Digitalising a controversial theme: The death of Robin Hood Two case studies: “A Gest of Robyn Hode” and “Robin Hood's Death”

Abstract

This work has as primary aim that of showing, through a comparison of two old texts, how a same theme can be developed and matured in a different way. In order to achieve this purpose, I will execute a process of digitalisation on two ballads dating back to the Middle English period. Both revolve around the character of Robin Hood and affect the same topic, namely his death, but having a rather diverse extent of this same theme which, consequently, can influence its interpretation. The two case studies will be “Robin Hood’s Death”, the version edited by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall in the I volume “Bishop Percy’s folio Manuscript- Ballads and Romances-“ (1867) and “A Gest of Robyn Hode”, the version edited by Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren in the volume “Robin Hood and other outlaw tales” (2000). I will proceed with the encodings of these texts employing an XML TEI language, encodings that will represent the base to create the related digitalisations. The choice of digitalising is made to highlight features/traits, peculiarities and potential differences which can emerge in a digitalised text compared to the same text in paper belonging to a different era, therefore not todays. As a matter of fact, sometimes a digital version of a text permits to discover and reveal some aspects that could be overlooked on paper.