Anthony Munday
born 1560?, London, 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.
