[In the following essay, Margeson examines The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington within the romance tradition.]

Recent editions by the Malone Society of The Downfall and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington may renew interest in these plays which have been looked at in the past chiefly because of complicated problems of authorship and revision,¹ or because of their place in the Robin Hood canon. There are indeed good reasons for a new interest. Although they have been strongly criticized as unsatisfactory mixtures of folk tale, melodrama, and farce, it seems to me that they have been held up against the wrong models. They are not chronicle plays nor pastoral comedy mixed with tragedy of blood but primarily romances.² They should be considered as late examples of a continuing dramatic tradition with strong roots in the medieval stage, a tradition of independent vitality whose conventions were easily understood by actors and audience alike. A study of their dramatic form may help us to understand the wider spectrum of a genre known chiefly in the romances of Greene and Shakespeare.

The qualities of these plays that have troubled critics are easily described: they are almost all characteristics which distinguish the plays sharply from the kind of drama that is strongly sequential, cumulative, and character-based.³ The characters in the two Huntington plays are very simply delineated, almost like the characters of a folk tale rather than those of realistic drama. Motivation is scanty, inner conflict is barely hinted at, and qualities are painted in with primary colors. When one turns to action, it is clear that 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. The second play, one must admit, has a somewhat stronger plot line than the first. There is also a remarkable freedom in the handling of time in the two plays in spite of their historical context, as if history were of little account.

These are not necessarily faults unless the reader is obsessed with a particular model of the well-made play. I think there can be little doubt that Elizabethan audiences found these plays readily acceptable because of their awareness of the conventions that lay behind them. The conventions are to a considerable extent those of romance and popular romantic drama.

One convention of romance is that the characters should be strongly colored, their qualities polarized as noble, generous, and chaste, or as malicious, lustful, and treacherous. The central characters of the Huntington plays tend to be categorized in this way and fulfil recognized roles. Robin has a double identity, as the exiled Earl of Huntington and as the Robin Hood of legend, but this double identity does not confuse the romance nature of his role. He is the folk hero of the ballads, prose romances, and popular plays like George-a-Greene, strong and bold, afraid of no one of whatever rank, an exemplar of the manly virtues of honest courage and independence. But in some respects he is idealized beyond the range of the folk hero and given the qualities of a hero of literary romance: the noble earl, virtuous and generous-hearted, who is betrayed and driven into exile by a conspiracy of his enemies, but who maintains his nobility and greatness of soul under conditions of extreme stress. The heroic portrait of Robert in Drayton's poem, Robert Duke of Normandy, is remarkably similar and may be a direct source since this poem was published with an augmented Tragedy of Matilda in 1596. In the poem, Robert Duke of Normandy is described in terms that may be equally applied to Robert Earl of Huntington:

Honor gave entertainment to beliefe,
Under which collour treason in was brought,
Which slew his strength before he felt the griefe,
Pure innocence seldom suspecteth ought,
          No base affection maister of his thought,
Nor majestie inward deceit had learn'd,
More then to shew, her outward eyes discern'd.
Miserie seem'd nothing, yet to him unknowne,
Not knowing evill, evill could not flie,
Not savouring sorrow, having tasted none,
To find lurking deceit, he look'd too hie,
          To honest minds, Fraud doth the soonest pry. …(4)

The directness and simplicity of the portrait of Robin, the absence of moral conflict and inner doubt, are thus explicable since Robin is an embodiment of virtues belonging both to the folk tradition and to the heroes of romance. The emphasis on forgiveness at the end of Part I and particularly in Part II makes this idealization specifically Christian. At times, his role in the play transcends that of the traditional Robin Hood and even that of the Christian knight: there is something about him of the saint in the fifteenth century miracle plays or of Abraham or Christ from the mystery cycles.

Matilda is equally an idealized character from romance. One can see some signs of the Maid Marian of the French pastourelles and the English ballads, but she is more clearly the lofty exemplar of beauty and chastity that Drayton celebrated. Drayton explicitly associates her with Lucrece and with Virginia⁵ and Munday in his second play, The Death of Robert, attempts to give her similar stature as a martyr to chastity. She is developed as a saint-like character in her purity, her loyalty to Robin, her steadfastness in the face of temptation and threat, and she dies like a saint.

The villains in the Huntington plays lack the sinister powers of Sacrepant, Brian sans Foy, and Archimago, but there is no doubt of their relationship to the forces of evil. Dark lords with mysterious powers are a familiar part of the romance tradition; they have the evil capability of separating lover from lady, of causing mischief and misunderstanding, and of bringing about the death of a major character in the story. The Robin Hood legends tend to associate such evil figures with the established powers of state and church: the tyrant king, the sheriff, the evil abbot or prior. This is how the figures of evil appear in the Huntington plays. John is a would-be usurper and tyrant, the Bishop of Ely represents ambitious political power in the church, and Warman is the local henchman of usurping, tyrannical power. Doncaster and the Prior of York are also churchmen involved with power but their malice has an excessive quality about it and their cunning and sly poisons are strikingly sinister. They display the uncomfortable wit and delight in evil associated with the Vice figure in the late moralities and hybrid plays like Cambises and Common Conditions. Brand is of the same breed as the torturers and murderers of the mystery cycles who turn up again in early chronicle plays.

Though John is a villain, he does not seem to belong altogether to a single romantic category. Of all the characters in these plays, he comes closest to the world of history and the chronicle plays by being given the power of a moral choice and the capacity to suffer the consequences of choice. No doubt the fact that he had already been drawn on the stage in a variety of guises had some effect on his portrayal here. But his roles as rival lover in Part I and as tyrant and tempter to evil in Part II belong also to the structure of moral romance. Chronicle play and romance traditions of characterization meet without undue strain in the portrait of John.

We have been considering the effect of the romance tradition upon the characters of these two plays. One may ask whether another important component of dramatic structure, the plot or fable, was similarly influenced. I have used the term “moral romance” to describe these plays, but so far as plot structure is concerned, there appears to be a paradox inherent in the very term. A moral plot depends upon choice and a firm corollary of cause and effect whereas romance usually displays a series of surprising events, random in sequence though emotionally startling, leading eventually to some longed-for conclusion. We shall look at this problem again to see whether Munday has found a way to reconcile these apparently opposed elements. What needs to be noted here is that the seeming randomness of romance plotting is very often merely a slight concealment for traditional patterns belonging to the stories themselves.

In The Downfall, the elements of the plot can be stated simply, and many of them will remind even a modern audience of the telling of old tales. An honorable man is driven into exile by a conspiracy of his enemies and his possessions are confiscated; true lovers are separated while lust seems to triumph; the treacherous follower receives great rewards. But eventually notorious pride is brought low, lust is repelled, the usurper finds himself deserted and powerless, and the absent king returns to recall the hero and his lady from exile to their full inheritance:

Richard is come to call him to the court.
And with his kingly presence chase the clouds
Of griefe and sorrow, that in mistie shades,
Haue vaild the honour of earle Huntington.

(2676-2679)

It is noteworthy also that the major action of the play takes place in the greenwood where the loyal and honorable have gone to escape the tyranny of the usurper, and that much of the play gives a sense of journeying in disguise until a complete restoration is possible.

These are the outlines of familiar stories associated with pastoral romance, folk tale, and moral history. But there is little narrative in the ordinary sense, very little working out of intrigue, and almost no analysis of the influence of character upon event. This does not mean that plot structure is loose and disjointed. The real control in a romantic play is exercised through the familiarity of certain story patterns and the conventions belonging to them. Because the audience knows these patterns, the playwright can allow the links between episodes to be filled in by the audience's imagination and concentrate instead on the dramatic moments he wishes to highlight.

This may sound like special pleading for poor craftsmanship, but an example will show more clearly what I mean. In the plot involving Prince John and the Bishop of Ely, an early scene ends with Ely enraged at John for his murder of Lacy and his arrogant refusal to submit himself to Ely as King Richard's deputy. There is a clear threat of war:

A thousand thousand ensignes of sharpe steele,
And feathered arrowes, from the bowe of death,
Against proud Iohn, wronged Ely will imploy. …

(757-759)

but Chester advises a meeting of the Council of State. After a long intervening episode in which Robin rescues Scarlet and Scathlocke from execution, Prince John enters, pleased with his victory over Ely, and shortly afterwards the colliers appear with their “monster,” a bearded woman.⁶ Professor Meagher suggest that another chronicle scene of defiance and war has been lost: any respectable chronicle play would show the events leading up to Ely's defeat and his escape in woman's clothes.⁷ This assumption may be correct, but I would argue that there is no need for a linking scene when the total pattern is so strongly marked. All we need to see is Ely in his lofty pride and then Ely in low estate, mocked by the colliers and imprisoned by a warder who was once his agent. Ely is vividly presented on two occasions in his fallen state, and Friar Tuck's mock elegy upon Ely's fall completes the picture. In this kind of play, confrontation (like that between Robert and his enemies at the beginning) and the emotional and moral reactions of the characters count for more than the how and why of the intrigue. The unity of the whole is provided by the familiar shape of the story with the accepted conventions. The result is a very different kind of unity from that which depends on a single character or on a powerful developing intrigue.

The Death of Robert works differently in some respects, though it is still outstandingly moral and retains much of the idealizing quality of romance. The movement toward tragic action separates it from romance, but it is a shift of emphasis rather than a sudden break. Munday seems to realize the nature of the shift and warns the audience in the epilogue to the first play and in choral passages elsewhere not to expect the romantic mood to continue:

Off then, I wish you, with your Kendall greene:
Let not sad griefe, in fresh aray be seene.
Matildaes storie is repleat with teares,
Wrongs, desolations, ruins, deadly feares.

(The Death, 872-875)

The characters maintain their good and evil natures, but there is more emphasis on sinful motives, the power of evil and the possibility of suffering. So the dangers of Part I become catastrophes in Part II: Doncaster and the Prior of York attain their revenge against Robin, the converted Warman is murdered, and John continues his long pursuit of Matilda, threatening her death in terms that make us realize the menace of his threat.

Nevertheless, one can still see plainly the idealism of romance influencing the approach to character and the working out of the plot. The converted Warman holds true to his new faith and dies completely loyal, Robin remains the very “flower of curtesie” at his death, Doncaster and York suffer appropriate punishments for their treachery, the innocence of Lady Bruce and her child is remembered in a lyrical passage of mourning, and finally Matilda dies, a martyr to chastity. The virtuous characters are tortured by a cruel world, but in their essence they remain citizens of another world where virtue is rewarded and desire fulfilled. They are still, therefore, typical figures of romance and do not become the divided or wilfully blind characters of tragedy, nor the ironic characters of satire. The dominant emotion is pathos, since there is no struggle with self, no self-accusation to balance the struggle with an external enemy. Such pathos is closer to the melancholy of romance than it is to the sterner emotions of tragedy.⁸ There is no concealing the fact that the final outcome is disastrous and that no miraculous chance saves the virtuous Matilda from destruction. Nevertheless the central expectations of moral romance are fulfilled: the virtuous remain steadfast to the end, the evil are punished, and the sinning king is redeemed.

This last statement about the redemption of the sinning king suggests that the morality play is exerting an influence in some kind of combination with romance. Moral allegory, symbolism, and myth are often the means by which writers of romance extend their range of meaning. In the Huntington plays, there are many allusions to characters and episodes in the Bible and to the traditions of religious drama. In the first play, for example, the fable concerns a great noble who is driven out of his inheritance by greedy men of this world. He remains in exile until the return of the just king whose entry has some of the panoply of a Second Coming. Leicester describes Richard, just before his return, as the very embodiment of the Christian hero (though his language may give us a passing doubt as to which God he represents on earth):

O still mee thinkes I see king Richard stand
In his giult armour staind with Pagans blood,
Upon a gallies prowe, like warres fierce God,
And on his crest, a Crucifix of golde.
O that daies honour can be neuer tolde.

(1863-1867)

When Richard reaches Sherwood, Robert comes before him like the steward before his lord who had returned from a far country, to deliver up his reckoning, and there is little doubt of the allusion here:

Doe not, dread Lord, grieue at my lowe estate:
Neuer so rich, neuer so fortunate,
Was Huntington as now himselfe he findes.
…
First take againe this Iewell you had lost,
Aged Fitzwater, banished by Iohn.

(2715-2726)

Throughout his exile, Robert's noble and forgiving nature is stressed, and he is set in striking contrast against the rulers of this world, Ely and John. He is the sun at the beginning of the play (l. 85) and his enemies are “Judas-like” (ll. 92, 345, 714).

Warman's part in the play is that of Judas, and this identification exists not only because of the frequent use of the name, “Judas,” but also because of the way the series of episodes follows the biblical account and the mystery plays on the same subject.

WAR.
Your honour thinks not ill of mee, I hope.
ROB.
Iudas speakes first, with, master is it I?
No, my false Steward, your accounts are true,
You haue dishonoured mee, I worshipt you.

(344-347)

When Warman seeks mercy from his new masters after the escape of Ely, we are reminded of Judas before Pilate and Caiaphas in the mystery plays, seeking employment and trust after he has betrayed Jesus:

IO.
O Iudas, whom nor friend nor foe may trust
Thinkst thou with teares and plaints to answere this?
…
WAR.
O my good Lord
IOH.
Thou thy good Lord betrayedst,
And all the world for money thou wilt sell.

(1669-1687)

In the end, when all have refused to relieve him, he tries to hang himself:

As Iudas did, so I intend to doe.
For I haue done alreadie as he did:
His master he betraid: so I haue mine.
…
As all betraiers, I die desperate.

(2407-2414)

The Judas theme is somewhat overdone, and one wonders whether Munday's own experience of being called Judas by his enemies as a result of his exposure of Catholic activities at home and abroad finds an echo in these scenes depicting a real Judas.⁹ The heady emotion is relieved just in time when the outlaws confront the ex-sheriff and put on a mocking play, with Much as presenter. In this lighter atmosphere, Robin forgives Warman and relieves his hunger and thirst.

Prince John in the first play has no part to act out from the Biblical scheme, except as prince of this world; he is rather that familiar secular image, Fortune's pawn, rising to a great height and falling as swiftly into empty nothing. At the moment of his fall, he thinks of himself as Phaëton. Yet though John calls himself a son of Apollo, entrusted however briefly with the chariot of the sun, he is regarded by Matilda and her father in a somewhat different light. The fable of Appius and Virginia is hinted at in the first play¹⁰ and carried toward its tragic conclusion in the second. King John in the second play is not only Appius and Tarquin, but also Herod, enraged by passion and demanding the murder of the innocent. In other words, he is not just a political abstract but the metaphysical enlargement of the tyrant into a primal source of evil. Brand, his agent for murder, is the brutal servant of tyranny from the mystery plays. We are reminded vividly of the devils of these plays in the temptation scene at Dunmow Abbey:

MAT.
Some holy water, helpe me blessed Nunnes.
Two damned spirits, in religious weedes,
Attempt to tempt my spotlesse chastitie:
And a third diuell gaping for my soule,
With horrid starings, gastly frighteth me.

(2529-2533)

Throughout the second play, but especially after Robin's death, Matilda is not only the exemplar of chastity but a saint-like character, destined to suffer in a corrupt world. The implications broaden out from the directly moral to the metaphysical, as they do much more elaborately in formal allegory of the period. Munday does not lack awareness of the advantages to be gained from this kind of complex writing where symbol and metaphor extend the range of meaning; for example, he has Robert address Warman on his wretched treatment of his tenants when he was steward:

Yet are you innocent, as cleare from guilt,
As is the rauenous mastife that hath spilt
The bloode of a whole flocke, yet slily comes
And couches in his kennell, with smeard chaps. …

(The Downfall, 355-358)

This discussion of moral configuration and mythical patterns is in danger of swamping completely two comparatively simple, though not straightforward, plays. These plays are not formal allegories nor complex mythical structures with a range of meanings that can only be discovered by the elect: on the contrary, they are lively and theatrical pieces which make use of some of the potentialities of romance in a direct, unassuming way. One should not try to search through them for the elaborate patterns of Spenserian or Shakespearean romance.

Nor should we forget that the first play is a comic romance and that comedy plays some part in the pathetic tragedy of the second play. John Russell Brown has reminded us that romance on the Elizabethan stage was almost always associated with mirth, that the romances had important parts for clowns, and that comedy frequently made possible the audience's acceptance of fantasy and the incredible.¹¹ Much the Miller's son is the clown of Part I; he is earthy and vigorous and is given a number of opportunities for lively imitation and mockery. At one point, as we noted earlier, his mockery of the despairing Warman turns a potentially tragic pattern in the direction of comedy. Other comic scenes in the play, including those in which Friar Tuck forgets his part and lapses into Skeltonics, help the audience to see how narrow the gap is between the solemn and the ridiculous. In The Death, comedy must obviously be of less importance. The opening scenes of hunting and feasting have something of the comic life of Part I but the ironic scenes at Fitzwater's ball and at the Abbey have a sinister aspect, so that laughter is ingrained with fear.

In both plays, the use of comic devices from slapstick to dramatic irony leads to multiple points of view and to numerous breaks or alterations of mode in the didactic pattern. Striking examples of ironic scenes occur in the “mock-spousal” feast near the beginning of The Downfall, when the jealous Queen and her allies are plotting against Robert and Matilda; in the somewhat similar scene at the beginning of The Death where Doncaster and the Prior of York prepare Robin's doom and comment on the irony of the great feast that is being laid out; and in the masque at Fitzwater's house in The Death, when King John comes in disguise to seduce Matilda. All of these are skilful examples of what the epilogue to The Downfall calls “The purpos'd mirth and the performed mone,” highly theatrical contrasts between appearance and reality. When the oaths of friendship and loyalty are sworn around Robin's death bed, and when the abbey, Matilda's hoped-for refuge, is revealed as more evil than the world for its hypocrisy, irony makes its own sharp comment. The temptation scene is one of the most effective in the drama of the time, and although it contains a strong dose of Protestant propaganda, its place in the play is beautifully calculated. Such irony as this is bound to be a little disruptive of the moral themes of the two plays by its skepticism regarding men's motives and words, even though one is aware (as in the late moralities) of the evil nature of the mockers and tempters.

Nevertheless, the irony of the two plays is almost entirely dramatic in function, underlining first Robin's and then Matilda's virtue in contrast to the hypocrisy and corruption of the world. The emphasis upon these characters, very much symbolic figures, suggests one way in which a romantic play can become moral, and may provide a partial answer to the question raised earlier about opposed kinds of structure implicit in the term “moral romance.” The varied trials Robin experiences, though some of them are merry adventures, are generally severe and they test and display his character. The more frightening ordeals that Matilda must undergo have the same function. The moral pattern grows, therefore, out of characters representing certain virtues and vices and out of a series of actions that display these qualities. Yet something of the romance structure remains: the various episodes do not grow out of each other in a causal sequence. Where there are references backward and forward, the incidents are typological: from Robin's forgiveness of Warman back to Warman's earlier betrayal and to Robin's original trust. The familiar romantic story of an exiled prince living in disguise until the moment of throwing off his disguise provides a framework which allows the accretion of other episodes. Similarly in the second play, the trials of a chaste heroine leading to her death or metamorphosis and the repentance of the would-be ravisher provide the romantic story. The reconciliation between romantic structure and moral pattern comes about in this way: the central characters maintain their given moral qualities throughout all difficulties; many of the individual episodes have the nature of tests or trials; and finally, the romantic story which provides the framework for each play is itself a moral tale or has something of the parable about it. This is precisely the reconciliation of romantic structure (disparate and surprising episodes) with moral pattern (character, trials and ordeals, eventual triumph of the ideal) that gives Pericles its striking place in Shakespeare's development.

This discussion of moral pattern has implied that there are strong links between the two plays, though their romantic frameworks appear to be quite distinct. Are the two plays as separate as several critics have claimed, yoked together by highly artificial means? We know that two-part plays were relatively popular at the time. There are several reasons for this, apart from the insatiable hunger of the London audiences and companies of actors for new plays. A given play might be so popular as to demand a sequel; a historical or romantic subject might prove too large for a single play and too interesting in dramatic potential to be passed over; or in combination with these factors, certain characters might take on a remarkable degree of life which seemed to demand continuance in another play. As Professor Leech has pointed out, the double plays that provoked numerous imitations are clearly Tamburlaine 1 and 2 and Henry IV 1 and 2.¹²Tamburlaine Part 2 has often been regarded as a sequel stimulated by the popularity of the first part, but it also reflects the fact that in Part 1 Marlowe had not worked out the full implications of his subject matter. One important aspect of the tradition after Tamburlaine was the shaping of the first part in a comic direction, at least toward reconciliation, and of the second part in a tragic direction. Often one can find a deeper awareness of human character and human suffering in the second part.¹³ This kind of structure is apparent in Antonio and Mellida and Antonio's Revenge (1599), in The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Byron (1608), and there are signs of it in the much cruder and fragmentary first part of Sir John Oldcastle (1599). It is also important in the Huntington plays.

To what extent can these two plays be regarded as a single work?¹⁴ The main characters are common to both parts and the same conflicts work through them both, though there are important shifts of emphasis. John, for example, is Matilda's suitor and Robin's dangerous rival in both plays, but much of his energy in the first part is taken up with the power struggle, whereas in the second part he is obsessed with his desire for Matilda. The basic themes are continued from one play to the other, the warfare between innocent virtue and cunning and powerful evil, the contrast between loyalty and treachery, the religious necessity of forgiveness. The framework too, through inductions and commentary, allows us to see the developing story as a whole.

It is necessary to emphasize these links since critics have tended to see the two plays as distinct and the opening scenes of the second play as a crude and unsatisfactory way of linking the two together. The two plays have different romantic structures—the greenwood romance of an exiled hero and lover, eventually called back to his inheritance, and the pathetic tragedy of a chaste heroine who suffers death rather than submit to lust—but even as romances they cannot be separated completely. In a larger context, the greenwood romance is a phase of art that complements pathetic tragedy, as youth is related to age. The comic action of The Downfall takes place against a threatening background of cunning and violence. The reconciliation at the end of this play is happy enough in its temporal context, but it is followed inevitably by an intensification of the same difficulties and a movement toward suffering and death. (One would be happier if more time had elapsed between the two parts.) Several of the surviving two-part plays of this period show a similar pattern, as I have noted above; it seems, therefore, to have been a conventional mode of representing the mixed comedy and tragedy of life in an extended time sequence. Since comedy ends with a wedding or the celebration of reconciliation, and since tragedy ends with a funeral, two plays about the same characters could legitimately move through one phase to the other. Hence it is right, in terms of the convention, that Robin's death should take place in the second play rather than at the end of the first, that there should be a recognition of the possibility of harmony at the end of Part I and a shift to violence and pathos in Part II. The plays do not move on to the rebirth of joy in another generation as Shakespeare's romances do; nevertheless, the repentance of John at the end of the second play is a little like the glooming peace at the end of Romeo and Juliet.

One other means by which the two plays are held together is the framework of induction and commentary within which the whole double play is cast. This is important and interesting not so much for its linking qualities as for the light it throws on illusion in romantic plays. The use of the framework is an invaluable guide to the way the imagination works. Inductions and plays within plays were fairly common in the last two decades of the sixteenth century, but they were often of small importance. In The Downfall and Death of Robert, however, as in Munday's other ironic play, John a Kent and John a Cumber, the games played with illusion at different levels are complicated and sophisticated. A company of professional actors are playing the parts of amateur actors at the court of Henry VIII who in turn discuss and present a play about Robin Hood, Matilda, and John. Not only this: the characters of the play, Robin Hood and the rest, are constantly staging little plays of their own to further intrigue, to ease emotion, or to make fun of assumed pretensions. Thus Robert, discovering the conspiracy for his exile, puts on a tragic scene for his guests in which Marian unwillingly takes part:

MAR.
If it be but a play, Ile play my part:
But sure some earnest griefe affrights my heart.

(The Downfall, 259-260)

Thus Robin deceives the Sheriff of Nottingham by acting the part of an old man (950ff.), and thus the outlaws play mocking parts before Warman when he seeks to hang himself in the forest (2445ff.). There is less play-acting in Part II because of the shift toward tragedy, but the ceremonial nature of certain scenes is continued in the second play, especially when Young Bruce presents his horrifying “dumb show” to King John.

Multiplying games with illusion has no particular value, apart from a certain theatrical cleverness, unless it serves to illuminate the action and meaning of the play. In The Downfall and Death, we have one of the most interesting examples of what can be done with a dramatic framework and play within a play. There is, first, the comic by-play which lightens the tone of the first play and has an intimate touch about it in both parts, letting the audience into the actor's confidence. This is at one remove, of course, since the actors who speak for themselves are the gentlemen-amateurs: but actors' revelations are always at one or more removes in any case. Moreover, through these consultations, the audience is allowed to participate in the business of putting on a play, and to watch itself being considered from the point of view of suspense and emotional effect. The audience is made conscious of the art of the play as perceived by director and actor, and specifically by the playwright himself. One may even see the play under construction:

S. Ioh.
Skelton, there are many other things,
That aske long time to tell them lineally:
But ten times longer will the action be.
SKEL.
Sir Iohn, yfaith I knowe not what to doe:
And I confesse that all you say it true.
Will you doe one thing for me, craue the king
To see two parts: say tis a prettie thing. …
S. Ioh.
I will perswade the king: but how can you
Perswade all these beholders to content?

(The Downfall, 2805-2815)

There is another effect of this technique of which the audience is not so immediately conscious: this is the way their interest is aroused to watch the development of familiar characters in a serious direction, and at the same time to expect much less of the comic treatment usually reserved for them. The later passages where illusion is broken have a choral effect, guiding the emotions and the moral sense of the audience away from the expected pattern of Robin Hood jests toward such themes as forgiveness and such emotions as pity and fear.

The treatment of illusion in the Huntington plays is by no means a survival from an early form of drama where audience and actors had not yet been properly distinguished from each other. On the contrary, it is in the approaching fashion of plays and masques by Jonson, Marston, and others which would make use of inductions and breaks in illusion for sophisticated theatrical reasons. The mystery plays and moralities had often used the direct approach to the audience to ensure participation in ritual, but this new use of an old technique was designed to make an audience aware of the art of the play and of its own reaction to this experience. Yet there is one aspect of the technique which is linked very strongly to the tradition of romance. This is the awareness by the audience of a story told as an old tale where the author and the listener enter into a kind of conspiracy together to enjoy the tale and accept it for its general truth in spite of absurdity, incongruity, or other faults. Many romantic plays from Peele and Greene to Shakespeare are presented with the insouciance that belongs to such a conspiracy. It is implicit in plays as different as Mucedorus and The Winter's Tale and it is perfectly expressed in the character of Shakespeare's Gower, another framework device. Illusion is a game which one can create or break at will but which is accepted for the sake of the story as an acknowledgement of the power of the imagination. Munday shows considerable skill in adapting and developing a quality of romance and the romantic play to the increasingly sophisticated theater of his day.

The variety of styles in the two plays is related to the shifting points of view that I have been describing. Especially one notices a marked change of style whenever illusion is disturbed: the actors, interrupting the play, talk more plainly in their hurried conferences about the plot. Skelton who plays the part of Friar Tuck cannot help lapsing into Skeltonics at every opportunity while another actor vainly tries to stop the flow. Although this is funny, humor is only part of the effect. The episode of the Bishop of Ely's fall is an interesting example. The uncovering of his disguise as a woman by the colliers gives plenty of room for comic action on the stage, an unmissable scene from Holinshed. Later he is treated with more dignity by Robin Hood, but Friar Tuck's commentary on his whole history, in rapid Skeltonics, has usually been dismissed as “lamentable doggerel,” as if the choral comment ought to echo the conventional moralizing of the Mirror for Magistrates in a suitable meter. Surely the passage is an example of a comic technique applied to a serious theme, partly to echo the earlier comic scene of his capture and burlesque the expected moralizing, partly to see the whole episode in proportion as comic and serious at once:

ROB.
Frier, what honest man is there with thee?
FRI.
A silly man, good master. I will speake for you:
Stand you aloofe, for feare they note your face.
Master in plaine, it were but in vaine, long to detaine,
with toyes a with bables, with fond fained fables; but
him that you see, in so mean degree, is the Lord Ely,
that helpt to exile you, that oft did reuile you. Though
in his fall, his traine be but small, and no man at all,
will giue him the wall, nor Lord doth him call: Yet he
did ride, on Jennets pide, and knightes by his side, did
foote it each tide: O see the fall of pride.

(The Downfall, 2143-2153)

In the twentieth-century theater, it is clear enough that human society and history can be represented in more ways than one, that social realism can co-exist with political didacticism and with fantastic mixtures of comedy, melodrama, satire, allegory, music and dance. Perhaps some of the mixed plays of the Elizabethan theater should be regarded with the wide tolerance of the modern theatergoer. The serious chronicle plays attempted a moral, humanistic approach to the understanding of historical processes and the motivation of great personages. The chronicle-romances made history and legend into something local, human, and individual; in part they were fervently patriotic or moralistic, in part ironic or even skeptical; sometimes they developed an intense pathos, and sometimes, even within the same play, they mocked the serious. They cared little for accurate history in comparison with the rightness of a good story, but they were interested in the great variety of emotional experience that belongs to human life in any period. There is a wonderful hodgepodge of popular dramatic elements in The Downfall and Death of Robert which might well remind us of experiments on the modern stage that try to incorporate a variety of popular theatrical techniques. The difference is that for Munday this gathering together of diverse materials and techniques was not a bold innovation but the working out of potentialities within the tradition of romance. His awareness of the tradition and his good craftsmanship are both evident.

Notes

1. See introductions by J. C. Meagher to both volumes (Oxford, 1965 and 1967). I have left the problem of authorship out of the present discussion in order to consider the plays as we have them, but am inclined to agree with Professor Meagher that the extant texts are Munday's alone.

2. Celeste Turner, Anthony Munday, an Elizabethan Man of Letters (Berkeley, 1928), p. 118.

3. Harold Jenkins, The Life and Work of Henry Chettle, (London, 1934), pp. 138ff.

4. ll. 666-677, in The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. W. Hebel, Vol. V (Oxford, 1941).

5. Tragedy of Matilda, ll. 36, 596.

6. Holinshed's Chronicles (London, 1807), II, 228.

7. J. C. Meagher (ed.), The Downfall of Robert, p. vii.

8. My use of the term “romance” depends upon Northrop Frye's extended analysis in The Anatomy of Criticism. See also Patricia Russell, “Romantic Narrative Plays: 1570-1590” in Elizabethan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 9 (New York, 1967).

9. Turner, Anthony Munday, pp. 85-86.

10. ll. 1210ff.

11. J. R. Brown, Shakespeare's Plays in Performance (New York, 1967), pp. 104ff.

12. Clifford Leech, “The Two-Part Play, Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 94 (1958), 90-106.

13. Leech, p. 102.

14. The two plays seem to have been written close together in time and subsequently acted, licensed, and printed as a pair. See introductions, Malone Society editions. There may have been a third part, “The Funeral of Richard Coeur de Lion,” using material suggested in the original induction, but if so it was probably developed as a separate play. See J. C. Meagher, “Hackwriting and the Huntingdon Plays,” Elizabethan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 9, pp. 198-199.