Among the narrative traditions of the center a long time, the Robin Hood legend holds a different, vital, and infrequently neglected place. Robin Hood's forte and significance starts together with his prestige because the basically English contribution to global mythology. His can also be the single lasting fable to come up from the excessive center a while and the final Western legend to accomplish a sustained foreign allure. numerous Robin Hood ballads continue to exist from the center a long time, and from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries he figured prominently in folks drama. for the reason that then, he has seemed in different proverbs, placenames, operas, novels, kid's tales, movies, and tv sequence. A story informed so frequently has to be profoundly major to the society that retells it. but regardless of its significance and recognition, the legend of Robin Hood has bought unusually little examine. This e-book overviews the genesis and improvement of the Robin Hood legend from the center a while to 1700.

As is acceptable for a piece that bridges the divide among the worlds of fiction and background, this quantity comprises the strengths of either historic and literary techniques, respecting either the conditions of the ancient environment and the legend's prestige as a fictive production. The primary concentration of the e-book is the interplay among the textual content and the social context during which the legend arose and built. the 1st chapters research the early Robin Hood culture, together with the preliminary nondramatic manifestations of the legend and the later dramatic representations. the amount then seems to be on the transformation of the legend within the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and considers how a number of the components of the legend interacted with one another and with society as a whole.