Ivanhoe

CHAPTER XL

1 (p. 404) epigraph: The line is not from Shakespeare, but from Colley Cibber’s subliterary revision The Tragicall History of King Richard III (1700), which was the version of the play known to British theatergoers for more than a hundred years.

2 (p. 418) ”I am Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest”: [Author’s note] Locksley. From the ballads of Robin Hood, we learn that this celebrated outlaw, when in disguise, sometimes assumed the name of Locksley, from a village where he was born, but where situated we are not distinctly told.—

According to tradition, a village of this name was the birth-place of Robin Hood, while the county in which it was situated remains undetermined. There is a broadside printed about the middle of the 17th century with the title of A New Ballad of Bold Robin Hood, showing his birth, etc., calculated for the meridian of Staffordshire. But in the ballad itself, it says—

In Locksley town, in merry Nottinghamshire,

In merry sweet Locksley town,

There bold Robin Hood, he was born and was bred,

Bold Robin of famous renown.

Ritson says, it may serve quite as well for Derbyshire or Kent as for Nottingham (Laing).