Anthony Munday Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Anthony Munday

Few Elizabethan and Jacobean authors produced as varied a canon as did Anthony Munday. He wrote plays, translated Continental prose romances, produced original prose fiction, apparently wrote ballads in his earlier years, was, in the early 1580s, by far the most controversial "news reporter" in London, and in his later years devised pageants for the City of London, as well as expanding and bringing up to date Stow's chronicle of the city. As is frequently the case with people who throw themselves into a host of literary fields, he excelled in none. However, much of his work is interesting, some of it still eminently readable.

As he was baptised on 13 October 1560, it is probable that he was born in that month, although the precise date of his birth is unknown. He was buried on 9 August 1633 after a long life, but not quite as long as the eighty years that his tombstone, quoted in the 1633 edition of John Stow's Survey of London, which Munday had enlarged, reported him to have lived.

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