SOURCE: Singman, Jeffrey L. “Munday's Unruly Earl.” In Playing Robin Hood: The Legend as Performance in Five Centuries, edited by Lois Potter, pp. 63-76. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998.

In the essay below, Singman considers Munday's depiction of Robin Hood in his Huntington plays, which he claims was not only unprecedented, but one of the most influential interpretations ever written.

At the end of a century that witnessed both the apex of the Robin Hood games and their precipitous decline, Anthony Munday's Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon and his Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon stand as a momentous yet little-examined milestone in the history of Robin Hood drama, and indeed of the Robin Hood legend as a whole. The 1590s had already seen at least three representations of Robin Hood on the London stage, in George Peele's The Famous Chronicle of Edward I, in the anonymous...