Munday, Anthony

Anthony Munday, Munday also spelled Mundy, (born 1560London, Eng.—buried Aug. 9, 1633, London), English poet, dramatist, pamphleteer, and translator.

The son of a draper, Munday began his career as an apprentice to a printer. In 1578 he was abroad, evidently as a secret agent sent to discover the plans of English Catholic refugees in France and Italy, and under a false name he obtained admission to the English College at Rome for several months. On his return he became an actor and a prolific writer. He published popular ballads, some original lyrics, much moralizing in verse, translations of many volumes of French and Spanish romances, and prose pamphlets, but only two of his many plays were printed.

In 1581–82 Munday was prominent in the capture and trials of the Jesuit emissaries (many of whom he had known at Rome) who followed the martyr Edmund Campion to England. Critics have found his English Romayne Lyfe (1582) of permanent interest as a detailed and entertaining, though hostile, description of life and study in the English College at Rome. By 1586 he had been appointed one of the “messengers of her majesty’s chamber,” a post he seems to have held for the rest of Elizabeth I’s reign.

Munday wrote at least 17 plays, of which only a handful survive. He may be the author of Fedele and Fortunio (c. 1584), an adaptation of an Italian original; it was performed at court and printed in 1585. His best-known plays are two pseudo-histories on the life of the legendary outlaw hero Robin Hood, The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon (both 1598). He was probably the main author of Sir Thomas More (c. 1590–93), a play that William Shakespeare helped to revise. Munday ceased to write plays after 1602, but during 1605–23 he wrote at least five of the pageants with which the lord mayor of London celebrated his entry into office. A friend of the chronicler John Stow, he was responsible for enlarged editions of Stow’s Survey of London in 1618 and 1633.