Note 603 — Chapter VIII · THE MAY-GAME

Printed in Dodsley-Hazlitt, vol. viii. These plays were written for Henslowe about February 1598. In November Chettle ‘mended Roben hood for the corte’ (Henslowe’s Diary, 118-20, 139). At Christmas 1600, Henslowe had another play of ‘Roben hoodes penerths’ by William Haughton (Diary, 174-5). An earlier ‘pastoral pleasant comedie of Robin Hood and Little John’ was entered on the Stationers’ Registers on May 18, 1594. These two are lost, as is The May Lord which Jonson wrote (Conversations with Drummond, 27). Robin Hood also appears in Peele’s Edward I (†1590), and the anonymous Look About You (1600), and is the hero of Greene’s George a Greene the Pinner of Wakefield (†1593). Anthony Munday introduced him again into his pageant of Metropolis Coronata (1615), and a comedy of Robin Hood and his Crew of Soldiers, acted at Nottingham on the day of the coronation of Charles II, was published in 1661. On all these plays, cf. F. E. Schelling, The English Chronicle Play, 156.