SOURCE: Meagher, John C. “Hackwriting and the Huntingdon Plays.” In Elizabethan Theatre, edited by John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, pp. 197-219. London: Edward Arnold Publishers Ltd., 1966.

[In the following essay, Meagher examines Munday's Robin Hood plays for what they reveal of Elizabethan popular taste.]

By the late 1590's, the theatrical entertainment of the London populace had become a substantial business, and most of the trade was divided between two dramatic companies, the Chamberlain's Men and the Admiral's Men. We know little about whatever pressure the public might have exerted for quality in the plays they presented, but the survival of the diary of Philip Henslowe, the financier of the Admiral's Men, reveals a decided pressure for variety; in a typical fortnight in 1597 the Admiral's Men gave twelve performances which presented eight to ten different plays, of which one might be new and another might be appearing for the last time, its receipts having fallen off badly after eight or a dozen showings. Such a pace demanded a constant supply of new plays, and the Admiral's Men accordingly kept in touch with a group of playwrights who worked sometimes separately and sometimes in conjunction with one another to keep up the production of dramatic texts. Some of them—Ben Jonson and George Chapman, for instance—were writers of some genuine distinction; but the care which such men usually invested in their plays made it impossible for them to fill the constant demand of the active stage of the Rose theatre. That task accordingly fell to the others. In 1598 Henslowe laid out payments for work on more than thirty plays, almost all of them the individual or combined efforts of his five most faithful hacks—Anthony Mundy, Henry Chettle, Michael Drayton, Thomas Dekker and Robert Wilson.

Modern taste in Elizabethan drama is formed in the image of artistic standards which had not yet triumphed in the heyday of Henslowe's hacks. The standard fare of the late Elizabethan stage was not the plays of Jonson and Chapman, but the work of men who made a living by turning out plays in two or three weeks' time. The surviving examples of their plays are probably a better key to the basic dramatic standards of the time than the work of their more distinguished contemporaries. For not only did their work dominate the stage by sheer volume—their reputations were by no means inferior to those of playwrights who are now taken much more seriously. In 1598, Francis Meres singled out the English writers who best bore comparison with the greatest comic dramatists of the ancient world in his Palladis Tamia or Wit's Treasury, and his selection from Henlowe's contributors reserves a special commendation not for one of the immortals but for one of the more methodical hacks: ‘the best for Comedy among us bee … Anthony Mundye our best plotter, Chapman, Porter, Wilson, Hathway, and Henry Chettle’. Meres's testimony is instructive even if we may wish to question his taste. If we are to understand Elizabethan plays in an Elizabethan perspective, we must include in our point of departure an understanding and at least a hypothetical appreciation of the basic standards and methods of Henslowe's hacks.

The texts upon which such a study can be based are unfortunately few. In the year in which Meres registered his opinions on the Elizabethan dramatic scene, Henslowe paid for more than thirty plays: yet only two have survived. Those two are the focus of this chapter, and as far as we can tell from Henslowe's records, their case seems typical. The first of them makes its initial appearance on the fifteenth of February, 1597/8, when Henslowe purchased from Anthony Mundy ‘a playe boocke called the firste parte of Robyne Hoode’. Five days later, Henslowe made an initial payment for a sequel to it; and by the middle of March, the two parts of ‘the downefall of earlle huntyngton surnamed Roben Hoode’ were duly licensed by the Master of the Revels and launched upon their brief career on the boards of the Rose. They appear to have been at least modestly successful—one or both played at Court during the festivities of the following Christmas season. But they were typical of the dramatic ephemerality of the time. There is no evidence of their having appeared on any stage since the 1590's.

If the Huntingdon plays have subsequently been neglected by producers—and even by scholars—it is understandable. They are not artistically distinguished. They represent neither new departures in the theatre nor unusually late survivals of old departures. They do not excel in stagecraft, nor use source materials ingeniously, nor exhibit touches of great poetry, nor even anticipate better plays. Their interest for the historian of drama lies especially in their representativeness rather than their distinction: they are le drame moyen sensuel, examples of the sturdy hackwork that formed the staple diet of the late Elizabethan stage and then, for the most part, quietly disappeared. As such, they provide a satisfactory opportunity for investigating the probably typical approach of a relatively unambitious playwright addressing himself to the task of writing a respectable and entertaining play rather quickly, without running the risk of artistic distinction.

It is impossible for the critic to be totally fair to the merits of the Huntingdon plays, because we do not have them in their finished form. The only text is that published by William Leake in 1601, and the manuscript used by the printer was apparently a set of ‘foul papers’, the author's late but not quite final draft. For the investigation of the techniques of Elizabethan hack-work, however, the irregularity of that manuscript is an additional advantage, since its incompleteness preserves in fossil form evidence of several important decisions and changes of mind made by the playwright during composition. Such decisions and revisions usefully supplement the inferences that can be drawn from the overall character of the plays; indications of the process of growth are keys to the playwright's dramaturgical values and techniques.

To begin with, it is clear that the play delivered to Henslowe in the middle of February was not exactly the one which Mundy originally sat down to write. He appears at first to have designed a single play to cover the story of the betrayal and exile of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, with his subsequent life as Robin Hood, probably ending with his death; to this, he also joined an historical plot, dealing with the political struggles between Prince John and the Bishop of Ely during the absence of the crusading King Richard I. Earlier drafts may possibly have preceded the version printed in 1601; but the draft from which Leake published was written essentially in the order presented by the printed text, and begins with a fairly finished version of the scenes which cover the exile of Robert and the beginnings of the struggle between Ely and John. It was apparently after these scenes were written that an important inflection of the plot occurred to Mundy.

In order to provide Robin Hood's traditional Maid Marian with a courtly history paralleling that of Robin Hood himself, the opening scenes of The Downfall present her as the daughter of Lord Lacy and the betrothed of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon. Mundy also makes her the object of Prince John's amorous attentions; he may have got the idea from Michael Drayton's poem, Matilda (1594), which deals with the relentless pursuit by King John of Matilda, daughter of Lord Fitzwater, or it may be that Mundy thought explicitly of Drayton's poem only after he had created the parallel. At any rate, after writing the first few scenes, Mundy saw the advantages of exploiting the established literary history of Matilda: from this point on, Marian and Lord Lacy appear exclusively under the names of Matilda and Lord Fitzwater.

This metamorphosis was to become importantly influential later on, but at first it does not seem to have affected the original plot of The Downfall very deeply beyond the mere change of names. The play continues to develop rather as one might have anticipated from the opening scenes. Mundy still intended a single play, and as he neared the end of The Downfall he wrote evidence of this intention into an aside by Skelton, the master of ceremonies in the play's induction-epilogue framework:

The Abbots malice, rak't in cinders long,
Breakes out at last with Robins Tragedie. …
Wherefore still sit you, doth Skelton intreat you,
          While he facete wil breefely repeate you, the history al,
And tale tragical, by whose treachery, and base injury,
Robin the good, calde Robin Hood, died in Sherewodde …

(i2-2v)

It is not clear when he changed his mind. It may be that he finished the play as he had originally intended before recognising that a more full and faithful dramatic version of Drayton's Matilda could be joined with the representation of Robin's death and some of King Richard's glories as the foundation of another play. In any event, he discovered that he had plot enough for five pounds' worth of sequel. He then rounded off The Downfall with a happy restoration and transferred either a completed or an intended version of the death of Robin Hood to the beginning of a sequel play, whose projected content be outlined in an epilogue appended to The Downfall:

The second part shall presently be pend:
There shall you see, as late my friend did note,
King Richards revels at earle Roberts bower,
The purpos'd mirth, and the performed mone,
The death of Robin, and his murderers.
For interest of your stay, this will I adde,
King Richards voyage backe to Austria:
The swift returned tydings of his death,
The manner of his royall funerall.
Then John shall be a lawfull crowned king,
But to Matilda beare unlawfull love.
Aged Fitzwaters finall banishment:
His pitious end, of power teares to move
From marble pillers. The Catastrophe
Shall shewe you faire Matildas Tragedy,
Who (shunning Johns pursute) became a Nunne,
At Dumwod [sic] Abbey, where she constantly
Chose death to save her spotlesse chastitie.

(l2v)

But this plan too was short-lived. On 15 February, Mundy delivered The Downfall to Henslowe and entered into negotiations for its sequel. Five days later, perhaps after the Company had examined The Downfall through a reading at their favourite tavern in Fish Street, Henslowe issued an initial payment to Dowton to give to Mundy for ‘his seconde parte of the downefall of earlle huntyngton surnamed Roben Hoode’,¹ and on 25 February twenty shillings more followed for Henry Chettle to help with its composition—possibly to write the section dealing with King Richard.² But it was soon realised that the story of King John and Matilda was rich enough by itself, and that there were independent possibilities in Richard's adventures in Austria and his funeral. The latter plot was therefore spun off for a separate play, written by Chettle, Mundy, Wilson, and Drayton the following June as The Funeral of Richard Coeur de Lion, and the former became the basis of The Death. This change probably took place before Mundy had gone very far; just after the extant version of The Death represents the tragic end of Robin Hood in precisely the manner promised in the epilogue to The Downfall, and makes the initial arrangements for Richard's return to Austria, the revised plans for the rest of the play are revealed in an abrupt transition which dismisses the fate of Richard and looks exclusively to the tale of King John and Matilda:

Yet knowe full well, to please this company,
We meane to end Matildaes Tragedie. …
You must suppose king Richard now is deade,
And John (resistlesse) is faire Englands Lord …

(D2v-3)

Hereafter, the composition proceeds according to plan: Drayton's story of King John and Matilda, loosely imitated in The Downfall and conformed there to a prior plot of John and Marian, proved sufficient for a more faithful dramatic redaction as well. On 8 March, Henslowe laid out the final payment for The Death, and it is likely that plans for a now lost The Funeral of Richard Coeur de Lion were also afoot by that time. The original Downfall had been fruitfully conceived: each of its plots had begotten dramatic offspring.

The original conception had probably derived its first form from a passage in Grafton's Chronicle. After treating King Richard's commission of Ely and his departure for the crusade, Grafton digresses into an account of Robin Hood, taking note of his original nobility and of the prodigality which eventually caused his bankruptcy and outlawry.³ Neither the nobility and bankruptcy of Robin Hood nor his historical association with the period of Richard's crusade was traditional. Grafton's notice seems to provide the germ of both plots of The Downfall.

Grafton has little more about Robin Hood, but Mundy had plenty of other material to use in amplifying his treatment of that story. Some of this has not survived, which makes it risky to assert the originality of the Huntingdon plays' treatment of Robin Hood; but there is evidence both that Mundy used Robin Hood literature extensively, and that he could be independent of it. He accepts without substantial changes standard characters such as Little John, Friar Tuck and Maid Marian; but the prehistory given each of them in The Downfall seems to be his own invention. Some specific adventures of Mundy's Robin Hood are thoroughly indebted to earlier literature (Robin's rescue of Scarlet and Scathlock from the gallows is based on a conflation of several popular ballads),⁴ while others, such as the manner of Robin's death, are unprecedented in extant writings. It is clear that Mundy deliberately deviated from the traditional fare of stage Robin Hoodery, and it seems that he regarded his deviation as a well-calculated risk. When one of the characters of the induction framework suspends The Downfall near the end to express concern over the play's omission of traditional ‘jeasts of Robin Hoode’ and ‘merry Morices of Frier Tuck’ (i2),⁵ Skelton's reply is redolent of the experienced confidence of the Henslovian hack:

His Majestie himselfe survaid the plat,
And bad me boldly write it, it was good.
For merry jeasts, they have bene showne before,
As how the Frier fell into the Well,
For love of Jinny that faire bonny bell:
How Greeneleafe robd the Shrieve of Notingham,
And other mirthfull matter, full of game.
Our play expresses noble Roberts wrong,
His milde forgetting trecherous injurie: …
If these that heare the historie rehearst,
Condemne my Play when it begins to spring,
Ile let it wither while it is a budde,
And never shewe the flower to the King.

(i2)

The flower survived, and certainly part of the reason was the dramatic (and commercial) attractiveness of Mundy's new design for Robin Hood, with an unprecedented emphasis on Robin's generous charity that reaches almost hagiographical dimensions. The playwright was no slave to sources. But some of his treatments of Robin Hood material are only qualifiedly original—new to the Robin Hood tradition, but not to the stage. Mundy totally reshaped Much, the miller's son, from the way he found him in the Robin Hood literature, where he is a standard Merry Man, almost indistinguishable from Scarlet or Little John. But although Mundy's reshaping of Much is almost total, it is neither gratuitous nor imaginative: his motive and his model for the change can be found throughout the drama of the 1590's in the form of the stock stage clown, whose absence would have been a distinct disappointment to the audience at the Rose. Mundy merely includes a character who performs with the expected silliness, incongruity, bawdiness, and verbal malapropisms, and gives him Much's name. However revolutionary it may be for Much's reputation, from the theatrical point of view it is neither new bottle nor new wine.

Theatrical tradition exerted an enormous shaping pressure on the Huntingdon plays. Even the co-ordination of Robin Hood material with a plot drawn from political history, though it may have been suggested by Grafton's Chronicle, was more likely a principle which Mundy took straight from the stage. Edward I and George a Greene had both been played successfully at the Rose within the four years prior to the composition of The Downfall. The combination of Robin Hoodery with historical drama was accordingly well-established. Grafton provided the particular historical plot, but probably not the idea.

In fact, Grafton did not provide even all the particular historical plot. The need for material soon drove Mundy beyond Grafton to other sources. Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles (1587) provided considerably more detail, an obvious advantage to an eclectic dramatist; Mundy accordingly shows a much greater debt to Holinshed's information than to Grafton's. Indeed, his search for good dramatic hints seems to have taken him as far as John Bale's Acts of the English Votaries, where the description of Ely's capture is closer than either Grafton or Holinshed to the representation in The Downfall.⁶ We cannot be sure where Mundy got his chronicles—they would have been a considerable investment for an Elizabethan dramatic hack, though a prudent one during the vogue of the history play.⁷ But he clearly did have access to them, and used them for an ample and unsystematic cribbing whose range and carelessness are nicely embodied in a remark in The Downfall: ‘Richard is a king,’ says Prince John, ‘In Cyprus, Acon, Acres, and rich Palestine’ (g4v). Acon is simply the name by which Grafton designates the town known to Holinshed as Acres.

Mundy used the chronicles, but it would not be quite accurate to say that he learned his history from them. He gleaned to serve his independent purposes, and the resulting representations in the Huntingdon plays are frequently quite innocent of historical accuracy. The Death shows Chester, Winchester, and Mowbray among the defenders of King John; Holinshed clearly states that they were on the other side. The first part of The Downfall emphasises the tyrannical ambitions of Prince John, aided by his scheming mother; Holinshed agrees with the other chronicles that the tyranny was rather on Ely's part, and shows us a responsible Queen Eleanor who carefully keeps King Richard informed about political developments during his absence. These divergences are typical: the plays see history neither steadily nor whole.

If history generally appears with its spectra rearranged, it is frequently by a passage through previous literature rather than through the playwright's imagination. Mundy frequently had a choice between chronicle and literary versions of the same material, and he usually opted for the latter. The wars of King John with his barons arose, according to the chronicles, over the King's refusal to honour the ancient laws of the land; in Drayton's poem, Matilda, the wars arise over the King's lustful pursuit of chaste Matilda. The Death follows Drayton. King Richard, according to the chronicles, had a relatively uneventful imprisonment in Germany, never got beyond Jerusalem on his crusade, and spent his last months warring in France; The Downfall, following romances and ballads,⁸ tells the story of Richard's heroic deeds during his imprisonment in Austria, refers to his siege of Babylon, and sends him back to Austria to meet his end.

In short, the Huntingdon plays were built on a literary bias that reminds us how clearly they owe their allegiance to drama, not to history—and in the less obvious sense as well as the more, for their representation of a wicked Prince John and a scheming Queen Eleanor (which is one of their sharpest divergences from the chronicles) flouts history mainly because such plays as The Troublesome Reign and King John had done so before them. John and Eleanor came to Mundy dramatically ready-made; there was no good reason to let mere history modify his preconceptions about such established characters.

It is not only history that the Huntingdon plays bend so freely to the shape of the stage. The same phenomena appear in their handling of even so literarily well-digested a source as Matilda. The Death follows the main lines of Drayton's story, but freely transposes, alters, omits, and invents. The reasons are almost always specifically theatrical. Matilda's Amazonian participation in the Barons' Wars keeps her actively present in The Death, but is the child of dramatic expediency, not to be found in Drayton's poem. The majority of Drayton's elegant monologues are ignored or contradicted by the play, their slow-paced sophistication being dramatically unsuitable even for extensive imitation in all but a very few cases. Drayton's King John is a well-drawn regal and courtly figure who speaks with a smooth and graceful eloquence, and his messenger is a sophisticated ‘devill, walking in a humane shape’,⁹ an atheistic Machiavel, skilful in persuasion. But despite the opportunities created by Drayton, Mundy adjusts his King to a condition of blunt and irascible crudity, true to the legacy of The Troublesome Reign, and throws over Drayton's messenger to imitate the sturdy and old-fashioned devil of the Tudor morality plays: coarse, gloatingly immoral and slightly bawdy. Even the Fitzwater and Matilda of The Death seem to betray by their shallow simplicity Drayton's poetic achievement. But it is not because of the playwright's incapacity to translate his source faithfully into drama: it is more precisely the result of the hackwriter's prudent sense of economy. Drayton was primarily interested in the poetic reactions of his characters; Mundy was interested in the dramatic actions of his, and where the two do not coincide, the stage is the touchstone.

Having assembled a considerable body of historical, literary and theatrical material, Mundy selected from it and shaped it in accordance with his considerable experience of what worked on the public stage. He exploited the audience's acquaintance with popular literature, heeded their taste for both the novel and the familiar, and accordingly organised his play according to the proven—if sometimes ruthless—principles of theatrical efficiency by which he had built his reputation. These principles required the minimising of unnecessary sophistication in plot, in character, in language. But the main law of dramaturgical economy operative in the construction of these plays is as positive as it is simple and obvious: maximise the dramatic uses of characters, places, and actions, by means of whatever selection, distortion or invention of material may be necessary. This principle is applied extensively and imaginatively enough in the Huntingdon plays to make Mundy's reputed skill as a plotter at least credible.

The character named Warman provides a particularly good example. He begins as the unjust steward of the Earl of Huntingdon, and might easily have been forgotten once his primary task, the outlawry of the earl, was accomplished. But Mundy observed that he could double as the indispensable Sheriff of Nottingham, and accordingly has Ely present him with a commission to that office (c1v), thus extending his usefulness to the greenwood scenes. Then (with rather less plausibility) after John usurps the throne, he commands that Ely be sent to Warman's jail in Nottingham (e2v); Warman can therefore be involved in Ely's subsequent escape and so combine the dramatic necessities of getting Ely free and bringing himself (through John's wrath) to deserved grief. It is, albeit somewhat improbably, a fairly successful piece of dramaturgical economy: by doing the work of three characters, Warman's employment heightens the interest in the traditional confrontation between Robin Hood and the Sheriff, allows his established untrustworthiness to make Ely's escape more plausible, and incurs the punishment merited by his initial misbehaviour as Robert's steward. But even that is not all. Being a handy tool, Warman is made the source of John's information concerning the treachery of Sir Hugh Lacy (c4-4v) and the agent of the Prior's disgrace (g3-3v).

These economies obviously make a play somewhat easier to follow, since they reduce the number of characters to be kept straight by the audience while permitting the remainder to contrive maximum action. Mundy knew this, and also appreciated the contribution of minor connective devices to the tidiness of the action and the flow of information, and therefore invented connections to serve a variety of other ends—to effect transitions, to clarify attitudes, and generally to promote an illusion of coherence that helps knit more closely the disparate and sometimes rather improbable actions of the play. Warman's rôle in the persecution of Scarlet and Scathlock could have been derived quite adequately from his office as Sheriff of Nottingham, but to this the playwright poignantly adds a list of the kindnesses of Scarlet's family to Warman (and to Warman's father!), including the original preferment of Warman to his lord (i.e., the Earl of Huntingdon) and, with deliberate irony, a rescue from the gallows (d3v).

So the small connections multiply. Warman gloats just before the rescue that Scarlet and Scathlock had hoped to be aided by the Earl of Huntingdon, whose bankruptcy (Warman thinks) puts such aid out of the question (d4); a casual line from Little John reveals Robin's earlier benevolence to the widow Scarlet (d1v); Friar Tuck, not yet of Robin's company, is brought into the scene as confessor to the prisoners, and when Robin wishes to learn something about Tuck's background, he asks Scarlet, who just happens to know (d4v); Tuck turns out to be of the same abbey as Robin's wicked uncle, the Prior, and happens to be acquainted with Jinny (f2v), who in turn is not only the sweetheart of Much but the daughter of the widow Scarlet as well (e4v). Few of these minor revelations have any significance at all beyond the moment of their occurrence—they contribute not to the plot, but to the general dramatic illusion of the coherence of events.

The same tendency is evident in The Death. Lord Bruce is kinsman not only to Hugh le Brun, whose activities are bothering King John toward the beginning of the play (E2v), but to Fitzwater too (E3v)—unhistorically, in both cases. Hubert, later in the play, happens to know (and, of course, to mention casually to King John) that the Abbess of Dunmow is carrying on with a monk of Bury (I1); it later transpires (as soon as it is dramatically indispensable) that this same monk has long pestered John for his infallible preferment to the office of Abbot, and can therefore be induced to levy some helpful pressure on Matilda through the Abbess (I2v). When Matilda is to be wooed by one Wigmore, it is done by proxy: one of the Bruces appears with the mission of excusing the proxy suit, and the chosen vicar turns out to be Leicester (E3v). The same scene reveals an even more notable economy in the process of being instituted: it originally included both Fitzwater and his son, but Mundy apparently discovered that Young Bruce, already designed into other actions of the play, could profitably absorb the functions of Fitzwater's son. He therefore altered his plans for Young Bruce and moved him into this scene to replace the now supererogatory Young Fitzwater, who was then put completely out of existence. The extant text has arrested the process of composition just before the full realisation of the change.

The spirit of economy (occasionally bordering, like some of the examples already cited, on absurd coincidence) is operative in matters of place as well. When Robert and Matilda first meet with Little John and Much in Sherwood Forest, the forthcoming execution of Scarlet and Scathlock chances to be mentioned, whereupon Little John observes that they happen to be within sight of both the appointed gallows-tree and the widow Scarlet's house (d1v). When Fitzwater is exiled in The Death, he requests permission to visit Matilda once more and is warned that he has only until sunset; he promptly catches sight of Dunmow Abbey, and the transition to the next scene does not demand the clearing of the stage (H4-4v).

The well-known conventional flexibility of the Elizabethan stage is not often glaringly abused in the Huntingdon plays, but Mundy often does exploit its resources to effect a simple shift of location where another writer might have cleared the stage first. The Huntingdon plays manage to include more dialogue in their scenes than is the average for the extant plays of the time, and they achieve this not through a diminution of action and diversity but by bringing stage conventions to the aid of continuity. The Downfall moves from Little John's struggle with the Sheriff through Robert's tryst and escape to Prince John's uprising against Ely, without ever clearing the stage (b4-d1); and The Death plays without a break a sequence that goes from the last valiant stand of Fitzwater and his allies through their defeat and capture, through Fitzwater's last interview with Matilda at Dunmow, through King John's plotting with the monk and with the messenger Brand, to Hubert's soliloquy on loyalty (H2v-13v). This is not to say that Mundy never wrote two scenes when they could be reduced to one, nor that he handled the stage with remarkable subtlety, but merely that he had adequately learned his lessons at the theatres: he knew the tricks of stagecraft and was sensible of the dramatic value of on-stage transitions, occasionally taking some trouble to avoid clearing the stage unnecessarily.

Such strategies as these reveal the playwright's concern for the coherence of his play, and the more ambitious of them achieve enhanced coherence at a fairly deep level of organisation. But the majority are superficial and localised, adequate to promote the illusion of order where it is temporarily needed but careless of long-range effects.

The Huntingdon plays therefore move constantly but not consistently, balanced precariously on the edge of the events of the moment and the devices required to justify them. For minor movements, this causes little difficulty. Mundy is fairly careful to motivate entrances and exits, and can usually do so on the spot without egregious awkwardness (a notable exception being his sudden invention of an illness for the absent Archbishop of York (g2v) in order that the Prior might be temporarily free to soliloquise and receive some bad news from messengers). But this kind of management is less satisfactory when the playwright must organise a more complex action or order a substantial reversal. Attempts to handle such problems only when they occur, without adequate prior planning, are bound to produce cumbersome results, especially if the playwright tends to work on the level of dramatic illusion rather than in deeper plot-organisation.

For instance: before he reforms and joins Robin's band, Friar Tuck proposes to help the Prior by trapping Robin. He forms a plan involving the unwitting assistance of Jinny. Jinny, says Friar Tuck,

Loves, and is belov'd of Much the millers sonne,
If I can get the girle to goe with mee,
Disguis'd in habit, like a Pedlers mort,
Ile serve this Execution, on my life.

(f2v)

The point of the disguise is obviously that they might avoid the suspicion of the outlaws. But what is the point of his mentioning the mutual love of Jinny and Much? Presumably, it is that her visit would therefore not be suspicious, an advantage that is plainly cancelled by the proposed disguise—and in any event a factor which must inevitably (except in such a play as this) make a disguised visit to the greenwood a most curious proposition from Jinny's point of view. What seems to have happened is that Mundy, faced with the problem of getting Tuck and Jinny to the greenwood, thought of two ways of solving it and used them both, not noticing that they were incompatible. To be safe, when he brings Jinny on a few lines later, he has her soliloquising an already formed intention to go to the greenwood. A similar over-compensation occurs in The Death when Mundy takes on the considerable job of repairing the character of King John after his cruelties have taken their final toll. The time has now come for the reconciliation required to present a united England against the threat of French invasion, and to resolve the play. But John's reputation is at its nadir: Matilda has been poisoned, and Bruce has just shown to the assembled company the bodies of his mother and brother, starved by the King's command. This is quite a gap for an on-the-spot bridging, but the absence of long-range planning left Mundy no choice. John now reveals, for the first time, that he had had second thoughts about the famishment of the Bruces, had ordered his agent Brand to take them food, and had been assured by Brand that he had already, out of pity, left food for them. Sir William Blunt, warden of the castle, supports John's story,

Which argues in that point his innocence:
Brand did beare in a months provision;
But lockt it like a villaine, farre from them:
And lockt them in a place where no mans eare
Might heare their lamentable wofull mones:
For all the issue both of vent and light,
Came from a loover at the towers toppe,
Till now Lord Bruse made open this wide gappe.

(L3)

The entire speech is a multiple rationalisation. Brand must bear the blame that John might be forgivable; Blunt must be provided with an excuse for not having aided the captives; and his excuse (the inaccessibility of the Bruces' prison) must be clarified to explain its apparent incompatibility with the victims' very obvious accessibility on the upper stage. The dramatist is not for a moment daunted by the patent absurdity of an argument which supposes that Brand, under orders to lock up the Bruces without food, carried along a month's supply anyway (even though he had not the least intention of giving it to them) and then relieved the King with an unnecessary lie that would undoubtedly have cost him his head as soon as the King discovered the truth. Nor does Mundy seem to notice that Blunt's innocent awareness of the Bruces' imprisonment makes his subsequent ignorance the more culpable, or that his testimony about the month's food half-substantiates Brand's story but has nothing at all to do with the support of John's. The speech is a specimen of expedient ingenuity, designed to excuse John by villifying Brand, while keeping Blunt unstained. The playwright is not concerned with piecing together an airtight argument but rather with piling on enough testimony to convince the audience. It would probably serve its purpose to the drowsy ear in the late afternoon at the Rose, and that was enough.

Such accidental inconsistency is a characteristic feature of the Huntingdon plays. Mundy often turned his attention so exclusively to the exigencies of the present action that he failed to retain that general sense of tact required for a consistently intelligible unity of design. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that he cared little for such unity. The Huntingdon plays are designed to provide a continuity of interesting action, which is not the most aesthetically ambitious form of design but adequate for dramatic entertainment—and certainly easier to put together in two or three weeks¹⁰ than loftier conceptions.

It is in this regard that the modern reader's natural sympathy with Elizabethan drama most clearly falters. The strong contemporary bias for aesthetic unity and against ‘contrivance’ is deeply inbred, and the satisfaction of these canons still largely determines our ranking of early dramatists. It is difficult for us to see that these were not characteristic Elizabethan prejudices, that in fact many playwrights do not seem to have particularly valued them—and that even those who satisfy them did not necessarily consider this their most notable achievement. To the extent that we feel driven to explain all Elizabethan stage foolery by pointing patronisingly at the groundlings or by invoking a hidden thematic relevance; to the extent that we feel obliged to adjust our interpretations of characters and of speeches in order to preserve psychological truth; to the extent that we permit ourselves to be disappointed by structural imbalances, mystified (or impressed) by inconsistencies in time, and embarrassed by possible improbabilities, we shall find it hard to understand why The Downfall was selected to play at Court and how its author acquired his reputation. Indeed, we shall find it hard to accept in the greatest Elizabethan dramatists many things for which we now frequently feel obliged to find excuses. I do not mean to imply, of course, that the order in Jonson's plots or in Shakespeare's patterns of imagery is merely accidental; but I do wish to suggest that it would be critically fruitful to consider the Huntingdon plays as dramaturgical paradigms rather than as examples of theatrical inadequacy. It is true that Mundy falls short of Jonson and Shakespeare. But it is more accurate to say that Shakespeare and Jonson go beyond Mundy. The evidence suggests that it is not in the great plays but in the products of successful standard hackwriting that the basic principles of late Elizabethan dramatic composition are to be most clearly exemplified and the relevant critical standards most clearly revealed.

Accordingly, the handling of character in the Huntingdon plays is superficial, rather crude, but eminently practical. Main characters are organised, as one would expect, according to their functions in the action and their moral dispositions (excluding comic characters, who are typically excused both from affecting the plot and from having an ethical dimension). Characters are usually quite good or quite nasty. Occasionally a moral middle-ground emerges, but this is a highly unstable state, and usually seems to be due to the playwright's carelessness rather than to his design: normally, the middle-ground is crossed in a single leap. Conversions and lapses are both ordinarily complete, at least temporarily.

The moral positions of characters are of course intimately connected with their functions in the plot, and both of these are rather arbitrary and unpredictable in the Huntingdon plays. Consequently, each major change of circumstances redefines those characters who cause it, but can (and occasionally does) threaten the intelligibility of those who are less directly involved. Mundy frequently provides the necessary information by resorting to the expedient of having them redefine themselves by stating their reactions to what has transpired, either in group discussions or in asides. The device is crude, but it preserves order.

Not surprisingly, there is a tendency to a certain extravagance in the way characters represent their positions. There was no point in taxing the Rose's patrons with finesse. Robin Hood not only treats his betrayers with kindness when they repent—he releases the unrepentant Doncaster from a just captivity and sends him off with a hundred pounds to comfort him (B1). When Queen Eleanor and Prince John are thwarted in their attempt to prevent the escape of Earl Robert and his sweetheart, the Queen resolves to ‘turne love, to never changing hate’, while John vows to follow Robert ‘with revengefull murdrous hate’ (c3v), though neither's animus is put to any further dramatic purpose. Warman's despair (i4-4v) and Young Bruce's angry grief (L1-1v) are uttered at length, in the most superlative terms, and Lady Bruce's gratitude for a trifling gesture of mercy from King John is hardly less extreme (G2). Brand chokes when he accidentally pronounces the word ‘honest’ (K2), and Doncaster, accused of raping a nun, modestly acknowledges a thousand other victims (C3).

The same kind of extravagance is sometimes applied to events. The Prior must not only be banished, but have his barns accidentally destroyed to reinforce the point (g3); and Warman, once fallen, encounters and is abused by three persons to whom he once was kind (i2v-4)—no kindness of his having been mentioned anywhere in the play until it could be put to this use. King John is likewise confronted simultaneously with the famished Bruces, poisoned Matilda, a French invasion, and the threatened defection of his most valiant peers (L4v).

Plays constructed with such heavy-handedness cannot be expected to be inhabited by flexible characters, and flexibility is unnecessary when action can be contrived without it. Hearts can be changed in a twinkling by an encounter with catastrophe or a stroke of good fortune. There is therefore no need for gradual awakening or for the complexities of character by which substantial changes can be dramatically anticipated. Abrupt reversals of character have their own conventional logic on the Elizabethan stage. But, more usefully still, that logic is not inexorable. The dramatist may arbitrarily make his characters react to any event in whatever way best suits the requirements of the plot. Warman and the Prior both lose everything, escape to the greenwood, and are charitably received by Robin Hood. They react differently, but only because it is convenient to have them do so. The significance of any event is entirely up to the playwright if, instead of building laws of behaviour into his characters, he rather metes out decisions, as he goes along, from the general law that action must be sustained. Such a method has its price, for coherence is easily sacrificed to expediency; but it does sustain the action.

Action is not, of course, Mundy's exclusive concern in the Huntingdon plays. The ethical bias of the Elizabethan stage was strong (note its importance in Mundy's handling of character), and the Huntingdon plays frequently pause to reflect on their own action in order to press home, at least temporarily, a general moral conclusion. Both plays, for instance, deal with types of rebellion and thus call dramatically into question important principles of civil order; each accordingly seizes a critical moment to put into the mouth of a sympathetic character an eloquent defence of the universal and inviolable duty of obedience.¹¹ But in themes as well as actions, these are largely piecemeal plays.

Nothing could make clearer Mundy's failure to achieve thematic coherence than his almost total disregard of the best opportunities to fix the theme of obedience as a necessary implication of the action. Toward the end of The Downfall, the reconciliation is secured through the submission to Richard of those who had opposed him in his absence, concluding with the usurping Prince John. Any one of these characters would provide a splendid opportunity for clinching the principle of obedience: in a speech of penitent submission all the truths voiced earlier by the indignant Leicester could be finally affirmed. Mundy lets the opportunity pass. The rebels submit, and are reinstated, offstage, and nothing is said again about their temporary defection. Prince John never utters a remorseful word to the King whom he betrayed—despite the example given the dramatist in Holinshed's account. A similar opportunity arises at the end of The Death, with a similar result. Leicester proposes to escape the tyranny of King John by accepting the rule of the Dauphin. The principle of dutiful obedience to a legitimate king, the theme of Hubert's earlier soliloquy, is the obvious argument for the loyalists to use; instead, they plead that Frenchmen (and particularly King Louis) cannot be trusted, that the Dauphin Louis could be worse than John for all they know, and that John is deeply remorseful (M1-1v). The reconciliation is secured on the strength of these arguments, and the best chance for clinching the duty of obedience is allowed to pass.

These are missed opportunities certainly, but probably not missed simply through carelessness. Leicester's outrage at usurpation and Hubert's sense of duty serve dramatic purposes in their respective places. It may never have occurred to our playwright that those purposes might be thought sufficiently relevant to later scenes and situations to dictate the way in which they should be handled, when a resolution could be found for the plot without arguments from political philosophy. The duty of obedience was not a thematic preoccupation for the author of the Huntingdon plays, but an incidental general reflection. This is the case with the majority of the general reflections in these plays: they are occasioned by circumstances and cannot be considered any more universal than the scenes in which they fall.

The closest the Huntingdon plays get to an essential theme is through their recurrent emphasis upon the virtue and power of charitable forgiveness. The central figures, Robin Hood and Matilda, are both paragons of generosity, and both succeed in thawing the vices of others merely by pardoning them. But even this lacks the contagion necessary for the establishment of a theme. This kind of charity is a property of Robin and Matilda, not of the plays. The dying Robin asks the repentant Prior to take advantage of the legal loophole allowed to clerics and live on, a better man, and begs King Richard to spare his life: ‘Let sweete forgivenesse be my passing bell’ (C4). Richard promptly sentences the Prior to death. King John's final reformation, which might appropriately have been occasioned by Matilda's dying forgiveness, arises simply from the horror of his deeds. His victim's charity is not even reported to him. Thus even the most pervasive thematic idea is only a particular effect that never acquires the proportions by which the plays might be drawn to assume its shape. Thoughts and principles are presented as the reactions of specific characters to specific circumstances, not as the general truths discovered by life in action. This was apparently enough to satisfy not only critical standards but even the Elizabethan appetite for moralising. If a play generally encouraged the audience to do good and avoid evil, the dramatist could fully discharge his moral obligations merely by occasionally letting his characters toss off a weighty precept. It was not necessary to let this interfere with his main dramatic business. Indeed, it might be wasted effort to blend the two more closely—a book published in 1596 recommends the plays of Sophocles and Euripides as examples of the sort of tragedy most fit for our reading: ‘honest and full of grave sentences, interlaced with pleasaunt talke’.¹²

There is yet another correlative to the general organisation of the Huntingdon plays to be found in the medium of expression. These are verse-plays, reserving prose almost exclusively for the use of comic characters, in accordance with the common practice of the time. But they are written in verse probably only because verse had become the conventional dramatic medium. They rely primarily on a direct and unambitious style, using it as an essentially transparent medium through which events, character-traits, and the connections of the plot may be easily viewed. Metaphor and simile are allotted sparingly and are more often ornamental than functional when used. The prosody is also simple: a straight end-stopped iambic pentameter is the rule throughout both plays, but just carelessly enough to permit the frequent occurrence of the rawest sort of padding to achieve regularisation (e.g., ‘Let him, let him, let him make thee as sad’ [b1]), as well as both hypersyllabic and hyposyllabic lines.

This is not to say that the Huntingdon plays are deliberately unpoetic, or even that Mundy declined to concern himself with poetic effects. Nearly a third of the lines are rhymed (and sometimes cross-rhymed); this, together with the frequent displacements of normal word-order made to secure the rhymes, can even give the reader an impression of a certain self-consciousness about poetry. If such an impression is seriously damaged by the occurrence of

O Honourable Awbery de Vere,
Let sorrow in a sable sute appeare

(L4)

it is nevertheless reinforced by a passage like this, in which the parenthetical betrays just such a self-consciousness:

Now are yee, worthy and resolved men,
Come to the cage where the uncleane birds bide,
That tyre on all the faire flight in the Realme.
Summon this Castle, or (to keepe my words)
This cage of night-hid owles, light-flying birds.

(G2)

But that is, of course, precisely the point. Passages like this, like Prince John's sonnet-like address to Matilda (k3v), like Hubert's defence of poetry (E2), stand out somewhat awkwardly from the surrounding lines, because the Huntingdon plays use two different styles which are never successfully blended. There is a static and adorned style, highly metaphorical and well suited for the elaboration of a mood or the vivid narration of an event; and there is a kinetic and plain style, direct and well suited for carrying the flow of dramatic action. The former usually appears at a pause in the action: a reflective soliloquy, a lament, a digression, a narration. When the action picks up again, the more ‘poetical’ style yields to the more plain. It is a practical solution. Each style is nicely adapted to the kind of dramatic job for which it is employed; stylistic homogeneity would unnecessarily compromise both of them—and, in addition, would diminish the variety valued on the Elizabethan stage.

For anyone attached to general consistency, bathos and anticlimax occur frequently in the Huntingdon plays, as a result of the abruptness with which they move from one event or mood into another. Our playwright either had no gift for graceful transition, or simply considered grace an unnecessary and dispensable dramatic luxury. After their rescue from the hangman, Scarlet and Scathlock entertain their audience with a lively narration of their past outlaw history; when they are done, Mundy puts into the mouth of their new master the words which will serve to shift the conversation to the next topic: ‘Of that enough’ (f1). Similarly, Mundy has no scruple about leaving a flurry of heroics stranded in mid-air. Leicester works himself into a peak of fervour with a long speech to his troops, ending with ‘Courage, upon them, till wee cannot stand’ (h2v), only to discover that his seeming opponent is a dear friend who is quite nonplussed at the sight. The emotion or diversion is itself satisfying, and may be abandoned abruptly once it had served its purpose.

Again and again the artistic blemishes of the Huntingdon plays seem to point this same neglect of the larger effects in favour of the smaller and more immediate. Mundy was usually careful to see that what happens at a particular moment is intelligible and appropriate, but he demanded an intelligibility only of the most practical and limited kind (often confined to explaining away evident difficulties) and his criteria of appropriateness were essentially those of dramatic expediency, with arbitrariness usually dominating over the inner logic of character and situation. If a certain turn of events can arrange the plot more tidily or vary it entertainingly, the circumstances and information necessary for its minimum justification can be provided. To make things happen and resolve them in the end, to garnish scenes with moments of poetry and flights of emotion, to fill the stage with a continuity of interesting action—to do all this is to build an entertaining play, which is none the less entertaining for being irregular in the texture of its moods and verse and events and characters.

There were some pains taken with the overall construction of the Huntingdon plays, and there is abundant evidence to demonstrate that their author was not always careless of the coherence and total effect of his work. But his primary concern was with the immediate requirements of the action, moment to moment, and often at the cost of those gradual transitions and overall strategies that are indispensable for the achievement of a totally satisfying artistry. This may be a considerable failing from the aestheitc point of view; yet the Huntingdon plays nevertheless remain interesting and perhaps even exciting from moment to moment—and surely their author would have asked no higher praise than this. This was enough for the professional hack. It apparently satisfied the patrons of the Rose. It wasn't until November that the prospect of a more discriminating audience drove the Admiral's Men to hire Henry Chettle ‘for mendinge of Roben hood for the corte’ (Diary, f. 52). He was an appropriate choice for putting the finishing touches on Mundy's hackwork. Not only had he been involved, at least temporarily (and perhaps substantially), in the composition of The Death—he had also kept in condition through the intervening eight months by contributing to more than a dozen other plays.

Notes

1. Henslowe's Diary, ff. 44-44v. The conjectured tavern reading is not merely fanciful: the Diary records the purchase of ‘The Famous Wars of Henry I and the Prince of Wales’ in the middle of March, 1597/8, and adds immediately afterward an entry for five shillings ‘lent at that tyme unto the company for to spend at the Readynge of that boocke at the sonne in new fyshstreate’ (f. 45). Another payment for ‘good cheare’ on Fish Street is recorded on 25 March, on the occasion of the purchase of ‘Earl Godwin and His Three Sons’ (f. 45).

2. Chettle's rôle in the composition of The Death is an important but regrettably elusive question. After an extensive study of the problem, I am satisfied that no argument purporting to identify his work in the extant text has yet been built upon adequate evidence (some are demonstrably improbable); that in fact there is evidence for a basic homogeneity of authorship throughout the Huntingdon plays; and that it is even possible that Chettle's contribution does not appear in the extant text at all. The question will be taken up at greater length in the introduction to the M.S.R. of The Death; in the meantime, the most responsible position on the authorship of The Death seems to me to be that Chettle's work, if present in the extant text, is either very limited in extent or very like Mundy's in manner. But since the properly conservative circumlocutions would be improperly awkward, I shall speak of The Death in this chapter as if it were Mundy's; the reader is therefore asked to remember that this is intended qualifiedly, and that references to Mundy in my remarks on The Death should be taken as meaning ‘Mundy (and/or perhaps Chettle)’. This qualification does not apply to The Downfall. There is no evidence for Chettle's participation in the extant text of that play; his additions of November, 1598 (Diary, f. 52) would have been made to a copy more finished than the foul papers from which Leake published The Downfall in 1601.

3. Grafton's Chronicle, I (1809), p. 221. (This reproduces the original edition, A Chronicle at large, printed in 1569.)

4. See ballads numbered 133, 134, 140 A-C, and 141 in F. J. Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98). The very existence of Scarlet and Scathlock is a conflation: in earlier Robin Hood literature, there is in their place only one character, variously named. The conflations could of course have been made in lost ballads. But then, Mundy wrote ballads too.

5. These would have been known through playlets attached to the May games—e.g., those printed with A Merry Jest of Robin Hood, ca. 1560 (later reprinted by White, n.d.). There are sections of The Downfall that break into a jingling tetrameter, and the reason may be merely a diverting attempt to imitate the style of such playlets. But some of these merry jests and morrises would undoubtedly have appeared also in the lost ‘pastorall plesant Commedie of Robin Hood and little John’, entered on the Stationers' Register in 1594. This may even have played at the Rose, which would help explain the extent of the collection of Robin Hood properties in Henslowe's inventory on 10 March, 1597/8; see Henslowe's Diary (1961), p. 317 ff., especially the suggestive entry ‘i hatte for Robin Hoode, i hobihorse’ (p. 318).

6. The first two parts of the Acts or Unchaste Examples of the English Votaries (1550), o3-3v; cf. The Downfall, e2-2v.

7. The existence of Mundy's earlier nondramatic historical publications (e.g., A Watchword to England, 1584) and the quality of his later ones (e.g., A Brief Chronicle of the Success of Times, 1611) lend strength to the hypothesis that the necessary books were in Mundy's own library in 1598.

8. See the examples in George Henry Needler, Richard Coeur de Lion in Literature (1890), and in Thomas Evans' Old Ballads, ii (1810), 81-7.

9. Matilda (ed. 1596), stanza 117.

10. Few of the plays recorded in Henslowe's Diary during this period seem to have taken longer than three weeks between their initial approval and their final delivery. Henslowe occasionally sets a deadline. Mundy was given two weeks to produce a comedy for which he contracted on 9 August 1598 (Diary, f. 49: cf. deadlines given to other playwrights on folios 43v, 45, 46, and 47v, ranging between one and three weeks).

11. Leicester in The Downfall, h2-2v; Hubert in The Death, I3-3v.

12. Delectable Demands and Pleasant Questions, with their Several Answers.