Marian's mythical makeover

Cate Blanchett is the fresh, spirited 21st century incarnation of Maid Marian. Photo / Supplied by Paramount

A climactic and violent scene towards the end of Robin Hood, the new Ridley Scott film, features the hero, played by Russell Crowe, fighting at the water's edge. [Spoiler alert] Curious about the identity of an unknown warrior battling beside him, Robin lifts the visor on the warrior's helmet.

The limpid blue-grey eyes of Cate Blanchett stare back at him. Meet Maid Marian in a fresh and spirited, 21st-century incarnation.

Far from remaining locked inside her castle chamber, the Marian of Scott's imagination will be seen swinging her sword alongside the Merry Men across cinema screens from next week.

Whether Blanchett's Marian is fighting her enemies or arguing with the male authority figures around her, the screenplay of this new take on the legend has set out to reinvent the passive beauty who first won Robin's heart.

As versions of the Robin Hood tale have changed down the ages, the character of Marian has been one of the major variables. While Will Scarlet, Little John and Friar Tuck remain on roughly the same terms with each other, the heroine has regularly swapped backgrounds and personality.

Sometimes she is portrayed as a haughty aristocrat, sometimes as a rebellious tomboy, and sometimes as an innocent young girl.

When Audrey Hepburn played her opposite Sean Connery in the 1976 film Robin and Marian, she was the abbess of a priory who had to be saved not only from the Sheriff, but from religion, too. In the late 1980s, the BBC children's TV series Maid Marian and her Merry Men took the bold step of making her the leader of the pack, ruling over a foolish Robin, who was kept on as a figurehead.

Scott, like earlier Hollywood directors, has evidently been troubled by the prospect of allowing his heroine to function only as a reward for Robin's bravery, and his discomfort reveals Hollywood's continued search for the right sort of leading lady for a big-budget action movie. "It is a really good thing if Cate Blanchett does speak up for herself and is active in this film," said Marina Warner, the writer and literary critic who has specialised in the analysis of myth. "Heroines in these stories often appear as speechless apparitions, gliding through like Helen of Troy does in Marlowe's play."

Warner suspects that, while as a child she was always drawn to feisty heroines who mixed in with the boys, there is a dangerous appeal in a silent and decorative leading lady. "Girls can be drawn into this safe world of retreat and it is this kind of lack of self-expression that may lead to the problems we have today, like eating disorders," she said.

Although the legend of Robin Hood has been a repository of radical left-wing thought throughout the 20th century, at one point attracting blacklisted American screenwriters from the McCarthy era to Britain to work on the 1950s television series, the female star of the show has rarely been liberated.

"Greek legends have some quite significant uprisings led by women, and historically disturbances such as bread riots and other sorts of social strife have often had women at the fore, probably because of the suffering involved and the need to ensure survival, but this kind of thing is very rare in myths," said Warner. Instead, tradition commonly passes down stories about mute heroines who "represent domestic sanctuary and the survival of the community".

In fact, there is no Maid Marian at all in the first surviving evidence of the Robin Hood myth from the 14th century. The stories concentrate instead on the lives of the group of wild woodsmen living apart from the domestic community. But by the late 16th century Marian had become a central character and the love between her and Robin was quickly given a chivalric flavour - a way of indicating that the outlaw could be tamed.

Although this is the template for the Marian that was picked up by Hollywood in films from the Douglas Fairbank's silent hit of 1922 to Errol Flynn's celebrated 1938 outing in tights, her origins were not the archetypal damsel in distress.

In some of the early tales, there was a strong emphasis on Marian's skills as an archer and as a hunter. One of the popular verses to tell the story makes this plain: They drew out their swords, and to cutting they went, At least an hour or more, That the blood ran apace from bold Robin's face, And Marian was wounded sore.

"O hold thy hand," said Robin Hood.

"And thou shalt be one of my string, To range in the wood with bold Robin Hood, And hear the sweet nightingale sing."

The ideal of Marian drew on images of Diana, the Roman goddess of hunting, as well as on the central figure of the annual spring festival, the Queen of the May. Maytime rituals in England marked the return of fertility to the land and customarily featured two presiding spirits: Robin Goodfellow, the rough-and-ready huntsman, precursor of Robin Hood, and the Queen of the May, clad in white and garlanded in flowers, an emblem of the abundance and anarchy of spring.

According to one leading Robin Hood scholar, Stephen Knight of Cardiff University, Marian's role in the tales may well have been built up to make the cast less problematically all male. The strong homoerotic overtones had suddenly become clear and were unwelcome, he has argued. When Knight launched this theory on the world in 1999 it caused an international storm and he was forced to justify the suggestion that Robin Hood might have been gay, a suggestion he had never actually made.

For Knight, the medieval Robin was at heart a social bandit, "a tough guy without a lady", until he was gentrified during the Renaissance and given good manners. He points out, too, that the medieval ballads about Robin are entirely male, and that even in the Victorian novels, once Marian has appeared on the scene, she usually plays a limited part in the plot.

Warner, however, doubts that Marian's arrival could have taken away the current of homoeroticism in the tales. "When women are introduced into a story as a trophy," she said, "they just become a unit of exchange among men. They are there either to be insulted or revered. You honour them as a sign of respect, and you profane them as a sign of disrespect, but you are still talking to the men."

Along with fellow academics, Knight compares the potency of the Robin Hood tales to the legends of King Arthur and the Round Table, and suggests that the sexual betrayal at the centre of the saga of Arthur and Guinevere might well have seemed too hot to handle in the Victorian era.

As a result, the more straightforward and pure romance between Robin and Marian became increasingly popular, and the legends were retold by children's authors and playwrights.

Scott may have given Marian new power, but the story is constantly revisited as a romantic ideal. It has also prompted one of the best apocryphal stories of the early 1990s, which tells of a young couple so taken with the Kevin Costner film, Prince of Thieves, that they requested the Bryan Adams title song, (Everything I Do) I Do It For You, to be played at their wedding.

Asked for the Robin Hood theme, the elderly organist proceeded to play the theme to the 1950s TV show: "Robin Hood, Robin Hood riding through the glen ..."

LOWDOWN

Who: Cate Blanchett as Maid Marian in Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe and directed by Ridley Scott
When & where: Opens at cinemas on Thursday

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