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The long career of Anthony Munday almost embarrassingly typifies the profession of letters in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. In an age when literary hackwork enslaved many an embittered poet, Munday eagerly generated an astonishing variety of such writing. His canon includes prose fiction, translations of prose romances, sensational news, plays, possibly a pamphlet attacking plays, political and moral pamphlets, and city pageants. He also wrote ballads and lyric poems, and he updated John Stow's city chronicle. Nor did he confine this mercenary tendency to his writing. He worked as a printer, studied at a Jesuit seminary, spied against Catholics, and took part in the doomed search for the Martin Marprelate pamphleteer, all while holding the title of draper. With such a life, it is hardly surprising that amid a largely mediocre canon Munday's most entertaining book should be The English Roman Life (1582), which recounts his own continental adventures. The work has value as prose, as history, and as travel literature.
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