Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560-1633

Abstract

Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560-1633, by Donna B. Hamilton. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. xxxvi + 268. Cloth $94.95. Reviewer: JOHN D. COX In a work careful historical reconstruction, Donna Hamilton has written what will surely be the definitive literary biography Anthony Munday for a long time to come. Munday is principally known as a minor dramatist, writing for the late Elizabethan popular stage from 1590 to 1602. This brief theatrical career brought him tangentially into the orbit Shakespeare, whose sunlike luster likely made Munday's small planet visible to literary historians in the first place. Both are thought to have contributed to the play called Sir Thomas More (unpublished until the nineteenth century), and Munday had a hand in Sir John Oldcastle, which was written in response to Shakespeare's 1 Henry TV. But Munday's writing includes far more than plays. As Hamilton shows, he had an extraordinarily long and prolific literary career in many genres, stretching from 1577 (when he was only seventeen) to 1633, the year his death. What is most striking about Hamilton's biography is her argument for Munday's adherence to Catholicism. At a time when the argument for Shakespeare's Catholic adherence is enjoying unprecedented popularity, the careful study a possible parallel is illuminating and helpful, especially since Munday's Catholicism is not obvious. He published a condemnation the recusant priest Edmund Campion, when Campion was captured and executed in 1581 ; Munday dedicated a book to Richard Topcliffe, chief torturer for Elizabeth and James and eager persecutor recusants; Munday published two sermons by John Calvin; and at least once in his long career Munday took service with the crown as a pursuivant or warrant officer, charged to find, inform on, and assist in the apprehension traitors, especially recusants. Munday's hand in Sir John Oldcastle adds to the puzzle, because the play resuscitates the reputation a Lollard (or proto-Protestant) martyr whom Shakespeare lampooned in the character subsequently known as Falstaff. Well aware these difficulties, Hamilton nonetheless makes her case persuasively by means various kinds historical evidence together with informed close reading Munday's daunting corpus. She argues that Munday is what Elizabethans called a church papist, that is, one who adhered to the government's standards for religious conformity while continuing to believe in Catholic doctrine. This was not an easy stance to maintain. Elizabeth was not only queen the realm but also head the English Church, which was independent the Church Rome and therefore opposed to papal domination. Depending on the strenuousness one's belief in Catholic doctrine, conforming to the standards the English Church was heretical, as recusants maintained, because it necessarily entailed denial the pope's authority. Munday was clearly not a recusant, or he would not have survived. In what, then, did his Catholicism consist? Hamilton argues convincingly that even though Munday remained loyal to the crown, he consistently advocated tolerance Catholics, rather than persecution, and he signaled his Catholic allegiance in a variety ways. His patronage network was consistently Catholic, for example, as Hamilton shows in detail. He published with printers who were known Catholic sympathizers. He addressed issues that concerned Catholics in particular, and he addressed them in ways that suggest Catholic sympathy. Finally, and here Hamilton's interpretation is boldest and most arresting, Munday frequently spoke through the experience and voices others in ways that suggest his own position as revealed outside the texts he published. Reading Munday's writing in light a densely elucidated context is thus essential to Hamilton's strategy and makes it credible. Regarding Munday's Brief discourse on the takinge Edmund Campion, the seditious Jesuit (1581), for example, Hamilton notes that the tract coneludes with a list of the priests, gentlemen and yeomen now in the Tower, as well as those the wives and nuns who remained at Lyford, where Campion had been captured (37). …