Decoding Robin Hood: Towards a Palimpsestic Method - Reading Layers of Meaning through the Costumes of the Cinematic Robin Hoods, 1938-2018

Decoding Robin Hood studies the way in which the costumes of cinematic Robin Hoods in Hollywood have changed between 1938 and 2018, and how these costumes and changes convey meaning through context. Evolving from medieval folk tales and ballads through pageantry and plays with a green-clad hero who lives in the forest, the cultural presence of Robin Hood has become fully mythical further aided by his international appearance in cinema. It has informed and provided limits for cultural language (verbal and pictorial), with myth being embedded, active parts of everyday social and cultural life (Barthes, 1972), as well as determining cultural in-groups and possible expressions within that group (Dundes, 1969). The cinematic texts are approached chronologically through close readings of the costumes (Corrigan and White, 2012), whilst also considering their materiality and the social and cultural context within which they appear. Through the re-presentation of the image (Hall, 1980), the costume exists in relation to previous images, and functions intertextually through the image’s layers of cultural palimpsest (Hutcheon and O’Flynn, 2013). In this process, it becomes a distilled image of the ideal as the assumed and specific characteristics of Robin Hood are dressed in what is considered to be appropriate in contemporary culture.

Departing from existing work on cinematic costume (see for example Berry, 2000; Bruzzi, 1997; Cook, 1996 and 2005), this thesis studies costume as unspectacular and representative of the ordinary and expected (Street, 2001), which allows for a reading of costume as representation of myth, where gender is one layer through performance (Butler, 1990). This informs the hypothesis of Decoding Robin Hood; images function as palimpsests where the layers of the image contain meaning related to cultural myths. Studying costume is thus an effective way of cutting away the superfluity of a famous narrative, and focusing on the palimpsestic image of a mythical character as it appears in an historical moment. Decoding Robin Hood therefore makes a primary contribution to knowledge through providing a method of considering these images.