Chapter 5 investigates the fifteenth-century ballad A Gest of  Robyn Hode as protest literature set against the encroachment of government centralization on the political autonomy of the North of England. Robin Hood’s theft and murder of government officials ironically informs the outlaw’s own expressed love for the king, calling to mind the relationships between the crown and the northern magnates, such as the Percy earls of Northumberland, in the later Middle Ages. In one striking scene from the Gest, King Edward and Robin Hood ride out of the forest together, dressed in Robin’s livery of Lincoln green. This juxtaposition of the king of England with the king of outlaws implies the complexities with which the poem contemplates law and sovereignty, complexities attendant to the remarkable development of sovereign theory from the early-thirteenth century in western Europe. Foregrounding the exceptional powers of the sovereign that would inform the political theory resonate in the later work of Bodin and Hobbes, the Gest laments the dwindling regional autonomy of the North, with its once-great barons, and the increasing pull of law and authority to London and Westminster.

This chapter considers two plays which draw explicitly on the broadside ballad tradition of merry world fiction: Thomas Heywood’s The First Part of Edward IV (c. 1599); and Henry Chettle and Anthony Munday’s The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington (c. 1598). While these play-texts quote from, allude to, and overlap with the ballad stories they dramatise in various ways, it is also possible to see a distinctively theatrical vocabulary emerging which adapts the merry world topos to the stage. As such, they presuppose a high degree of audience familiarity with the visual and verbal conventions of the genre on page, stage, and in performance. The theatrical literacy of this assumed audience allows both plays to be constructed around moments of recognition and repetition. This degree of stylistic self-consciousness is playfully knowing in Heywood’s Edward IV and a source of frustration in the Downfall, where it is the impetus for an elaborate meta-theatrical framework exploring audience desire and response.