Should We Like Munday After All?

Given that it’s almost eighty years since the last full-length book on Anthony Munday appeared, it is both striking and a cause for celebration that two books devoted to this most maverick of writers should appear within a single year. It is also perhaps a testament to Munday’s elusive profile as both man and author that two scholars, albeit operating on different sides of the Atlantic, should have reached such different conclusions and produced such very different books.

Munday’s career was, to put it mildly, an eclectic one. There were few activities or genres available to a literate man in early modern London in which Munday did not indulge. Indeed, as both Hill and Hamilton concede, the sheer number of pies into which Munday stuck his finger has probably helped to generate the comparative indifference (or even contempt) with which his miscellaneous and prolific output has, until recently, been received. Munday was, variously and often simultaneously, a playwright, an actor, a pamphleteer (whose work includes a swingeing attack on playgoing), a printer, a civic historian, a spy, and a translator of Spanish romances.

As the titles of these monographs suggest, Hill and Hamilton adopt critical approaches to their subject that are poles apart. Hill sensibly begins by arguing that the relative dearth of reliable information concerning Munday’s personal life renders the notion of a conventional biography redundant. Instead, she suggests that the very ordinariness of his writing, its prolixity, its occasional incoherence and inconsequentiality, even its mendacity, allow us a glimpse into ‘a quotidian London and its everyday practices’ (a phrase borrowed from Garrett Sullivan’s The Drama of Landscape (Stanford, 1998), to which Hill is much indebted), ‘which a concentration on major canonical works and writers would circumscribe’ (p. 3). Accordingly, Hill deploys her formidable knowledge of what she terms, in the subtitle to her first chapter, ‘Munday’s London Milieu’ to locate her subject within a nexus of precisely documented relationships – communal, geographical, and, above all, commercial. One of the many strengths of Hill’s book is the sureness of touch with which she maps Munday’s progress through the streets, parishes, and buildings of the city; the sense that she has traced her subject’s footsteps across the metropolis, and seen what he saw, is powerfully evoked in the book’s introduction and opening chapter, and is reinforced by the original work Hill has done in the archives of the livery companies for whom Munday worked (including the Drapers, the powerful company of which Munday was himself a member).

The most obvious payoffs of this approach are found in the first and last of the book’s five chapters. The last, ‘Munday and Civic History’, contains an especially judicious and illuminating account of the writing Munday produced explicitly for and about the city. Here, for instance, we are offered an incisive analysis of the ways in which Munday’s fastidious enthusiasm for local history inflected the alterations and additions he made to the 1618 and 1633 editions of John Stow’s Survey of London. The sense that Hill has achieved an authoritative understanding of these large and complex texts is constantly reinforced by the inclusion of little topographical details, such as when we are told how we might locate the tower of St Alban today ‘in the middle of Wood Street just below the Barbican complex’ (p. 191 n. 202); the cumulative effect of such interventions is curiously akin to the charm achieved by the anecdotal digressions with which Stow himself peppered his masterpiece of urban chorography. Similarly, an easy familiarity with both the work of today’s historians of early modern London and the records of the livery companies who commissioned him to write for them also informs Hill’s account of the several Jacobean pageants...