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89 pages

English

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Who and what was Robin Hood? Why is an outlaw from 14th century England still a hero today, with films, festivals and songs dedicated to his memory? Robin Hood: People's Outlaw and Forest Hero explores the historical evidence and cultural significance of the legend of Robin Hood. With text by Paul Buhle and comics and assorted drawings by Christopher Hutchinson, it adds another dimension to the history and meaning of rebellion. It also features 30 pages of collages and comic art, recuperating seven centuries' worth of artistic interpretation.

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Graphic novel

History

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Publié par	PM Press
Date de parution	08 décembre 2011
Nombre de lectures	12
EAN13	9781604866599
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

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Robin Hood: People’s Outlaw and Forest Hero; A Graphic Guide
Paul Buhle with illustrations by Chris Hutchinson, Gary Dumm and Sharon Rudahl
This edition © 2011 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978–1–60486–318–5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010916481
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Back cover image: "CLR James – The Midnight Robber" banner by Mike Alewitz 5’ x 7’ /2010 www.alewitz.com
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AN INTRODUCTION Why Robin Hood? Why Now?
CHAPTER 1 Robin’s Historical Contexts
Gary Dumm, "Lollards and Rebels"
CHAPTER 2 Revolutions and Poets: The Uprising of 1381, Piers Plowman , and the Robin Hood Narrative
Chris Hutchinson, "Robin’s Adventures"
CHAPTER 3 Robin Hood, Media Man
CHAPTER 4 Green Robin/Spirit Robin
Sharon Rudahl, "In Search of Maid Marian"
CHAPTER 5 Conclusion: Robin of Global Fear, Robin of Global Hope
Chris Hutchinson, "Robin’s World and Our World"
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Acknowledgments
Much thanks to the editors and production folks at PM especially Ramsey Kanaan, Romy Ruukel, Gregory Nipper, and Brian Layng and to the critics of the text who generously gave us criticisms on matters large and small: Kent Worcester, Dave Wagner, Bill Jones, Albert Ruben (a script editor of television’s Adventures of Robin Hood ), and Nick Whitam. David Berger’s exceptional knowledge about British life, literature, and culture at large has been a great help. The Scurrah Wainwright Trust and Charity supplied funds for the illustration of this book, and their assistance is gratefully acknowledged. In lieu of a formal dedication, I would like to remember two great historians my friend E.P. Thompson and my mentor, C.L.R. James and one great screenwriter, my oral history subject Ring Lardner, Jr., who more brilliantly than anyone else in the twentieth century made Robin an eternal revolutionary.
AN INTRODUCTION
Why Robin Hood? Why Now?
"When the forest was cut down, where did the mystery go? Some say there were fairies in the forest angry, bad-tempered creatures (the unwashed children of Eve), ill-met by moonlight, who loitered with intent on banks of wild thyme listening furiously to the encroaching axes. Where did they go when the forest no longer existed?"
Kate Atkinson, Human Croquet (1997)
"The traditions which nourished Shakespeare or Dante or Homer the cross-cultural traditions which nourished those writers and which bore upon the great pre-Columbian sculptors those traditions are alive, and buried within ourselves, within the world’s unconscious…. There is a tradition…. which nourishes us even though it appears to have vanished."
Wilson Harris, "Cross Cultural Community and the Womb of Space," The Selected Essays of Wilson Harris:
The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination (1999)
In the late 1950s, a handful of peaceniks protested mandatory ROTC on a major U.S. university campus by carrying signs and wearing green buttons. Back when The Adventures of Robin Hood was a giant hit on television, most everybody knew that green was Robin Hood’s color and that Robin could not side with the king’s soldiers or future soldiers of any Empire. Five decades later, the lead protagonist of a cult favorite American cable show, Leverage , announces at the beginning of each episode: "The rich and the powerful take what they want; we steal it back for you."
It’s a fitting motto for heroes of the twenty-first century. Admittedly, resistance to injustice has not as yet returned to the level of those apprentices and craftsmen in Edinburgh, Scotland, who in 1561 chose to come together "efter the auld wikid maner of Robene Hude": they elected a leader as "Lord of Inobedience" and stormed past the magistrates, through the city gates, up to Castle Hill where they displayed their unwillingness to accept current work-and-wage conditions. But as a global society, we are clearly still thinking about the need for Robin Hood.
After all, we live in something rapidly approaching a Robin Hood era. The rich and powerful now command almost every corner of the planet and, in order to maintain their control, threaten to despoil every natural resource to the point of exhaustion. Meanwhile, billions of people are impoverished below levels of decency maintained during centuries of subsistence living. In this historical moment, the organized forces of egalitarian resistance and even their ideologies seem to be reduced to near nonexistence, or turned against themselves in the name of supreme individualism. Robin’s Greenwood, the global forest, is disappearing chunks at a time. Yet, resistance to authority, of one kind or another, continues and, given worsening conditions, is likely to increase. Robin Hood lives on as a figure of tomorrow, rather than just yesterday, in the streets of Cairo, Egypt, and Madison, Wisconsin, USA, among the many other places where people dream of a better life and struggle for it openly, cheerful to be rebellious.
No other medieval European saga has had the staying power of Robin Hood; no other is wrapped up simultaneously in class conflict (or something very much like class conflict), the rights of citizenship in their early definitions, defense of the ecological systems against devastation, and the imagined utopia of freedom disappearing into a mythical past with centuries-long village Mayday festivals with music, dance, and heavy undertones of fertility rites.
No wonder, then, that theater and poetry seized the subject early on, and that modern communications, from nineteenth-century penny newspapers and "yellow back" cheap novels to modern-day comic strips, comic books, pulp magazines, and assorted media have all had their Robin Hood characters. No wonder that the early Robin films set records for lavish production and box-office records for audience response. No wonder that television productions of Robin have pressed issues of civil liberties and that many of the later films, if distinctly mediocre, nevertheless seem to refresh the subject, offering a source of summer holiday distractions that never quite disguise darker themes within. The most successful of television lyrics for this theme, ending, "Feared by the bad/loved by the good/Robin Hood," still offer reminders for aging sentimentalists of the Civil Rights and New Left days. Devised for the hit series of the 1950s, actually written by Marxist-minded men and women on the run from the FBI, that Robin Hood perfectly expressed the subtler forms of struggle against Empire. And the series was really funny, too.
Robin Hood’s status may be especially important in our time of extended imperial crises. In an understated 1976 film, Robin and Marian , directed by the talented avant-gardist Richard Lester, the protagonist is a weary veteran of the Crusades (needless and bloody invasion/occupations). Sean Connery’s Robin, Audrey Hepburn’s Marian (who in this version is a prioress aiding the poor while battling against authorities) and Robert Shaw’s repressive but deeply fatalistic Sheriff of Nottingham light up the screen in a film shot beautifully in a Spanish forest that looks like some untouched Sherwood. It is the only film version in which Robin dies.
The blowback of the Crusades brings a dose of multiculturalism: not the threat from "outsider" Arabs so much feared after 9/11, but the persona of the Outsider who has, since at least the early 1990s, become necessary for the plot. Kevin Costner’s Robin in Robin Hood: Prince of Th ieves has for this reason a friendly "Saracen," played by Morgan Freeman. More interesting adaptations to follow have Middle Eastern herbalists, especially women, and even the occasional Rastaman whose presence reflects the Anglo-Caribbean uses of Robin Hood against Empire. Following the similarly pointless and bloody U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, the crisis of Empire is seemingly an inescapable part of Robin’s fate and his repertoire.
Most recently, however, Ridley Scott’s 2010 mega-feature Robin Hood , easily among the least faithful adaptations of Robin’s tale ever made, has placed Robin in battle, in a massively staged prequel, with hundreds of armed and warring soldiers previously unknown to the Robin narrative. Th is Robin also seeks to redeem or at least defend embattled villagers, but in practice, only manages to protect one empire against another. The appearance of the film and its massive accompanying publicity nevertheless sparked yet one more in a seemingly endless series of Robin revivals. Within the months before and after the film’s release, a handful of new books appeared, along with the publication of new scholarly studies, new Robinesque features of local summer festivals, an occasional Robin Hood musical comedy, and a spate of other Robin-connected publicity. The contexts of the films, books (mainly novels for young readers), plays and theme-events are so varied, the purposes so divided between money-making, rebellious sentiment and good-weather exuberance, that any effort to divine a single meaning to them all would be foolish. We know that Robin Hoodness is alive and well, with all its complications.
In his famous scholarly analysis, British historian Eric Hobsbawm dubbed the "Robin Hood-type outlaw" a "primitive rebel," because the outlaw lived in a peasant society with no prospect or even idea of social transformation. The outlaw did, however, have the sympathy of the oppressed people, especially those whose lands had been recently stolen by lords, merchants, invading forces allied with local barons, or anyone with the armed power to do so. Robin Hood, then, the rebellious persona considered generical