Anthony Munday

Anthony Munday (or Monday) (1560? – 10 August 1633) was an English playwright and miscellaneous writer. He was baptized on 13 October 1560 in St Gregory by Paul's, London, and was the son of Christopher Munday, a stationer, and Jane Munday. The chief interest in Munday for the modern reader lies in his work as one of the chief predecessors of Shakespeare in English dramatic composition, as well as his writings on Robin Hood.

He was once thought to have been born in 1553, because the monument to him in the church of St. Stephen Coleman Street, stated that at the time of his death he was eighty years old. From the inscription we likewise learn that he was "a citizen and draper". In 1589 he was living in the city, and dates his translation of The History of Palmendos "from my house in Cripplegate". That he carried on the business of a draper, or had some connection with the trade as late as 1613, may be gathered from the following passage at the close of The Triumphs of Truth, the city pageant for that year, by Thomas Middleton: "The fire-work being made by Maister Humphrey Nichols, a man excellent in his art; and the whole work and body of the Triumph, with all the proper beauties of the workmanship, most artfully and faithfully performed by John Grinkin; and those furnished with apparel and porters by Anthony Munday, Gentleman." The style of "gentleman" was probably given to him with reference to the productions of his pen.

He probably already had appeared on the stage as an actor when he was bound apprenticed in 1576 for eight years to the stationer John Allde, an apprenticeship from which he was soon released. By 1578 he was in Rome. In the opening lines of his English Romayne Lyfe (1582) he states that he went abroad solely in order to see strange countries and to learn foreign languages; but he may have been a spy sent to report on the Jesuit English College in Rome or a journalist intent on making literary capital out of the designs of the English Catholics then living in France and Italy. He writes that he and his companion, Thomas Nowell, were robbed of all their possessions on the road from Boulogne to Amiens, where they were helped by an English priest who entrusted them with letters to be delivered in Reims. These they handed over to the English ambassador in Paris. Under a false name, as the son of a well-known English Catholic, Munday gained recommendations which secured his reception at the English College in Rome. He was treated with special kindness by the rector, Dr Morris, for the sake of his supposed father. He gives a detailed account of the routine of the place, of the dispute between the English and Welsh students, of the carnival at Rome, and finally of the martyrdom of Richard Atkins.

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