Anthony Munday is one of the most ubiquitous and at the same time elusive figures of early modern cultural history. For many years stigmatized and thereby overlooked as merely a “hack” writer, he in fact played a significant role in the literary culture of his day. After a considerable hiatus following the publication in 1928 of the sole biography of Munday, a rather speculative effort by Celeste Turner, in recent years critical attention has increasingly been drawn to the man and his works. Donna Hamilton's book contributes to ongoing critical debates about Munday, and her provocative argument, based on close readings of a wide range of Munday's works, will no doubt prompt interesting responses.

Munday was the exemplary self-fashioning writer: as a translator, propagandist, and playwright he specialized in adopting a range of voices, and as a relentless self-publicist who was adept at mobilizing and constructing his varied audiences he was at the same time perennially anxious about his public reputation. He was unusually self-conscious about his standing as a writer and propagandist, and his willingness to debate his reputation in print has left many traces of his interpersonal relations with a wide range of contemporary figures and institutions.

Nevertheless, for such a high-profile writer Munday's work is frequently evasive and ambiguous, even cryptic; Hamilton describes him as “a skilful equivocator and casuist” (xvii). As his predilection for translation indicates, he was adept at disguising his own voice behind that of others. From his early days as an actor he was known for his ability to improvise. As he himself put it in his short-lived guise of antitheatrical polemicist, “plaiers can not better be compared than to the Camelion” (A second and third blast of retrait from playes and theaters [London 1580], sig. Hvi^v). “Chameleon-like” is certainly a good description of Munday's fluctuating loyalties, which frequently raise the problem that if his position can be ventriloquized so easily, who can say where the authentic self lies. The issue of his religious affiliation, the subject of Hamilton's book, is a case in point, and the fact that Munday's early life has yet to be fully excavated serves only to multiply the possibilities. We do know that he was an orphan by the age of eleven and that he was brought up in the care of the City of London Corporation until he attained his majority (no record has survived of his parents’ religion); it is likely that he was tutored by the Protestant Huguenot refugee Claudius Hollyband; he visited Rome under dubious circumstances in 1578–79; and he was working in some capacity in the household of the suspect Catholic Earl of Oxford by 1580, to whom he dedicated his protonovel Zelauto in that year. On his return from Rome he busied himself producing quite vicious denunciations of Edmund Campion and other Catholic martyrs, and by the end of the 1580s he was in the public eye and chastized in print once again for playing a part in the arrest of those suspected of involvement in the Marprelate controversy. In this latter part of his career one of those he apprehended, the ultra-Protestant preacher Giles Wigginton, said of Munday that he “seemeth to favour the Pope and to be a great dissembler” (William Pierce, An Historical Introduction to the Marprelate Tracts [London, 1908], 164; my emphasis).

Tempting though it is to bring this fascinating man and his works together and to read the texts “biographically,” as a contemporary witness Wigginton identified a crucial aspect of Munday's working practices. The extant evidence is so indeterminate that it is difficult and quite possibly misleading to try to establish a consistent set of beliefs for this writer. As a man who depended on his versatile pen for his living, Munday was quite evidently prepared to write to order; it is therefore unwise for us simply to “read off ” religious and/or political allegiances from his texts. Indeed, Hamilton herself states that “no aspect of Munday's relation to ecclesiastical authority can be taken for granted” (177). Clearly, there were instances when he positioned himself quite overtly (e.g., in his anti-Catholic pamphlets of the early 1580s), but that is not to say that he at all times signed up to the views his texts expressed. Although she concedes that “any attempt to confine one of Munday's works to only one reading would be utterly pointless” (xvii), Hamilton attempts, even in the most unlikely contexts, to reclaim Munday as an active proponent of the Catholic cause. As an example of her approach, she argues that The conversion of a most noble lady of Fraunce, which Munday published in 1608 and dedicated to John Swynnerton, a powerful Protestant London alderman, a text that ostensibly demonstrates the benefits of conversion from Catholicism, actually does the reverse: by rehearsing the dangers of Catholicism, according to Hamilton, it actually “speaks to a resisting [recusant] readership” (157). One of the problems with this kind of paradoxical reading, of course, is that it is well nigh impossible to disprove. Counterevidence is also sometimes overlooked, such as the fact that Munday chose to worship only at two of London's most fervently Protestant churches, St. Giles Cripplegate, where the incumbents included the strongly anti-Catholic Robert Crowley (a man with whom Munday liked to claim acquaintance), and St. Stephen Coleman Street, a church associated with nonconformity since the Lollards.

Hamilton's study of Munday is part of a critical trend of identifying coded Catholic beliefs in the works of early modern writers, one that began a few years ago with Richard Wilson's controversial claims about Shakespeare's putative early days in a Catholic household in Lancashire (further such works include Clare Asquith's Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare). As one might expect, Hamilton's book demonstrates a considerable grounding in historical and critical works about early modern Catholicism. It is therefore disappointing to see that its author has refrained almost entirely from engaging with the growing body of scholarship on Munday. For a book that is otherwise so well researched, and which even cites a history of Morris dancing, this sidelining of recent work comprising at least two monographs, some doctoral theses, and a number of scholarly articles (many of which deal explicitly with Munday and Catholicism) is inexplicable. After all, Munday has hardly generated unmanageable quantities of commentary. Such an omission strikes me as a missed opportunity to test her revisionist views against those offering alternatives.