...A New Playe . . . to be Played in Maye Games

The Contexts for Dramatizations of Robin Hood Tales at Early Modern May Games, Whitsun Ales, and Robin Hood Revels

Abstract

To his ca. 1560 edition of A Mery Geste of Robyn Hode, printer William Copland appended “a new playe for to be played in Maye games, very plesaunte and full of pastyme.” The “playe” actually comprised two plays; the first, Robin Hood and the Potter segued without interruption to a second play, Robin Hood and the Friar. These short plays represent the extant remains of what once must have been a huge body of now lost ephemera, dramatizations of “Robin Hood” tales enacted, as Copland recommends, in the highly popular May games or Whitsun ales during the late medieval and Early Modern period. After documenting the popularity of the Morris Dance and its identification with the developing Robin Hood tradition, this essay analyzes both plays, assessing both their relationship to similar Robin Hood ballads and the potential for staging them outdoors at May games. Three scholarly theories accounting for the enduring association of Robin Hood with the May games are then reviewed: the seasonal approach theory that constructs Robin as “May Lord of the May games,” the Bakhtinian “carnival” theory that constructs Robin as the embodiment of disorder and misrule, and lastly the economic/parochial theory that posits that the May games or “gatherings” by Robin Hood pragmatically employed the outlaw as an effective fundraiser for rural parishes. The essay argues that while all are partially defensible interpretations of the documented evidence, none definitively accounts for the success of these festivities as celebrations of Robin Hood. Interpreting the same evidence, they arrive at varying (sometimes overlapping) conclusions, which suggests that one theory cannot supersede or exclude the others. Collectively, they demonstrate that the ubiquity of the “Robin Hood Revels” attests the primacy and preeminence of the English outlaw’s place in Early Modern popular culture.