Munday (or Mundy), Anthony (1553–1633)

English dramatist and miscellaneous writer. In 1605 he was appointed chief pageant writer for the City of London, and is best remembered for these entertainments. There are 18 plays ascribed to Munday, among them The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1601), followed by The Death of Robert of Huntingdon, in which he collaborated with Henry Chettle, and John a Kent and John a Cumber, performed about 1594.

He also wrote anti-Catholic pamphlets, translated romances, contributed several lyrics, some under the name of ‘Shepherd Tony’, to the collection of Elizabethan poetry England's Helicon (1600), and published an enlarged edition of Stow's Survey of London (1618).

He was born in London and went to Rome in 1578, probably as a spy to report on the English Jesuit College there. On his return to England in 1579 he became an actor, and later a member of the Earl of Oxford's company.