The Downfall and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington
Encyclopedia
The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington are two closely related Elizabethan-era stage plays on the Robin Hood
legend, that were written by Anthony Munday
(possibly with help from Henry Chettle
) in 1598
and published in 1601
. They are among the relatively few surviving examples of the popular drama acted by the Admiral's Men
during the Shakespearean era.
Scholars and critics have studied the plays for their place in the evolution of the Robin Hood legend. Munday has been credited as the first person to identify Robin Hood with the Earl of Huntingdon
.
on 1 December 1600
, and were printed in separate quartos
in the next year by stationer
William Leake
. The 1601 quartos were the only editions in the era of English Renaissance theatre
; the plays would not be reprinted until the nineteenth century.
Leake's 1601 quartos employ a blackletter
or Gothic typeface
for the speeches in the plays, with a Roman font
used for stage directions and speech prefixes.
(known as Henslowe's Diary) records a payment, dated 15 February 1598, to "Antony Monday" for "a playe booke called the firste parte of Robyne Hoode." The Diary records subsequent payments to Munday on 20 and 28 February the same year for "the second pte of Roben Hoode." Given the plays' general resemblances with Munday's earlier drama John a Kent and John a Cumber (c. 1594), scholars have had no problem in accepting Munday's authorship.
Henslowe's Diary also records a payment, dated 25 February 1598, to Henry Chettle for "the second pte of Robart hoode." Chettle was later (25 November 1598) paid for "mending" a Robin Hood play for a Court performance. Based on these facts, many scholars have assigned The Death to Munday and Chettle as collaborators. Comparing The Death to Munday's John a Kent on one hand and to Chettle's Hoffman on the other, some critics have considered Munday the likely author of the Robin Hood material in The Death, and Chettle the probable author of the story of King John's
pursuit of Matilda Fitzwater.
Yet John C. Meagher, editor of the Malone Society
reprints of the plays, argues that the case for Chettle's participation in the play's authorship is weak. In his judgement, The Downfall is the work of Munday alone, and The Death is also "either primarily or exclusively the work of Munday."
All of these difficulties would have to have been resolved in the plays' finished texts.
Some of these problems could have been remedied or at least palliated in the final versions. Yet some of these traits are inherent in the dramatic form and genre in which Munday worked. The plays "have been strongly criticized as unsatisfactory mixtures of folk tale, melodrama, and farce," when they should be considered as "primarily romances" — "not chronicle plays nor pastoral comedy mixed with tragedy of blood...." As romances, comparable to the romances of Robert Greene
and to Shakespeare's late plays
, the Munday works show more sense and coherence.
To a substantial degree, the two works form a single whole, a "two-part play." Like other works of this type, Munday's double play employs a dichotomy of dramatic forms: the first part moves "in a comic direction," or "at least toward reconciliation," while the second bends "in a tragic direction."
and printed in 1599
. This anonymous work has often been attributed to Robert Greene. The anonymous Look About You (1599?; printed 1600) also features Robin Hood; one researcher has ascribed it to Munday, or Chettle, or both.
An early Robin Hood play, author unknown, was printed in 1560. An anonymous Robin Hood and Little John (1594) has not survived. William Haughton
worked on a Robin Hood's Pennyworths around 1600, but apparently left it unfinished.
In turn, Robert Davenport based his later play King John and Matilda
(published 1655
) securely on The Death. Some critics have called Davenport's play a mere rewriting of Munday's.
During the Restoration
, a drama titled Robin Hood and His Crew of Soldiers was acted at Nottingham
on the day of King Charles II's
coronation.
/King's Men
. In the years from 1594 to 1602, the two companies were the only ones allowed permanent residence in London. The Admiral's Men performed two early works by George Chapman
, and Thomas Middleton
's The Roaring Girl
; most of their plays, though, were written by a coterie of house playwrights, regularly employed by manager Henslowe. These writers sometimes collaborated in teams of three, four, or even five per play. Henslowe's Diary preserves the titles of dozens of plays written by Chettle, Haughton, Thomas Dekker, John Day
, Michael Drayton
, Richard Hathwaye
, and others. A huge body of this work has disappeared, lost to history; out of the thirty plays Henslowe ordered from his house dramatists in 1598, only Munday's Huntington plays survive. Along with a few other survivors, like Sir John Oldcastle
or Haughton's Englishmen for My Money
, they illustrate what a whole style of drama was like.
Robin Hood
Robin Hood was a heroic outlaw in English folklore. A highly skilled archer and swordsman, he is known for "robbing from the rich and giving to the poor", assisted by a group of fellow outlaws known as his "Merry Men". Traditionally, Robin Hood and his men are depicted wearing Lincoln green clothes....
legend, that were written by Anthony Munday
Anthony Munday
Anthony Munday was an English dramatist and miscellaneous writer. The chief interest in Munday for the modern reader lies in his collaboration with Shakespeare and others on the play Sir Thomas More and his writings on Robin Hood.-Biography:He was once thought to have been born in 1553, because...
(possibly with help from Henry Chettle
Henry Chettle
Henry Chettle was an English dramatist and miscellaneous writer of the Elizabethan era.The son of Robert Chettle, a London dyer, he was apprenticed in 1577 and became a member of the Stationer's Company in 1584, traveling to Cambridge on their behalf in 1588. His career as a printer and author is...
) in 1598
1598 in literature
-Events:*September 22 - Ben Jonson is charged with manslaughter, after killing actor Gabriel Spenser in a duel.*October - Edmund Spenser's castle at Kilcolman, near Doneraile in North Cork, is burned down by the native Irish forces of Aodh Ó Néill...
and published in 1601
1601 in literature
The year 1601 in literature involved some significant events.-Events:*February 7 - The Lord Chamberlain's Men stage a performance of Shakespeare's Richard II at the Globe Theatre. The performance is specially commissioned by the plotters in the Earl of Essex's rebellion of the following day...
. They are among the relatively few surviving examples of the popular drama acted by the Admiral's Men
Admiral's Men
The Admiral's Men was a playing company or troupe of actors in the Elizabethan and Stuart eras...
during the Shakespearean era.
Scholars and critics have studied the plays for their place in the evolution of the Robin Hood legend. Munday has been credited as the first person to identify Robin Hood with the Earl of Huntingdon
Earl of Huntingdon
Earl of Huntingdon is a title which has been created several times in the Peerage of England. The title is associated with the ruling house of Scotland, and latterly with the Hastings family.-Early history:...
.
Publication
Both plays were entered into the Stationers' RegisterStationers' Register
The Stationers' Register was a record book maintained by the Stationers' Company of London. The company is a trade guild given a royal charter in 1557 to regulate the various professions associated with the publishing industry, including printers, bookbinders, booksellers, and publishers in England...
on 1 December 1600
1600 in literature
The year 1600 in literature involved some significant events.-Events:*January 1 - The Admiral's Men perform Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday at Court....
, and were printed in separate quartos
Book size
The size of a book is generally measured by the height against the width of a leaf, or sometimes the height and width of its cover. A series of terms is commonly used by libraries and publishers for the general sizes of modern books, ranging from "folio" , to "quarto" and "octavo"...
in the next year by stationer
Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers
The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers is one of the Livery Companies of the City of London. The Stationers' Company was founded in 1403; it received a Royal Charter in 1557...
William Leake
William Leake
William Leake, father and son , were London publishers and booksellers of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries...
. The 1601 quartos were the only editions in the era of English Renaissance theatre
English Renaissance theatre
English Renaissance theatre, also known as early modern English theatre, refers to the theatre of England, largely based in London, which occurred between the Reformation and the closure of the theatres in 1642...
; the plays would not be reprinted until the nineteenth century.
Leake's 1601 quartos employ a blackletter
Blackletter
Blackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes...
or Gothic typeface
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
for the speeches in the plays, with a Roman font
Roman type
In typography, roman is one of the three main kinds of historical type, alongside blackletter and italic. Roman type was modelled from a European scribal manuscript style of the 1400s, based on the pairing of inscriptional capitals used in ancient Rome with Carolingian minuscules developed in the...
used for stage directions and speech prefixes.
Authorship
The plays were originally published anonymously; the 1601 quartos lack any attribution of authorship on their title pages. The account book of theatrical manager Philip HenslowePhilip Henslowe
Philip Henslowe was an Elizabethan theatrical entrepreneur and impresario. Henslowe's modern reputation rests on the survival of his diary, a primary source for information about the theatrical world of Renaissance London...
(known as Henslowe's Diary) records a payment, dated 15 February 1598, to "Antony Monday" for "a playe booke called the firste parte of Robyne Hoode." The Diary records subsequent payments to Munday on 20 and 28 February the same year for "the second pte of Roben Hoode." Given the plays' general resemblances with Munday's earlier drama John a Kent and John a Cumber (c. 1594), scholars have had no problem in accepting Munday's authorship.
Henslowe's Diary also records a payment, dated 25 February 1598, to Henry Chettle for "the second pte of Robart hoode." Chettle was later (25 November 1598) paid for "mending" a Robin Hood play for a Court performance. Based on these facts, many scholars have assigned The Death to Munday and Chettle as collaborators. Comparing The Death to Munday's John a Kent on one hand and to Chettle's Hoffman on the other, some critics have considered Munday the likely author of the Robin Hood material in The Death, and Chettle the probable author of the story of King John's
John of England
John , also known as John Lackland , was King of England from 6 April 1199 until his death...
pursuit of Matilda Fitzwater.
Yet John C. Meagher, editor of the Malone Society
Malone Society
The Malone Society is a British-based scholarly society devoted to the study of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century drama. It publishes editions of plays from manuscript, facsimile editions of printed and manuscript plays of the period, and editions of original documents relating to English...
reprints of the plays, argues that the case for Chettle's participation in the play's authorship is weak. In his judgement, The Downfall is the work of Munday alone, and The Death is also "either primarily or exclusively the work of Munday."
"Foul papers"
For both of the 1601 quartos, the texts were set into type from the author's working drafts or "foul papers" rather than from "fair copies" of the finished texts or from theatrical promptbooks. Both plays contain major discontinuities that would have been corrected in their final versions.- The most serious problem in The Downfall is the most obvious. The heroine is called Maid MarianMaid MarianMaid Marian is the wife of the legendary English outlaw Robin Hood. Stemming from another, older tradition, she became associated with Robin Hood only in the 16th century.-History:The earliest medieval Robin Hood stories gave him no female companion...
for the first 781 lines of the play; then, suddenly and without explanation, she becomes Matilda. She should have been called Matilda from the start, since later in the play she deliberately changes her name to Marian, as a sign of the new identity she has adopted when joining Robin and his Merry Men. - The Death shows the same type of problems. Characters' names change for no reason. Lord Salisbury becomes Aubery de Vere, Earl of Oxford, and switches back and forth between the two identities. Similarly, Hugh becomes Mowbray.
- In The Death, the character Bonville speaks two speeches before his entrance, and then disappears.
All of these difficulties would have to have been resolved in the plays' finished texts.
Genre
This view of The Downfall and The Death as, to some significant degree, unfinished works in their existing texts, has a bearing on perceptions of the plays' artistic quality and their deficiencies. In Munday's Robin Hood plays, "Motivation is scanty, inner conflict is barely hinted at, and qualities are painted in with primary colors...not much attention is paid to cause and effect. Intrigues are begun and quickly forgotten, important episodes seem to be omitted completely, and diversions frequently have precedence over any logical sequence of events."Some of these problems could have been remedied or at least palliated in the final versions. Yet some of these traits are inherent in the dramatic form and genre in which Munday worked. The plays "have been strongly criticized as unsatisfactory mixtures of folk tale, melodrama, and farce," when they should be considered as "primarily romances" — "not chronicle plays nor pastoral comedy mixed with tragedy of blood...." As romances, comparable to the romances of Robert Greene
Robert Greene (16th century)
Robert Greene was an English author best known for a posthumous pamphlet attributed to him, Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit, widely believed to contain a polemic attack on William Shakespeare. He was born in Norwich and attended Cambridge University, receiving a B.A. in 1580, and an M.A...
and to Shakespeare's late plays
Shakespeare's late romances
The late romances, often simply called the romances, are a grouping of what many scholars believe to be William Shakespeare's later plays, including Pericles, Prince of Tyre; Cymbeline; The Winter's Tale; and The Tempest. The Two Noble Kinsmen is sometimes included in this grouping...
, the Munday works show more sense and coherence.
To a substantial degree, the two works form a single whole, a "two-part play." Like other works of this type, Munday's double play employs a dichotomy of dramatic forms: the first part moves "in a comic direction," or "at least toward reconciliation," while the second bends "in a tragic direction."
Other plays
The story of Robin Hood was integral to English folklore, and Munday was far from the first or only dramatist of his time to exploit it. The most prominent Robin Hood play of Munday's era was George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, registered in 15951595 in literature
-Events:*Lope de Vega leaves the service of the Duke of Alba and returns to Madrid.* December 9 - Shakespeare's Richard II is possibly acted at a private performance at the Canon Row house of Sir Edward Hoby; Sir Robert Cecil attends.-New books:...
and printed in 1599
1599 in literature
-Events:* Undated - Opening of the Globe Theatre.*June 4 - Middleton's Microcynicon and Marston's Scourge of Villainy are publicly burned, as ecclesiastical authorities crack down on the craze for satire of the past year. The Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury tighten their...
. This anonymous work has often been attributed to Robert Greene. The anonymous Look About You (1599?; printed 1600) also features Robin Hood; one researcher has ascribed it to Munday, or Chettle, or both.
An early Robin Hood play, author unknown, was printed in 1560. An anonymous Robin Hood and Little John (1594) has not survived. William Haughton
William Haughton
William Haughton was an English playwright in the age of English Renaissance theatre. During the years 1597 to 1602 he collaborated in many plays with Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Richard Hathwaye and Wentworth Smith....
worked on a Robin Hood's Pennyworths around 1600, but apparently left it unfinished.
In turn, Robert Davenport based his later play King John and Matilda
King John and Matilda
King John and Matilda is a Caroline era stage play, a historical tragedy written by Robert Davenport. It was initially published in 1655; the cast list included in the first edition is provides valuable information on some of the actors of English Renaissance theatre.-Performance and publication:No...
(published 1655
1655 in literature
The year 1655 in literature involved some significant events.-Events:*May - Jeremy Taylor is imprisoned for four months at Chepstow Castle.*August 6 - The Blackfriars Theatre is demolished....
) securely on The Death. Some critics have called Davenport's play a mere rewriting of Munday's.
During the Restoration
English Restoration
The Restoration of the English monarchy began in 1660 when the English, Scottish and Irish monarchies were all restored under Charles II after the Interregnum that followed the Wars of the Three Kingdoms...
, a drama titled Robin Hood and His Crew of Soldiers was acted at Nottingham
Nottingham
Nottingham is a city and unitary authority in the East Midlands of England. It is located in the ceremonial county of Nottinghamshire and represents one of eight members of the English Core Cities Group...
on the day of King Charles II's
Charles II of England
Charles II was monarch of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland.Charles II's father, King Charles I, was executed at Whitehall on 30 January 1649, at the climax of the English Civil War...
coronation.
Admiral's drama
In Shakespeare's generation, the Admiral's Men were the primary competitors with Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain'sLord Chamberlain's Men
The Lord Chamberlain's Men was a playing company for whom Shakespeare worked for most of his career. Formed at the end of a period of flux in the theatrical world of London, it had become, by 1603, one of the two leading companies of the city and was subsequently patronised by James I.It was...
/King's Men
King's Men (playing company)
The King's Men was the company of actors to which William Shakespeare belonged through most of his career. Formerly known as The Lord Chamberlain's Men during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, it became The King's Men in 1603 when King James ascended the throne and became the company's patron.The...
. In the years from 1594 to 1602, the two companies were the only ones allowed permanent residence in London. The Admiral's Men performed two early works by George Chapman
George Chapman
George Chapman was an English dramatist, translator, and poet. He was a classical scholar, and his work shows the influence of Stoicism. Chapman has been identified as the Rival Poet of Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Minto, and as an anticipator of the Metaphysical Poets...
, and Thomas Middleton
Thomas Middleton
Thomas Middleton was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period. He was one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in...
's The Roaring Girl
The Roaring Girl
The Roaring Girl is a Jacobean stage play, a comedy written by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker ca. 1607-10.The play was first published in quarto in 1611, printed by Nicholas Okes for the bookseller Thomas Archer...
; most of their plays, though, were written by a coterie of house playwrights, regularly employed by manager Henslowe. These writers sometimes collaborated in teams of three, four, or even five per play. Henslowe's Diary preserves the titles of dozens of plays written by Chettle, Haughton, Thomas Dekker, John Day
John Day (dramatist)
John Day was an English dramatist of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.-Life:He was born at Cawston, Norfolk, and educated at Ely. He became a sizar of Caius College, Cambridge, in 1592, but was expelled in the next year for stealing a book...
, Michael Drayton
Michael Drayton
Michael Drayton was an English poet who came to prominence in the Elizabethan era.-Early life:He was born at Hartshill, near Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England. Almost nothing is known about his early life, beyond the fact that in 1580 he was in the service of Thomas Goodere of Collingham,...
, Richard Hathwaye
Richard Hathwaye
Richard Hathwaye , was an English dramatist. Little is known about Hathwaye's life. There is no evidence that he was related to his namesake Richard Hathaway, the father of Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway. Hathwaye is not heard of after 1603....
, and others. A huge body of this work has disappeared, lost to history; out of the thirty plays Henslowe ordered from his house dramatists in 1598, only Munday's Huntington plays survive. Along with a few other survivors, like Sir John Oldcastle
Sir John Oldcastle
Sir John Oldcastle is an Elizabethan play about John Oldcastle, a controversial 14th-15th century rebel and Lollard who was seen by some of Shakespeare's contemporaries as a proto-Protestant martyr.-Publication:...
or Haughton's Englishmen for My Money
Englishmen for My Money
Englishmen for My Money, or A Woman Will Have Her Will is an Elizabethan era stage play, a comedy written by William Haughton that dates from the year 1598...
, they illustrate what a whole style of drama was like.