Female Bandits? What next!  Wendy Doniger    • Robin Hood: A
Mythic Biography by Stephen Knight     Cornell, 247 pp, £14.50,
May 2003, ISBN 0 8014 3885 3  In the 1964 film Robin and the
Seven Hoods, when someone compares ‘Robbo’ (Frank Sinatra) to
Robin Hood, one of the gangsters asks: ‘Who’s Robin Hood?’ And
another replies: ‘Well, he was a hood, some Englishman who lived
long ago and had an operation going for him in the forest. And I
guess the "robin” means he stole birds.’ Robin is more likely to
be a nickname for Robert, though the resonance with ‘robber’ may
also count for something, and Hood may suggest his frequent
disguises, for Robin is a great trickster whose masquerades
inevitably bamboozle his foolish oppressors: he specialises in
pretending to help people capture Robin Hood.  He is the only
figure in the DNB who is said never to have existed. Stephen
Knight grants that ‘it seems highly improbable, or at least
unprovable, that a Mr R. Hood ever existed,’ though, for some
people, Robin Hood, King