ROGER MORRELL (c. 1597).

Possibly the author of the academic Hispanus (cf. App. K).

RICHARD MULCASTER (c. 1530–1611).

A contributor to the Kenilworth entertainment (cf. ch. xxiv, C). For his successive masterships of Merchant Taylors and St. Paul’s, see ch. xii.

ANTHONY MUNDAY (c. 1553–1633).

Anthony was son of Christopher Munday, a London Draper. He ‘first was a stage player’ (A True Report of ... M. Campion, 1582), but in Oct. 1576 was apprenticed for eight years to John Allde, stationer. Allde went out of business about 1582, and Munday never completed his apprenticeship, probably because his ready pen found better profit in the purveyance of copy for the trade. He began by a journey to Rome in 1578–9, and brought back material for a series of attacks upon the Jesuits, to one of which A True Report of ... M. Campion is an answer. According to the anonymous author, Munday on his return to England ‘did play extempore, those gentlemen and others whiche were present, can best giue witnes of his dexterity, who being wery of his folly, hissed him from his stage. Then being thereby discouraged, he set forth a balet against playes, but yet (o constant youth) he now beginnes againe to ruffle upon the stage’. For the ballad there is some corroborative evidence in a S. R. entry of 10 Nov. 1580 (cf. App. C, No. xxvi), which, however, does not name Munday, and it is a possible conjecture that he also wrote the Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies issued in the same year (cf. App. C, No. xxvii). If so, he was already, before 1580, doing work as a playwright; but of this, with the doubtful exception of the anonymous Two Italian Gentlemen (q.v.), there is no other evidence for another fifteen years. His experiences as an actor may have been with the company of the Earl of Oxford, whose ‘servant’ he calls himself in his View of Sundry Examples (1580). From 1581 he was employed by Topcliffe and others against recusants, and as a result became, possibly by 1584 and certainly by 1588, a Messenger of the Chamber. He still held this post in 1593, and was employed as a pursuivant to execute the Archbishop of Canterbury’s warrants against Martin Marprelate in 1588. J. D. Wilson (M. L. R. iv. 489) suggests that he may also have taken a hand in the literary and dramatic controversy, as ‘Mar-Martin, John a Cant: his hobbie-horse’, who ‘was to his reproche, newly put out of the morris, take it how he will; with a flat discharge for euer shaking his shins about a maypole againe while he liued’ (Protestation of Martin Marprelate, c. Aug. 1589). Certainly Munday’s official duties did not interfere with his literary productiveness, as translator of romances, maker of ballads, lyrist, and miscellaneous writer generally. He is traceable, chiefly in Henslowe’s diary, as a busy dramatist for the Admiral’s men during various periods between 1594 and 1602, and there is no reason to suppose that his activities were limited to these years. Meres in 1598 includes him amongst ‘the best for comedy’, with the additional compliment of ‘our best plotter’. But he was evidently a favourite mark for the satire of more literary writers, who depreciated his style and jested at his functions as a messenger. Small, 172, has disposed of attempts to identify him with the Deliro or the Puntarvolo of E. M. O., the Amorphus of Cynthia’s Revels, the In-and-In Medley of the Tale of a Tub, and the Timothy Tweedle of the anonymous Jack Drum’s Entertainment. But he may reasonably be taken for the Poet Nuntius of E. M. I. and the Antonio Balladino of The Case is Altered (q.v.); and long before Jonson took up the game, an earlier writer had introduced him as the Posthaste of the anonymous Histriomastix (c. 1589). Posthaste suggests the formation of Sir Oliver Owlet’s men, and acts as their poet (i. 124). He writes a Prodigal Child at 1s. a sheet (ii. 94). He will teach the actors to play ‘true Politicians’ (i. 128) and ‘should be employd in matters of state’ (ii. 130). He is always ready to drink (i. 162; ii. 103, 115, 319; vi. 222), and claims to be a gentleman, because ‘he hath a clean shirt on, with some learning’ (ii. 214). He has written ballads (v. 91; vi. 235). The players jeer at ‘your extempore’ (i. 127), and he offers to do a prologue extempore (ii. 121), and does extemporize on a theme (ii. 293). He writes with

no new luxury or blandishment

But plenty of Old Englands mothers words (ii. 128).

The players call him, when he is late for rehearsal, a ‘peaking pageanter’, and say ‘It is as dangerous to read his name at a play door, as a printed bill on a plague door’ (iv. 165). The whole portrait seems to be by the earlier author; Marston only adds a characteristic epithet in ‘goosequillian Posthast’ (iii. 187). But it agrees closely with the later portraits by Jonson, and with the facts of Munday’s career. I do not think that ‘pageanter’ means anything more than play-maker. But from 1605 onwards Munday was often employed by city companies to devise Lord Mayor’s pageants, and it has been supposed that he had been similarly engaged since 1592 on the strength of a claim in the 1618 edition of John Stowe’s Survey of London, which he edited, that he had been ‘six and twenty years in sundry employments for the City’s service’. But there were other civic employments, and it is doubtful (cf. ch. iv) how far there were pageants during the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign for Munday to devise. On the title-pages of his pageants he describes himself as a ‘Cittizen and Draper of London’. The Corporation’s welcome at the creation of Henry as Prince of Wales in 1610 (cf. ch. iv) also fell to him to devise. How long he continued to write plays is unknown. He had several children in St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, between 1584 and 1589, and was buried on 10 Aug. 1633 at St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street.

Dissertations: J. D. Wilson, A. M., Pamphleteer and Pursuivant (1909, M. L. R. iv. 484); W. W. Greg, Autograph Plays by A. M. (1913, M. L. R. viii. 89); M. St. C. Byrne, The Date of A. M.’s Journey to Rome (1918, 3 Library, ix. 106), The Shepherd Tony—a Recapitulation (1920, M. L. R. xv. 364), A. M. and his Books (1921, 4 Library, i. 225); E. M. Thompson, The Autograph MSS. of A. M. (1919, Bibl. Soc. Trans. xiv. 325).