Frederick Fox Cooper’s 1869 stage adaptation transforms Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe into a thrilling Victorian spectacle of tournaments, sieges, outlaws, fire, and chivalric conflict. This modern edition restores the complete play, revealing how Astley’s Theatre reshaped Scott’s medieval romance for popular audiences through action, comedy, music, and patriotic drama onstage again.
This new edition of Looke About You (1600) brings back into view a neglected early modern comic history play filled with disguise, court intrigue, and dynastic conflict. Featuring an unusual portrayal of Robin Hood as the Earl of Huntingdon, the play offers a fascinating alternative to the better-known outlaw tradition. Edited by Stephen Basdeo, this edition makes the text accessible to modern readers while preserving the character of the original quarto.
An open access version of the Robin Hood pageant Metropolis Coronata (1615), linking the outlaw myth to London’s Lord Mayor’s triumph.
“JUPITER and JUNO, willing to do honour to the marriage of the two famous rivers, Thamesis and Rhine, employ their messengers severally, Mercury and Iris, for that purpose.”
“If Rome be earthly, why should any knee with bending adoration worship her? She’s vicious … Therefore ‘tis fitter I should reverence the thatched houses where the Britons dwell.”
The name of the Pinder to Wakefield locals is, as Shakespeare might say, ‘familiar in [their] mouths as household words’. The Pinders Fields, however, reveal an exciting history of rebellion, outlawry, and patriotism; so expressed in Robert Greene’s play in 1599 titled “The Pinner of Wakefield.”
“Vengeance! Vengeance! I will yet be avenged! In the meantime, let me seek an hour’s repose!”
“Virginity is an illusion! What is more virginlike? She who is deflowered while sleeping? Or the nun who, with burning tears, tosses and turns in her bed and breaks her finger through her habit while reading some impure romance?”
Hugo worked tirelessly on his self-imposed mission: poetry was so important, Hugo believed, that it should be a part of every aspect of life and had a central role to play in the story of national regeneration.
“Thou mayest be the envy of the world during the day, but night must come, and at night thou must always expect my cheering presence!”
Fans of outlaw stories, if they were ever able to time travel, might travel back to the 1820s and 1830s when Victor Hugo’s outlaw drama premiered.
The Ancient Britons’ rebellion was depicted as their last gasp in the fight for independence against the domination of the Roman Empire.