IS DUDUS DEM A COMPARE YAHSUH ENO MAN

Written on June 10, 2010 at 11:54 PM by Alfred C. Ronzoni, Jr.

Robin Hood 2010: Exploring the Movie, the History and Politics of a Legend

Filed under Culture & History, Literature, Media & Entertainment 2 comments

Universal’s Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe was a big disappointment. But at least it gives us an excuse to explore the fascinating roots of one of history’s most enduring legends. As I began to write this review I wondered where the outlaw heroes of our economically distressed age where hiding. Then, almost on cue, the Jamaican police began the U.S- prompted hunt for drug lord Christopher Dudus Coke, a one-man welfare state for the impoverished neighborhoods of West Kingston, who was quickly dubbed a modern-day Robin Hood by the press.
Erroll Flynn and Olivia De Havilland as Robin Hood and Maid Marion
In an age of increasing hardship for average folk while super-rich investment bankers continue to wax fat and happy, Robin Hood could have been a far more engaging and relevant film had screenwriter Brian Helgeland stuck closer to the standard version of the story, which has come down to us through generations of evolution and refinement. Part of the problem may have been the tortured journey of the script which went through several rewrites beginning with an original version by Sleeper Cell creators, Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris, where the Sheriff of Nottingham was a medieval proto-CSI-style investigator hero, involved in a love triangle with Maid Marian and a “less virtuous” Robin Hood. Helgeland finally developed the finished product as a prequel that supposedly offers “a new understanding of the origins of a real folk hero.” But instead, the film comes off as a dreary political drama that doesn’t engender any sense of connection to the characters. The love story between Robin and “the Lady Marion”, played by Kate Blanchett, was particularly cold and mechanical – devoid of the kind of chemistry Erroll Flynn and Olivia De Haviland brought to the roles in the classic 1938 film. When the main villain, the traitorous Sir Godfrey, finally met his end, there was barely any emotional response from the audience at the screening I attended.
Robin Hood starts off promisingly enough. Russell Crowe plays Robin Longstride, a commoner serving as an archer in the army of King Richard I, known to history as Coeur de Leon or Lionheart. In his earliest incarnations, Robin Hood was not an aristocrat but rather a yeoman or free man not bound as a serf. Yeomen could be small landholders or merchants, but they were also often skilled craftsmen of one kind or another. And archers were such an important part of the medieval English armed repertoire, that every Englishman between the ages of 17 and 60, who was not physically incapable, a priest, justice of the peace, or “baron of the exchequer” was legally required to keep a longbow and arrows and to practice shooting on Sunday afternoons.
The earliest surviving written reference to Robin Hood is contained in William Langland’s narrative poem, The Vision of Piers Plowman, composed around 1377 A.D. Langland attacked various social vices of the time including those of the Catholic Church. At one point he personifies Sloth as a priest who has no knowledge of the Lord’s Prayer but is quite familiar with “the rymes of Robyn Hood and Randolf Erl of Chestre.” Geoffrey Chaucer also makes reference to the “haselwode, where joly Robyn played” in his poem Troilus and Criseyde, written in the 1380’s. From there the story of Robin Hood moves to Scotland, where Andrew Wyntoun, a church elder, created a rhyming chronicle of Scottish history up to the year 1408. For the years 1283-5 he included the following passage:
“Litil Johun and Robert Hude Waythmen war commendit gud; In Ingilwode and Bernysdaile Thai oyssit al this time that travail”
This roughly translates from medieval Scots as: “Little John and Robert Hood robbers who were praised good and did their deeds in Inglewood and Barnsdale.” It may do well to note here that “Robin” is a familiar English diminutive of the name Robert. “Waythmen” was a term that originally referred to hunters and sportsmen (from the German weid-mann) but gradually came to denote forest ambushers as well. Also of interest is the fact that Little John’s name appears first, perhaps only to make a better rhyme, but possibly to indicate that at this stage of the tale he was actually the leader, or at least co-leader. And the two ply their vocation not in the Sherwood Forest of Nottinghamshire but rather in the more northerly Inglewood (English wood) and Barnsdale Forest. Finally, Wyntoun dates his Robin and Little John to within a decade before the “Braveheart” rebellion of Scottish patriot William Wallace. Wallace himself was forced to take to the forests like an outlaw after his defeats at the battles of Dunbar in 1296 and Falkirk in 1298. Nigel Cawthorne, author of Robin Hood: The True History Behind the Legend sees this as done purposely by Wyntoun to show that even good Englishmen were at times forced to rebel against an oppressive king.
The bold yeoman Robin Hood of the early tales and ballads bears little relation to the character we are most familiar with. He is not an Anglo-Saxon champion confronting vicious Norman conquerors, does not live in the time of bad Prince John and (allegedly) good King Richard, does not lead a large band, has no female love interest aside from an intense devotion to the Virgin Mary and, in particular, never robs the rich to give to the poor. Instead the yeoman Robin Hood looks out for himself and his men. The features of the tale we are more familiar with awaited centuries of literary transformation.
Robin Hood 2010 uses the somewhat clunky device of having Crowe’s Longstride assume the identity of Sir Robert Loxley, son of Sir Walter, played by Max von Sydow. But in a sense, this is more or less what happened to the yeoman Robin Hood of the ballads. As the story became part of a more fixed tradition, various writers grafted a noble pedigree onto the character who was indeed said to have been born in either the village of Loxley in South Yorkshire, or Loxley, Warwickshire, near Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare.
In 1521 another Scottish writer, John Major, used the Latin word dux, meaning “chief” but also the source of the English title“duke” to describe Robin Hood, as well as assigning the story to the years of Richard I’s captivity in Austria (1193-4) following the conclusion of the Third Crusade. In 1598 English playwright, Andrew Munday took Major’s implication that Robin Hood was a dispossessed nobleman and gave it more concrete dramatic form in The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington and a sequel The Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington. Like Major, he set the action during the reign of Richard, but his Prince John was not the out-and-out villain who appears in later versions of the story. Friar Tuck, the Sheriff of Nottingham, and a female love interest named “Matilda”, also make appearances in Munday’s plays. The addition of Matilda, who later became “Marian,” was important not only to add a romance element to the story but also because, as every good Englishman of the time would have known, Robert, Earl of Huntington, needed a wife to produce a male heir to continue his family line.
Munday’s writing was influenced by the Protestant Reformation in England. In his first play Robert, Earl of Huntington is originally betrayed by his uncle, a monastic official of the Catholic Church. By beginning the story this way, Munday was consciously trying to appeal to the rich and powerful Protestant aristocracy which had profited greatly from Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and distribution of church lands to them. Here we see a somewhat ironic beginning to Robin Hood and his Merry Mens’ dislike of corrupt, overindulgent, high ranking (Catholic) churchmen. The late Tudor period in which Munday wrote is also the era when Robin Hood began to acquire his reputation for “stealing from the rich to give to the poor”, though Munday never included this characteristic in his plays. Thus we can see how the political climate influenced the traits of the legend of Robin Hood. In hard times, such as now, our need for a hero who fights the corrupt institutions becomes at its highest.
Throughout the centuries of the story’s development there have been several real persons who may have served as the basis for the fictional Robin Hood, but RH scholars and folklore specialists cite two of these for particular attention: Fulk Fitzwarin and Eustace the Monk.
Fulk Fitzwarin
Fulk Fitzwarin was descended from a prominent landowning Welsh family, the story of which is preserved in the French language ancestral romance Fouke le Fitz Waryn. According to the tale, as a young boy Fulk is sent to the court of King Henry II, where he is brought up with the future King John. One day John starts a fight with Fulk over a game of chess. Fulk defends himself by kicking John in the chest and knocking him out. Terrified that he may have killed the prince, Fulk brings him around and John promptly runs off to tell Henry what happened. But when Henry hears Fulk’s side of the story, he decides that John got what he deserved and has him beaten for good measure. When John becomes King in 1199, he settles the score by dispossessing Fulk of his family estate. The aggrieved Fulk then leads a successful guerrilla rebellion against John, who is finally forced to pardon Fulk and his followers and reinstate his landholdings. In 1215, Fulk breaks with the King again, siding with the revolt of the barons that eventually led John to sign the Magna Carta in June of that year. Fouke le Fitz Waryn also ascribed more fantastic exploits of Fulk, such as killing a giant and becoming a renowned jousting champion.
Like Fulk Fitzwarin, Eustace the Monk, a.k.a Eustace of Boulogne, was a real person who lived from 1170 to 1217. His life was recorded by an anonymous poet from Picardy in a work known as Li Romans de Witasse le Moine. According to it, Eustace studied black magic in Toledo, but then returned home to France and became a Benedictine monk. He left the monastery to avenge the murder of his father. By 1202 he was serving as steward to the Count of Boulogne but the two quarreled to the point where Eustace fled and became an outlaw hiding in the forest. Eustace then proceeds to dupe and humiliate the Count in a series of daring escapades, appearing before him in numerous disguises, ambushing the Count and his men and time, and again making off with his horses.
Eustace later became a pirate preying on ships in the English Channel. In 1205, King John employed him in his struggle against Philip II of France. But in 1212 Eustace’s old enemy, the Count of Boulogne, became John’s ally and turned the King against the former monk. Again, like Fulk Fitzwarin, Eustace supported the rebel barons in 1215, and even ferried Philip’s son, Louis across the Channel to make his unsuccessful bid for John’s throne. On August 24, 1217 Eustace’s flagship was surrounded by the English fleet. He was found hiding in the ship’s bilges, was brought on deck and executed on the spot.
There are clear parallels between the stories of Fulk Fitzwarin and Eustace the Monk and the Robin Hood tale. Each are dispossessed of property and social standing and become the enemy of Prince, later King, John at a time when John was being challenged by the English nobility’s demand for a guarantee of civil rights by the monarchy – a demand that led first to the Magna Carta and later to the creation of Parliament, a representative body for both nobles and commoners. Each became leaders in rebellion against John and underlings like the Sheriff of Nottingham and each are imbued with the characteristics of bravery, charisma, skill with arms and subterfuge. It’s in times of turmoil that these characteristics can be embraced as heroic, and not just criminal.

The Beheading of Eustace the Monk
The Robin Hood today’s movie audiences are most familiar with also owes much to the Romantic era in literature that spawned works such as John Keats’ 1818 poem Robin Hood , followed a year later by Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe, where Robin Hood serves as a prominent, but not the major, character. Scott in particular crystallized the idea of conflict between the “good,” pastoral, egalitarian Anglo-Saxons and “bad,” brutal and greedy Norman conquerors – good King Richard being, of course, the exception. This idea actually stems from the “Norman Yoke” theory of history that was championed by both Thomas Paine and Jefferson, among others. It basically claims that Anglo-Saxon governments were democratic until taken over by Normans. By 1883 American author Howard Pyle had published The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire, which included illustrations used as the foundation for modern images of Robin Hood. Taking advantage of the new interest in the tale created by Pyle, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote The Foresters: Robin Hood and Maid Marian, which with music by Arthur Sullivan was produced for the New York stage in 1892. These versions of the story also firmly stamped Robin Hood as a re-distributor of wealth from rich to poor. The very next year Thomas Edison introduced the Kinetograph– the first practical motion picture camera.
The Robin Hood tale was a natural for both the big screen and television, as countless variations on the theme will attest. As Nigel Cawthorne points, out Robin Hood films and tv shows often reflect the politics of time through the prism of retelling an ancient tale. It is, perhaps, no accident that the classic Hollywood film The Adventures of Robin Hood came out in May 1938, just two months after Hitler’s Anschluss of Austria and a little less than a year before the outbreak of World War II. In the 1950s, the classic tv series, also entitled The Adventures of Robin Hood, was developed first for British tv by Hannah Weinstein, an American expatriate and left-wing activist who hired blacklisted countrymen as writers, some of whom were former communists. To them, the idea that Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor had particular appeal, along with his anti-authoritarianism. The show was used as a medium to criticize the hysterical red-baiting of the era.
In his book, Bandits, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm devoted an entire chapter to Robin Hood, who he identified as a “noblerobber” and “international paradigm of social banditry.” Hobsbawm compared the fictional Robin Hood to real life noble robbers like the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, Jesse James, Australia’s Ned Kelly, John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. Each of these larger than life personages earned the respect and even adulation of the common man and woman because they were seen as not mere criminals, but rather as rebels against corrupt, unfair, oppressive political systems that heaped material rewards on an often-undeserving ruling class.
Christopher Dudus Coke
The willingness of residents of West Kingston to risk their own lives to defend Christopher Coke is illustrative of this phenomenon in our own time. As the world continues to reel from severe economic crisis and increasing wealth inequality in the coming years, we may very well see the appearance of other “noble robbers”, of both the real and fictional variety, and perhaps even get a retelling of Robin Hood that is worthy of the times.
http://cchronicle.com/2010/06/robin-hood-2010-exploring-the-movie-the-history-and-politics-of-a-legend/comment-page-1/
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