Anthony Munday and the Catholics.

Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560-1633, by Donna B. Hamilton. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. xxxvi + 268. Cloth $94.95.

In a work of careful historical reconstruction, Donna Hamilton has written what will surely be the definitive literary biography of 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 of 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 Both are thought to have contributed to the play called Sir Thomas More (unpublished until the nineteenth century), and Munday had a hand in Sir John Oldcastle, which was written in response to Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV. 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 of 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 of a possible parallel is illuminating and helpful, especially since Munday's Catholicism is not obvious. He published a condemnation of 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 of 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 of traitors, especially recusants. Munday's hand in Sir John Oldcastle adds to the puzzle, because the play resuscitates the reputation of a Lollard (or proto-Protestant) martyr whom Shakespeare lampooned in the character subsequently known as Falstaff.

Well aware of these difficulties, Hamilton nonetheless makes her case persuasively by means of various kinds of historical evidence together with informed close reading of 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 of the realm but also head of the English Church, which was independent of the Church of Rome and therefore opposed to papal domination. Depending on the strenuousness of one's belief in Catholic doctrine, conforming to the standards of the English Church was heretical, as recusants maintained, because it necessarily entailed denial of 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 of Catholics, rather than persecution, and he signaled his Catholic allegiance in a variety of 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 of others in ways that suggest his own position as revealed outside the texts he published. Reading Munday's writing in light of a densely elucidated context is thus essential to Hamilton's strategy and makes it credible.

Regarding Munday's Brief discourse on the takinge of Edmund Campion, the seditious Jesuit (11581), for example, Hamilton notes that the tract concludes with a list "of the priests, gentlemen and yeomen now in the Tower, as well as those of the wives and nuns who remained at Lyford," where Campion had been captured (37). While the tract explicitly condemns Campion for disloyalty to the crown, in other words, it also dispenses crucial information that Catholic readers craved about the disposition of their community in the wake of Campion's arrest. This gently subversive tactic was not original with Munday; drawing on the work of Arthur Marotti, Hamilton notes that it was a standard strategy of English Catholics in Reformation England. Citing another strategy, where Munday's publication of romances is concerned, Hamilton argues that his choice "to translate Iberian romances from French translations involved him directly in the importation--smuggling, if you will--of material that carried foreign ideologies" (75). In contrast to staunchly Protestant narratives like John Foxe's or Edmund Spenser's, Munday's translations consistently imagine a world in which noticing "how much is the same becomes more important than noticing what has been changed." His romances thus "helped create a public sphere in which the Catholic perspective remained a competing voice and offered a counter-narrative that represented the larger Catholic world as advantageous to England's safety and identity" (79). That counter-narrative imagined, in short, a different national identity from the one that was being shaped by the Protestant establishment, identified by Richard Helgerson and others as the dominant narrative of early modern England.

In Hamilton's view, Munday walked a tightrope with remarkable dexterity throughout his entire life. Hamilton makes clear the difficulty of maintaining one's position as a church papist in Munday's response to the Gunpower Plot of 1605. Seemingly an unambiguous case of recusant sedition, the plot resulted in a governmental clampdown on Catholic sympathizers, some of whom were compelled to serve as spies and pursuivants to prove their loyalty to the crown. Hamilton reports that Munday again took service with Richard Topcliffe, principal enforcer for the crown, at this time (156), in an apparent attempt to exempt himself from suspicion, and he republished some of his earlier loyalist tracts from the 1580s (157). "It was shrewd and convenient to have Catholics decry the actions of other Catholics," Hamilton observes (157), and Munday's response to this shrewd government policy shows the ambiguities of his position. He took a serious risk in maintaining a dual loyalty, because his temporizing must inevitably have been suspicious to less ambiguous loyalists on both sides.

The documentation Hamilton offers in support of her path-blazing argument is noteworthy. Out of some 286 pages of substantive text, about 106 pages consist of notes, bibliography, and index. Hamilton has compiled three bibliographies: a chronological list of Munday's publications, a bibliography of primary sources, and a bibliography of secondary sources. The last in particular is a mine of sources, both literary and historical, for anyone interested in the topic of Elizabethan and early Stuart Catholicism. Organizing the discussion of so much material, published over the course of more than fifty years, is a challenge for any literary biographer, and Hamilton for the most part follows a chronological scheme. Beginning with two chapters that deal, respectively, with Munday's writing in 1577-80 and 1581-88, she organizes the rest of his career generically, giving a chapter apiece to Munday's translation of Iberian romances, his writing for the popular stage, and his writing for the City of London. Genre is a useful way to organize a large body of writing, but it confuses the chronological scheme, because Munday did not take up and abandon particular genres in succession; he wrote in several of them simultaneously, and attention to his multi-generic writing in a given year or years could conceivably help to strengthen Hamilton's point. This confusion in narrative organization is compounded by infelicities of style and poor copyediting that makes the index difficult to use, sometimes when it is most needed.

Still, this remains an important book, and it should be read by all those who engage in debate about Shakespeare's Catholicism, because it makes a strong case for the Catholic allegiance of a man who was almost Shakespeare's exact contemporary, and who had a much longer writing career. If Shakespeare was himself a church papist or possibly even a secret recusant, as many have argued, then one ought to be able to find at least some parallels between his career and Munday's. Hamilton has herself addressed the issue of Shakespeare's attention to religious issues in an earlier book, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (1992), in which she concludes that Shakespeare's own religion is impossible to determine. Her work on Anthony Munday has not changed her mind. "Shakespeare's religion remains inaccessible," she states unequivocally (xxiv n 3). For those engaged in proving Shakespeare's Catholicism from what he wrote, Hamilton's book on Munday would seem to carry an implicit warning: caveat lector.

Reviewer: JOHN COX