Matter of the Greenwood: Will Scarlet
A look at the most shadowy Merry Man. Image: Patric Knowles as Will in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Perhaps the least well defined of the famous characters in the Robin Hood mythos is Will Scarlet. Most people have a fairly clear idea of who Robin, Marian, Little John, Tuck, etc., are, but Will’s character and appearance are whatever a given creator chooses to make of them. Yet his name is almost indispensable to any Robin Hood story; from the sixteenth century on, “t
