdotes of Archery from the Earliest Ages to the Year 1791 (York:
Printed for E. Hargroves, 1792), 1-17.
[23] Alice Chandler, “Sir Walter Scott and the
Medieval Revival,” Nineteenth-Century
Fiction 19, no. 4 (1965): 315-32 at 315.
