Anthony Munday

Anthony Munday 1553-1633, English author, b. London. After spending his early years as an actor, he turned to writing. His literary output includes a number of plays (many written in collaboration), poems, pageants, several anti-Catholic pamphlets, and translations of popular French romances (including Amadis de Gaul ). Among his plays are John a Kent and John a Cumber (c.1594) and two on the legend of Robin Hood, The Downfall and Death of Robert, Earl of Huntington (both 1601).

Munday, Anthony (1560–1633), hack-writer, wrote or collaborated in a number of plays, and was ridiculed by Jonson as Antonio Balladino in The Case is Altered. Munday wrote ballads, and as ‘Shepheard Tonie’ contributed several poems to Englands Helicon (1600). He also translated popular romances, including the Palmerin cycle (1581–1602), Palladine of England (1588), and Amadis of Gaul (?1590), and wrote City pageants from 1605.

Munday, Anthony (1560–1633), English hack-writer, pamphleteer, ballad-maker, translator, and playwright. His first extant play, Fedele and Fortunio (1584), translated from the Italian, may have been used by Shakespeare in writing Much Ado about Nothing (1598), while parts of his play on a contest between two wizards, John a Kent and John a Cumber (c.1590), probably suggested the Bottom scenes in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595). Munday is known to have collaborated in several plays, now lost, about Robin Hood and Sir John Oldcastle, and worked mainly for Henslowe. He certainly had a hand in the fragmentary Sir Thomas More, since most of the extant manuscript is in his handwriting.