Robin Hood - Prince John arrests Robin HD

In 1598, Anthony Munday wrote a pair of plays on the Robin Hood legend, The Downfall and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington (published 1601). These plays drew on a variety of sources, including apparently A Gest of Robin Hood, and were influential in fixing the story of Robin Hood to the period of Richard I. Stephen Thomas Knight has suggested that Munday drew heavily on Fulk Fitz Warin a historical 12th century outlawed nobleman and enemy of King John, in creating his Robin Hood.[42] The play identifies Robin Hood as Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, probably for the first time, and identifies Maid Marian with "one of the semi-mythical Matildas persecuted by King John'.[43] The plays are complex in plot and form, the story of Robin Hood appearing as a play-within-a-play presented at the court of Henry VIII and written by the poet, priest and courtier John Skelton. Skelton himself is presented in the play as acting the part of Friar Tuck. Some scholars have conjectured that Skelton may have indeed written a lost Robin Hood play for Henry VIII's court, and that this play may have been one of Munday's sources.[44] Henry VIII himself with 11 of his nobles had impersonated "Robyn Hodes men" ss part of his "Maying" in 1510. Robin Hood is known to have appeared in a number of other lost and extant Elizabethan plays. In 1599, the play George a Green, the Pinner of Wakefield places Robin Hood in the reign of Edward IV.[45] Edward I, a play by George Peele first performed in 1590-1, incorporates a Robin Hood game played by the characters. Lleweleyn, the last independent Prince of Wales, is presented playing Robin Hood.