Reynolds's News and Miscellany

Can we ever fully understand what made people in the past laugh?

“Their arrows finely pair’d, for timber, and for feather, With birch and brazil piec’d to fly in any weather; And shot they with the round, the square, or forked pile, The loose gave such a twang, as might be heard a mile.

“Muse, tell me about Pan, the dear son of Hermes, with his goats feet and two horns—a lover of merry noise.

I was recently interviewed by Ed Power for The Telegraph about the legacy of the celebrated 1980s television series Robin of Sherwood.

Pierce James Egan (1814–81), usually styled “the Younger,” occupies an important place in the nineteenth-century British Robin Hood tradition.

Thomas Miller’s Royston Gower; or, The Days of King John (1838) is one of the more obscure nineteenth-century retellings of the Robin Hood legend.

Summary: Agnes Strickland’s Candava; or, The Last Suttee (1849) is a short but revealing example of Victorian fiction shaped by debates over British rule in India, Christian reform, and the practice of sati.

An issue of Reynolds’s Miscellany, edited by George W.M.

“Tout ce qu’il se fût accordé au-delà de l’absolu nécessaire, il l’eût regardé comme un larcin fait aux indigents, et, par suite, à Dieu.”

Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) was almost immediately transformed from a three-volume historical novel into popular spectacle.

When Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police in 1829, a new term entered the media’s vocabulary: “police brutality.”

I am a bad hand at depicting a hero properly so called, and have an unfortunate propensity for the dubious characters of borderers, highland robbers, and all others of a Robin Hood description.

In its relatively short literary history, the United States has produced many fine novelists, though my own bias naturally draws me towards those who emerged in the early nineteenth century, when the country was still, culturally speaking, in its infancy.

This article is the text of a paper delivered at the Breaking Barriers 2026: Reimagining Inclusion and Innovation in Sport conference, held at Richmond: The American International University, on 12 June 2026.

The cause of the printing of Percy’s MS., of the publication of this book, was the insistence, time after time, by Professor Child, that it was the duty of Englishmen to print this foundation document of English balladry, the basis of that structure which…

In April 1894, Sir William Harcourt, Liberal MP and Chancellor of the Exchequer, had a problem.

Now that copyright rules allow me to freely share some of my peer-reviewed research, over the next few weeks I’ll be making available some of the PDFs for people to download.

One of the pleasures of working on early modern literature is that, every so often, one encounters a text that has lingered for centuries in the margins: known by name, occasionally cited, but rarely read in full and seldom placed before modern readers in…

Presented here is the transcription of a Robin Hood play, or pageant, by Anthony Munday titled Metropolis Coronata (London, 1615), staged for the Worshipful Company of Drapers’ on 30 October 1615 to honour the new Lord Mayor, Sir John Jolles (named Iolles…

Zé Maria da Fortaleza’s Adventures of Robin Hood (2007) presents a lively Brazilian verse adaptation of the English outlaw legend, retelling the familiar narrative in the style of twentieth-century literatura de cordel.

“Our hero, indeed, seems to have held bishops, abbots, priests, and monks, in a word, all the clergy, regular or secular, in decided aversion […] and, in this part of his conduct, perhaps the pride, avarice, uncharitableness and hypocrisy of these clerical

Robin Hood with his merry men and Main Marian, from J.M.

Sir John Hawkins’s History of Music (1777) “Who was the author of the collection entitled Robin Hood’s Garland,” remarked Sir John Hawkins in his magisterial General History of the Science and Practice of Music (1777), “no one has yet pretended to guess.

Henry Anelay was closely associated with G.W.M.