Meredith Anne Skura

Anthony Munday's “Gentrification” of Robin Hood

I February 1598, the popular playwright Anthony Munday wrote a two-part play about Robin Hood that presented the greenwood outlaw for the first time onstage as an exiled nobleman. The play was a success when the Admiral’s Company performed it at Henslowe’s Rose Theater, and they were invited to repeat it at court during the Christmas celebrations. Soon afterward Shakespeare composed As You Like It, his own greenwood play about an exiled nobleman, for the rival company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. As You Like It begins with feats of physical combat like the ones in the old Robin Hood plays and traces the adventures of its outlawed hero, Orlando (appropriately surnamed DeBoys or “from the wood”), when he flees to the forest of Arden to live “like the old Robin Hood of England” (1.1.116). In the three years or so spanning the turn of the century, this newly ennobled Robin appeared in five plays, as well as presiding in spirit over As You Like It. Students of the Robin Hood legend have regretted Robin’s gentrification, which as Tom Hayes puts it, “drains [the] social energy” of the old Robin Hood ballads about a yeoman fighting for social