著者

宮原 牧子

出版者

福岡女子大学

雑誌

Kasumigaoka review (ISSN:13489240)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.13, pp.99-118, 2007-02

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Francis James Child collected forty traditional ballads related to Robin Hood in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. He called Robin "a ballad hero", and, in fact, it is remarkable that a single character has been sung about in so many ballads. In the medieval times Robin was an outlaw virtuous and courteous, but after the second half of the sixteenth century, when the broadside ballad was in its prime, Robin lost his natural nobility, becoming weak in battles and supple in behaviour. William Edmondstoune Aytoun's parodic ballad, "Little John and the Red Friar" was written after Robin's fame had fallen to the ground. The new hero is Little John, who struggles to maintain the manners of his master and gets out of all bounds. The story is similar to that of "Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar", a broadside ballad in the late eighteenth century. John is now only a 'thief' or may be the most obsequious outlaw in the history of Robin Hood ballads, and the readers may laugh or smile at him because what he says and does is extremely anachronistic. Aytoun, however, did not intend to make a mockery of the Robin Hood legend, for the last words of his ballad, 'Is Sherwood now what Sherwood once hath been?', tell of his nostalgia for the good old times of Robin Hood and his company. As his biographer, Theodore Martin wrote '[1] et no one parody a poet unless he loves him', Aytoun loved and knew Robin Hood ballads enough to make such an elaborate parody. His ballad is a mixture of the medieval and broadside ballads: he borrowed the style from the medieval structure while he wrote the story based on the broadside. Aytoun revived the Robin Hood legend with his parodic ballad. Graeme Stone, the editor of Parodies of the Romantic Age, who explains that parody is at its best a uniquely creative form of literary criticism, clarifies its nature: [Parody] may query overstatement, dispose of sentimentality, remote historical process, re-introduce social influence, banish outworn forms, revive discarded forms thought to have long been exhausted, and rescue art from narcissism. The medieval Robin could be a parody of King Arthur as some critics point out, and Robin in the broadside ballads is a travesty of himself in the medieval ones. Aytoun created a new ballad of the outlaws as a sequel to the traditional ballads, and the parody made him an heir of the legend of Robin Hood.