Being medieval

So, finally some “serious content” here again after a fair amount of twaddle. Oh, right, all of this is twaddle. OK, I better just get on with it, then, and get it out of my system!

Once I became immersed in “North and South,” I started to look for other stuff to see Mr. Armitage in. I confess that I was looking for modern dramas. I don’t usually care much for historical dramas (or novels). I’ve had way too much professional education in history and I’ve never been able to stop myself from playing “spot the anachronism,” which hugely irritates my friends and family if they watch such stuff with me, and annoys me myself if I don’t have anyone to share it with in order to demonstrate my (cough) tremendous erudition. And when I read of “Robin Hood” that the makers had made no gestures at authenticity, I thought it would be disastrous. I am generally not attracted by “medieval biker” or all-leather clothing. I’m not a medievalist; neither do I play one on tv; but I’ve learned enough to be a dangerous critic to a production like this.

Eventually my gnawing, developing Armitage obsession won out, though, and I started watching it. The historian in me still objects to it on some level. I cringe when I see Guy’s boots in series 1, or the spurs (medieval social historians have spilled a lot of ink on the development of the spur in Europe). But I am overcoming my objections, and I am trying to work out why. And no, it’s not just Armitage’s incredible screen charisma, or the body, or the voice. It has something to do with his characterization of Guy, in synergy with the script (even if I don’t agree with everything he has said in interviews). Here I am going to talk mostly about the scripts and the production, and will plan to talk soon in a post on RH 1.2, about his characterization.

From Robin Hood, series 1, episode 1. Source: RichardArmitageOnline

Why is this non-medieval medieval show is so compelling? I think that the answer lies in the fact that Guy of Gisborne–as the man without a category–is the nexus of all of the show’s status conflicts. On some level, this problem is very medieval, even if the show sometimes treats it in very modern ways.

I’ve talked about the problem of Guy’s status and his regular humiliations a little before in relationship to why it is women may find him sympathetic– how Guy is the most medieval of the characters and his insecure position ends him up in gender trouble. I’ve also discussed extensively the many ways in which Mr. Armitage plays Guy’s humiliation, and evaluated the reasons for his success in doing so. So I am partially going over familiar ground here, but I feel like I need this basis for later stuff I want to write.

To be fair to the makers of the show, it’s a bit difficult to envision what an authentic Robin Hood is supposed to look like. The first surviving written sources on the Robin Hood ballads date from the fifteenth century and don’t reference a specific period; sixteenth-century continuers of these stories put them in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Indeed, Guy of Gisborne himself was not one of the original figures in these tales. The first ballads were not solely or primarily political or historical commentaries; they have archetypal figures and read like trickster stories. There is some of that here, particularly in the inane Robin Hood figure they present us, which is not helped out by the fact that Jonas Armstrong only appears to have two facial expressions, but the “japes and antics” of the Merry Men are not all that funny. Their participation in terrorizing the people who are fighting the terrorists makes them a big too serious, a bit too patriotic–“We are Robin Hood!”–to be real tricksters. But as that device reminds us, the makers of this show decided to make it about the War on Terror, although they seem to have abandoned that issue after series 1.

But if the show is not medieval about politics, culture, religion, gender roles, language, costumes, customs, plots, dialogues, or even the level of dirt in Nottingham town, on one level it convinces totally, and that lies in how it approaches the problem, in medieval society, of status conflict. That is: Guy states repeatedly at the beginning that status is about land. This is the age of John Lackland.  Guy knows it, and can’t believe the Sheriff isn’t taking him more seriously. His men laugh at him, a Gisborne with no Gisborne.  The point, quite clearly, is the possession and not the cultivation–his rather odd inability to be a kind landlord we book into the category of his evil side–but it is the land that would make him able to stand up for the private ethical system that Armitage has said Guy has.

Now, let’s be clear: there are no “private ethics” in the middle ages. The good is defined by the standards of Christianity, which is still establishing itself, but is in a strong position in England by the late eleventh century, and is reflected in the hierarchical structure of Christian society, part of which involves the hierarchical allotment of land and the distribution of productive labor peculiar to medieval Europe. Guy may very well have his own ideas about the good, but he is in no position to pursue them except as a member of the hierarchy. To be fair, Armitage was presumably trying to answer for himself the question of how to enter a character who repeatedly commits murder and attempts infanticide with apparently few qualms, and seeing to avoid descending into caricature to make this character plausible and believable to an audience. But although Guy may justify these actions to himself in terms of some other ethic apart from self-interest, it is still the dominant Christian norms that control not only our perception of him, but more importantly, how his interlocutors in the series see him.

So who has status conflict problems here? Most obviously:

• Robin. His return home reveals not only that he is not as he was, but also that home is not as it was. In episode 1, he humiliates Guy as a way of reasserting his control over Locksley Manor.
• Edward of Knighton. Removed from his office, Guy’s attentions to his daughter–which he considers status inappropriate–are a constant reminder of his new lack of status.
• Marian. As Edward’s daughter, she shares in his status problems, but her guise as the Nightwatchman reveals an attempt to problematize her remaining status–which in turn Guy tries to shut down.
• the Sheriff. In order to be a commander, one must have a minion; in order to be “the Father,” one must have someone to sit at one’s right hand. This is a complex relationship, because it appears at first that the Sheriff needs Guy more than Guy needs the Sheriff, but by series 2 the status of power in the relationship is increasingly unclear.

Land would solve all these status conflicts for Guy except the one related to Marian (and this also bears more discussion someday…sigh). As a landholder, he would have the status to stand as Robin’s equal, to be an appropriate suitor for Marian, to operate independently of the Sheriff (this is clearly why the Sheriff has been so stingy with him). As someone with a defined status, moreover, he would stop being the provocation of so much status anxiety on the part of all of the other major players. As a landholder, he would have status; as someone with status he has honor. By this, I mean that he has something to defend and that others consider him to have to defend it. His behavior thus becomes less unpredictable; land tames one (People without land were not considered dishonorable as much as not in the same category for purposes of redress. Legally speaking, in areas with a dueling culture, one cannot be insulted in a way that generates a duel, for example, by someone without honor.) Thus, in having land and thus honor, he joins the ranks of those who have something to lose by standing up for their positions. This kind of thinking is at the basis of property concepts in the West and is especially noticeable as they develop into contract theories about property, which lie at the basis of our notions of representative government, which all emerged with property qualifications. I am not sure if it’s clear what I mean by that, so let me know if I need to clarify.

Hence the uniformly bad treatment of Guy in these scripts. Armitage objected to the repetitive, groundless humiliation of the character, and from the perspective of the subtlety of the character and the interest level of the script he was absolutely right. But given the merciless medieval status considerations that demonstrably permeate the show, it is hard to see how anyone could have treated him any differently. Guy, as the man who not only fails to know his place, but has no place, commits the cardinal medieval social sin. Hence, as a character without status, he is condemned to mime proper behavior of the status he desires, rather than ever to really behave appropriately. He gets better at the performance in series 2, but it is still only ever a performance for Guy.

Here I think that Armitage misperceived something in his reading of the plot. (This is not a criticism of Armitage’s performance as much as an alternate reading of the series that is consistent with Armitage’s performance and thus sheds more light on Guy’s behavior.) Robin is a problem for Guy not only, or even primarily, because Robin has everything Guy wants, even if that is Armitage’s position on playing him, and obviously it works for us as viewers. An eloquent friend of mine (who usually doesn’t write about such twaddle as this) has moved it a bit further, by noting that Robin’s willful rejection of everything Guy wants in order to live in the forest has to grate precisely because Guy is working so hard to get it. Not only does Robin have what Guy wants, he throws it away. (My friend also raises the question of whether we read Guy through Mr. Thornton, another person who believes that hard work will get him ahead, which would be worth further discussion.)

But Robin’s objectionability goes further than that for Guy, I suspect. If Guy is to have access to honor according to the peculiar rules of this system, he needs people to enforce those rules. From the moralistic perspective of this sort of bourgeois series fiction, characters cannot simply abandon the framework for some higher good, since the good itself is determined by the framework. Hence Guy’s dogged insistence on the law and upholding the law, even by illegal means. (War on Terror alarms going off here like crazy.) So, for example, Robin’s decision to abandon it all on principle draws the very system itself into question; Edward’s refusal to stand up for principle undermines the possibility that principle ever could have been connected to the system. Marian’s singlehood–underlined as lasting unduly long by the Sheriff in the first episode–and her particular refusal to tolerate Guy except in a condescending way until she has no other choice–show us that the system can be circumvented. The status anxieties of the characters who actually *have* status make the status system unstable, and that has to generate unstable behavior in a man without status, like Guy.

So, in the end, both Guy’s attempts at performing correct behavior, and his failures to do so, outline the contours of the predominant system of social status. As regular, predictable transgressor, Guy holds the system up. This is why he is so medieval — and such a problem.

[word count = 1912 words. My undergrads are required to write only 1500 for their essays. If I had written 2000 words today of an essay, presumably I could finish one in a week. What IS my problem?]

Questions, requests for clarification, counter-arguments, welcomed. Good night.

~ by Servetus on March 29, 2010.