Conduct and Character: The Feast Scene and Characterization in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Medieval Perspectives

Abstract

The eponymous main characters of the English outlaw tales are often read as “anti-heroes” who challenge the conventions of “chivalry, aristocracy, loyalty, masculinity and militarism” to borrow Neil Cartlidge’s list of the medieval values found in romance narratives (2012: 1).1 Rather than engaging in courtly and chivalric endeavors, the outlaws participate in more mundane exploits—roaming about the English countryside and forests, entering archery contests, hunting and poaching, and generally behaving as tricksters—and scholarly work on these texts tends to focus on the historical and cultural significance of such quotidian scenes and motifs as the kind of evidence of their popular, folk origins that permits critics to label the outlaw tales essentially “anti-heroic” (because, for instance, not chivalric).2 In this essay, by contrast, I follow scholars like Alex Kaufman into the domestic sphere of the medieval Robin Hood texts by examining how the feast scene establishes Robin Hood’s polysemic character in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode (hererafter, Geste). The benefit of viewing the Robin Hood figure as polysemous rather than through a specific archetypal lens is that as such it proposes criticism against established order by eschewing any effort to classify his character and, by association, his social position. This criticism in turn highlights the subversive nature of the text, deepening the interpretive possibilities of both the character and his narrative.

Publication Date

2016

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