MUNDAY (or MONDAY), ANTHONY (c. 1553-1633), English dramatist and miscellaneous writer, son of Christopher Monday, a London draper, was born in 1553-1554. He had already appeared on the stage when in 1576 he bound himself apprentice for eight years to John Allde, the stationer, but in 1578 he was in Rome. In spite of the opening lines of his English Romayne Lyle (1582), he must be regarded, if not as a spy at least as a journalist whose copy was the designs of the English Catholics in France and Italy. He says that 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 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 ( ? 1581). He returned to England in 1578-1579, and became an actor again, being a member of the Earl of Oxford's company between 1579 and 1584. He brought back material for five anti-popish pamphlets, among them the tract entitled A Discoverie of Edmund Campion and his Confederates, the first part of which was read aloud from the scaffold at Campion's death in December 1581. The tract A True Report of . . . M. Campion (1581), which says that he "played extempore" and was hissed off the stage, is a re ply. His political services against the Catholics were rewarded in 1584 by the post of messenger to her Majesty's chamber, and from this time he seems to have ceased to appear on the stage. In 1598– '599, when he travelled with the earl of Pembroke's men in the Low Countries, it was in the capacity of playwright to furbish up old plays. He devoted himself to writing for the booksellers and
the theatres, compiling religious works, translating Amadis de Gaule and other French romances, and putting words to popular airs. He was the chief pageant-writer for the City from 1605 to 1616, and it has been conjectured that he supplied most of the pageants between 1592 and 16o5. It is by these entertainments of his, which rivalled in success those of Ben Jonson and Middleton, that he won his greatest fame. He was buried in St. Stephen's, Coleman street, on Aug. Io, 1633.
Of the eighteen plays between the dates of 1584 and 1602 which are assigned to Munday in collaboration with Henry Chettle, Michael Drayton, Thomas Dekker and other dramatists, only four are extant.
The completest account of Anthony Munday is T. Seccombe's article in the Dict. Nat. Biog. A life and bibliography are prefixed to the Shakespeare Society's reprint of his John a Kent and John a Cumber (ed. J. P. Collier, i851). His two "Robin Hood" plays were edited by J. P. Collier in Old Plays (1828), and his English Romayne Lyfe was printed in the Harleian Miscellany, vii. 136 seq. (ed. Park, 1811). For an account of his city pageants see F. W. Fairholt, Lord Mayor's Pageants (Percy Soc., No. 38, 1843). See also Modern Language Review, 1909, 1913, 192o; M. St. C Byrne, Anthony Monday and his Books (1921) ; E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (vol. iii., 1923) ; C. R. Hayes, Anthony Monday's Romances of Chivalry (1925) .