One’s emotional response to yet another re-telling of the Robin Hood fable is inevitably one of despair, so before the third stanza is over, a huge literary deficit has been run up. This lexical left hook is rapidly followed by the raping of ‘Marion’, an early Haringtonian song. Our hope is then that this debt will somehow be paid off by an exciting new story line emerging in the context of tired old characters. Does he succeed? Well, Hoey has wittily transformed the yellow hired minibus that we used to get to Newstead Abbey into something more appropriate for the period, but unfortunately runs out of creative steam as almost soon as the party are waylaid by the men in tights, leaving us with a situation, unique in Hoeyan poesy, where we would rather that he carried on, which surely must be a disturbing state of affairs (CH).