However, it was not just series that labelled themselves as ‘Classics’ that featured the outlaw. As comic books continued to become an ever more significant part of popular culture, Robin retained his place in them. In 1954, the American comic book industry, faced by a moral panic over the deleterious effects its products were supposedly having on the country’s impressionable youth, brought in its own self-regulating ‘Comics Code’. Since the very first provision of the code stated that, ‘Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals’, it might have been thought that a charismatic outlaw, with a taste for making his opponents look very foolish indeed, would fall victim to it and be banned from the pages of the new, squeaky clean comics. In fact, the decade saw ever more Robin Hood comics on the market. Charlton Comics re-named their ‘Danger and Adventure’ series ‘Robin Hood and His Merry Men’ and ran it from 1956 to 1958. Magazine Enterprises, another second-tier publisher of comics, produced a short-lived series on Robin Hood. Although both illustrations and stories were competent enough, the series does not appear to have been a huge success. Even re-branding it by putting photographs of Richard Greene on the cover and calling it, like the TV series, ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’ could not prevent it from folding in 1958 after eight issues.
The major players in the comics market turned their attention to the English outlaw too. DC Comics not only included regular stories about him in their adventure anthology comic The Brave and the Bold which began in 1955 and continued, in assorted incarnations, for nearly thirty years. In 1957 and 1958, they also ran a short-lived series called Robin Hood Tales which was entirely devoted to Sherwood’s finest. Some of DC’s most successful and skilful artists of the time, including Joe Kubert, Russ Heath and Ross Andru, were given the job of bringing Robin to life. They did so with considerable panache. These Robin Hood stories sometimes owed a lot more to the superhero comics genre than they did to the old ballads. There were unlikely episodes of Robin grappling with exotic beasts such as panthers and tigers and even an issue entitled ‘The Masked Marvel of Sherwood Forest’ in which Robin seems to have awoken one morning and decided to dress just like the Green Lantern. At the time, comic books were dismissed as tawdry rubbish but at least one Robin Hood scholar, the Canadian Allen Wright, has drawn intriguing parallels between them and the broadside ballads of earlier centuries. Like the broadsides and chapbooks of the seventeenth century, they were assumed to be crude and inartistic but they provided one of the main vehicles in the 1950s for Robin Hood to reach a new generation.
In Britain, the 1950s saw the publication of a whole host of Robin Hood comics. From the very beginning of the decade Robin was a popular subject for comic creators and the success of the Richard Greene TV series, which first aired in the autumn of 1955, only increased the character’s presence on newsagents’ shelves. The Thriller Picture Library (also known as Thriller Comics and Thriller Comics Library) appeared between 1951 and 1963, beginning its life as something of a variant on the Classics Illustrated format and going on to embrace all kinds of adventure stories. Robin Hood was the subject of Issue Number 4 and became one of the most regularly recurring heroes in the series. Titles such as King of Sherwood, Greenwood Outlaw and Robin Hood the Magnificent followed. Only the Three Musketeers could match Robin in the number of issues devoted to their adventures in the twelve years the comic existed. Like most British comics of the time, The Thriller Picture Library had colour covers but the pages inside were all in black-and-white.
Perhaps the most striking of all these British versions were Frank Bellamy’s comic strips from Swift, published in two series between May 1956 and August 1957. Swift was part of the stable of children’s comics associated with Eagle, whose most famous character was Dan Dare, and Bellamy was an experienced and accomplished artist who had already produced re-tellings of ‘The Swiss Family Robinson’ and ‘King Arthur and His Knights’ for the comic. (He was later to graduate to Eagle and to illustrate Dan Dare.) Working with writer Clifford Makins, he created a version of the Robin Hood stories memorable enough to warrant republication in collected form more than fifty years later. Using as his starting point a 1940s children’s novel by Charles Gilson, which combined motifs and ideas from the ballads with the author’s own inventions (a villainous Norman warlord called Robert the Wolf, for example), Makins wrote the simple, readable text which accompanied Bellamy’s crisp and clear, black-and-white images. The artist’s Robin, striding heroically through the greenwood, still shows the influence of Errol Flynn’s performance as the outlaw. Richard Todd and Richard Greene had provided artists with newer, clean-shaven models for Sherwood’s hero but Robin in these two comic strips, with his pencil moustache and goatee beard, clearly harks back to the earlier film.
Meanwhile, throughout the decades when Robin was becoming a hero of the comics and beyond, he was also being regularly portrayed by illustrators of children’s books. Some chose to depict Robin in the same lush colour and detail as the movies. Others took a different path and tried to pare down their work to the essentials. Arthur Hall, for instance, in his line drawings for Roger Lancelyn Green’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, published in the 1950s, returned to the tradition of the Bewicks and produced a series of simple, deliberately naive images which complement the author’s straightforward re-tellings of the tales. In 1979, Victor Ambrus, a Hungarian-born artist who was later to become known for his work on Time Team, the Channel 4 archaeological programme, produced illustrations for Robin Hood: His Life and Legend by Bernard Miles. Like Hall, he clearly wanted to get away from the Hollywood image of Robin, echoed in so many comics and book illustrations, but, instead of visual simplicity, he opted for detail. Like the reconstructions of archaeological sites he went on to create for Time Team, his Robin illustrations are exercises in finely-drawn, gritty realism. Ambrus’s Merry Men look as if they might indeed be medieval outlaws, their clothes plastered with the dirt of the forest, rather than the movie extras frolicking through photogenic parkland that other illustrators depict.
In the last thirty years, new and sometimes challenging images of Robin have continued to appear in print. Well-known illustrators such as Tony Ross, Michael Foreman and Helen Craig have produced their versions of him and he has been depicted in everything from pop-up books to historical fiction for young adults. As comic books have morphed into graphic novels, with a concurrent rise in literary and artistic respectability, he has remained a subject that has attracted creative attention. Demons of Sherwood (2009) started life as a webcomic but has since appeared in book form. Written by Robert Tinnell, a screenwriter and director with an interest in the horror genre, and illustrated by Bo Hampton, a comic book artist who has worked on the Batman franchise, this is a revisionist Robin Hood story in which the legendary hero, his glory days in the past, has become a drink-soaked loser. Only when Marian is threatened with burning at the stake as a witch does he pull himself together sufficiently to join forces with his comrades of old (Little John, Tuck, Scarlet, etc.) to rescue her. But saving Marian proves to be just the beginning of a series of adventures which neatly and amusingly combine old-fashioned swashbuckling with elements of horror.
Outlaw by Tony Lee, Sam Hart and Artur Fujita, also published in 2009, is a graphic novel that puts together its story of Robin’s return from the crusades, to revenge his father’s death and become a hero of the greenwood, from an eclectic mix of sources. Some elements are borrowed from the traditional stories, some from Hollywood films, some from the Robin of Sherwood TV series and some seem to be the inventions of writer Tony Lee. The depictions of Robin himself are a little disappointing and lacking in individuality – there are even times when it is difficult to distinguish the outlaw leader from other characters – but the book does contain some vividly evocative and colourful panels of life in his world. Rich washes of green flood through the scenes set in Sherwood;
darker blues and purples create menacing shadows within the walls of Nottingham Castle where the Sheriff and Sir Guy of Gisbourne plot the hero’s downfall. Outlaw is a powerful re-telling of the legend in graphic novel format and marks another stage in the long history of the visual representation of Robin Hood.
Musical Robin
Did the Robin Hood stories begin in music? To the modern ear, the word ‘ballad’ suggests that the early tales of the outlaw were written to be sung but that was not necessarily the case. In the late medieval era, a ballad was not, by definition, something that had to be sung. In fact, the very earliest of the Robin Hood ballads were almost certainly intended to be recited rather than sung. However, many of them may well have been recited to a musical accompaniment. The ritual dramas of the May Games, in many of which Robin and Marian and Friar Tuck came to play significant roles, would also have been performed to the sound of drums and pipes and other early musical instruments. So music provided background to the Robin Hood legend from the very beginning and, as new ballads were created throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, new musical settings would have been made for the words. The persistence of this music through the years was remarkable. When folk music revivalists in the 1890s and early 1900s such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp began to write down songs they heard from singers in English country villages, they found settings of many Robin Hood ballads including ‘Robin Hood and the Tanner’, ‘Robin Hood and the Bishop’ and ‘Robin Hood and the Pedlar’. Some of these tunes had been handed down through families for generations and may well have dated back as far as the words.
It was in the eighteenth century, however, that Robin found a new musical home outside the broadside ballads. He became a relatively familiar figure on the London stage, most frequently seen in what would probably today be called ‘musicals’ but were then described as ‘comic operas’. In 1730, a work called Robin Hood and Little John was performed at Bartholomew Fair. Little is known about it but only two years had passed since the exceptional success of John Gay’s ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera and it may well have been an enterprising attempt to cash in on the consequent popularity of stage productions featuring amiable rogues and tricksters. Twenty years later and Robin had kissed farewell to the plebeian clamour of the fair and gone significantly upmarket. In 1750, he stepped onto the stage of the Drury Lane Theatre, then under the management of the legendary actor David Garrick, in a piece entitled Robin Hood: A New Musical Entertainment. Written by Moses Mendez, with music by Charles Burney, a minor composer, musicologist and father of the novelist Fanny Burney, this was a short work intended to be performed after the audience had enjoyed the longer play at the heart of the evening’s entertainment. Carrying faint echoes of the old ballad telling the story of Robin and Alan-a-Dale, Mendez’s plot featured the outlaw hero working to free the beautiful Clarinda from forced marriage to a foppish cad named Glitter and to unite her with the handsome Leander. The work concludes with everyone gathered in Sherwood Forest where true love is able to triumph. Although it was an afterpiece to the main entertainment, the musical was more than just a negligible trifle. Mendez’s lyrics were witty and well written and Burney’s music was skilful and demanding. At least two of the singers in the piece – the soprano Kitty Clive playing Clarinda and the tenor John Beard taking the title role – were major figures in London musical life at the time who both performed at premieres of Handel’s operas and oratorios.
In the last decades of the century, new musicals involving the outlaw hero continued to appear. Charles Dibdin’s Robin Hood, performed at the impressively-named Royal Circus and Equestrian Philharmonic Academy on Blackfriars Road in 1783, may well have boasted onstage horses to increase the spectacle it provided. By far the most successful of these eighteenth century musicals featuring Robin, however, was Leonard Macnally and William Shield’s Robin Hood, or, Sherwood Forest which opened at Covent Garden in April 1784. Long runs were not the norm at the time but this comic opera was regularly staged in London over a period of sixteen years. Touring companies took it around the UK and across the seas to Ireland and the USA. Even as late as 1820, audiences in Bath were enjoying a revival of it. Macnally claimed that he took his plot from old ballads. He would certainly have had the chance to consult some collections of them that appeared in the 1770s but his Robin, once again the exiled Earl of Huntington, owes more to the gentrified tradition that had developed since Munday’s plays than he does to the yeoman outlaw of the ballads. Maid Marian never appears in the opera and is given only an undignified mention as a servant making pastry for a feast. Robin’s lover is Clorinda, arriving on stage dressed as an archer and teasingly informing Little John that, ‘I come to seek with bended bow/That man of might/I fain would fight/And conquer with my oh ho ho!’ Other female characters absent from traditional versions of the story, although not so eager as Clorinda to proclaim the delights of their ‘oh ho ho!’, must have added to the appeal of the opera. William Shield’s music, a skilful melange of his own work and borrowings from other composers and traditional melodies, also gave it a boost that made it one of the most popular stage pieces of its day. (Interestingly, Shield was a friend of Joseph Ritson, who was to produce his great collection of Robin Hood ballads ten years after the opera’s premiere, and had collaborated with him in gathering together volumes of English and Scottish songs.)
It was in the late eighteenth century that the traditional English pantomime began to take shape and the presence of Robin Hood in the comic operas of the period meant that he also became available as a character for pantomime. In the nineteenth century, comic operas featuring Robin and the characters from the legend did continue to appear. Peacock’s novel Maid Marian was given a stage version soon after publication in 1822 and this was successful enough to be translated into both French and German. However, by the Victorian era, Robin’s most frequent appearances on stage were in pantomimes. Nearly all of these included songs and extensive musical interludes. By the middle of the century the comic opera, as experienced by the original audience for Macnally and Shield’s Robin Hood, had, in effect, been overtaken by the pantomime but the outlaw was still a figure in the new form. In 1860, one of the first works by FC Burnand, later to be a grand old man of the Victorian stage and the editor of Punch magazine, was a Robin Hood pantomime.
Robin could also take his place in more serious works of musical theatre. In the same year that the young Burnand was producing his pantomime, a three-act opera entitled Robin Hood, with words by John Oxenford and music by George Macfarren, was first staged at Her Majesty’s Theatre, London. Macfarren, now largely forgotten, was a successful Victorian composer of all kinds of music from light orchestral works to oratorios. He produced a dozen operas, including several such as King Charles II from 1849 on subjects from English history. Oxenford, a dramatist and librettist whose first works had appeared in the 1830s, had once been a theatre critic for The Times and was an expert on German literature and philosophy. Their opera focused on the love between Robin and Marian, although the plot was given an unusual twist by making Marian the daughter of the Sheriff of Nottingham. It also made extensive use of the conflict between Saxon and Norman that had become so central a part of the Robin Hood story in the four decades since the publication of Scott’s Ivanhoe. ‘The grasping, rasping Norman race’ is condemned in one aria and Robin becomes the vehicle for Victorian patriotism and ideas about liberty-loving Englishman when he sings in Act I that, ‘Englishmen by birth are free;/Though their limbs you chain,/Glowing thoughts of liberty/In their hearts remain.’ Macfarren and Oxenford’s Robin Hood proved popular enough with audiences for piano transcriptions of its best numbers to be published (Robin Hood quadrilles and Robin Hood waltzes based on Macfarren’s music also appeared) but its popularity was short-lived. It never achieved any kind of place in the operatic repertoire and a recent CD of it made by Victorian Opera Northwest, a society of enthusiasts for nineteenth-century English opera, was a record of the first perf
ormance of the work in more than a century.
A far more significant English composer than Macfarren, Sir Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) shared the cultural interest of the period in an idealised version of the English Middle Ages and, when he was looking for a subject for his long-planned grand opera, he chose Ivanhoe with its supporting role for a tenor as the outlaw Locksley. Scott’s novel had already provided inspiration for composers on the Continent and Rossini, Heinrich Marschner and Otto Nicolai had produced versions of it for the operatic stage. Now Sullivan, determined to create a large-scale historical work, decided to adapt it. Julian Sturgis, an American-born novelist and lyricist who also holds the unlikely distinction of having been the first American to play in an FA Cup Final (in his youth, he was an amateur footballer for The Wanderers), wrote the libretto. The opera had its premiere in January 1891, the first work to be staged in the new Royal English Opera House, now the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus. Accepted opinion on Sullivan’s Ivanhoe tends to be that it was a failure and he should have stuck to the comic operas at which he was so skilled but, in fact, it ran for more than 150 consecutive performances after this premiere. Although it rapidly fell out of the repertoire, there have been attempts to revive it recently. Critics have highlighted its significance in the history of English opera and complete recordings of it have been issued in the last few years. Sullivan himself returned to Robin Hood in 1893 when he wrote incidental music for the Tennyson play The Foresters.
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