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Anthony Mundy, “Edward” Spenser, and E. K.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In 1934 Mr. Padelford issued, as a newly recovered work, The Axiochus of Plato, which Cuthbert Burby had published in 1592 as a translation by “Edward” Spenser. Later Mr. Freyd and Mr. Swan maintained that the translator was Anthony Mundy. This problem, arising long after my own book on Mundy appeared, has led me to scrutinize any possible connection between the two poets. Although they had many opportunities for becoming acquainted, attention focuses upon a friend whom they may have had in common—one Edward Knight. In 1579 that writer, heading his verses “Ε. K., Gentleman,” prefixed them to Mundy's Mirrour of Muta-bilitie, registered 10 October. A book by Knight, The Trial of Truth, was registered 13 November. Can he have been Ε. K., the mysterious editor of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, registered 5 December?
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961
References
1 Frederick M. Padelford, ed., The Axiochus of Plato (Baltimore, 1934).
2 Bernard Freyd, “Spenser or Anthony Munday?” PMLA, L (1935), 903–908.
3 Marshall Swan, “The Sweet Speech and Spenser's (?) Axiochus,” ELH, xi (1944), 161–181.
4 [Julial] Celeste Turner [Wright], Anthony Mundy: An Elizabethan Man of Letters (Berkeley, 1928), hereafter cited as AM.
5 Edward Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London (London, 1875–94), hereafter cited as SR. See ii, 360: entered by John Allde, printer, Mundy's former master; and sold by Richard Ballard (AM, p. 201), who was, like Mundy's father, a draper-book-seller.
6 SR, ii, 362: entered jointly by Thomas Dawson, printer, and Thomas Butter, bookseller. In July, Dawson (with Stephen Peele) had registered A Discourse of John Fox (SR, II, 357), containing verses by Mundy (AM, p. 24).
7 SR, ii, 362 : entered by Hugh Singleton, printer-publisher.
8 Alexander C. Judson, The Life of Edmund Spenser (Baltimore, 1945), pp. 39–40, 60, 62, on Kirke, Mistress Kerke, and Ε. K.
9 The Works of Edmund Spenser (A Variorum Edition): The Minor Poems (Baltimore, 1943), I, 645–650, “Identity of Ε. K.”
10 Celeste T. Wright, “Young Anthony Mundy Again,” SP, LVI (1959), 150–168, hereafter cited as YAM. On Charlewood, see pp. 152 ff., especially p. 162. See Swan, pp. 161, 164, on sheet D, as described by the Pforzheimer Catalogue.
11 Mark Eccles, “Anthony Munday,” Studies in English Renaissance Drama, ed. Oscar Cargill (New York, 1959), pp. 95–105.
12 Leslie Hotson, “Anthony Mundy's Birth-Date,” N&Q, vi (1959), 2–4.
13 Pollard and Redgrave, Short-Title Catalogue (London, 1926), hereafter cited as STC. See item 19157.
14 Padelford, pp. 12–14. Mornay was a friend of Sidney, Spenser's patron.
15 Stanzas 6, 7. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954), pp. 369–370, finds Daphnaida “radically vulgar” and contrasts Spenser's man in black with Chaucer's (in The Boke of the Duchesse). Was Sackville's influence responsible for this “disastrous contrast”?
16 J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt, ed. The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser (Oxford, 1924), int., p. xx.
17 Sackville, Induction, in The Renaissance in England, ed. Hyder E. Rollins and Herschel Baker (Boston, 19S4), pp. 272–277.
18 M. St. Clare Byrne, The Elizabethan Home (rev. ed., London, 1949), p. x, notes Hollyband's address, but not the link between Sackville (Lord Buckhurst) and Mundy.
19 M. St. Clare Byrne, “The Shepherd Tony,” MLR, xv (1920), 365, on Mundy's partiality for this stanza.
20 Oddly enough Webbe's publisher, Robert Walley, had just inherited The Kalender of Shepherds, a translation from ‘ the French; his father, John, had got out three editions between 1559 and 1570 (STC, 22413 ff.). As E. K.‘s epistle hints, Spenser borrowed his title from this older work (Jud-son, p. 50). Reciprocally, the elder Walley rechristened his own enterprise the Shepherdes Kalender (STC, 22416 ff.). He died in 1586 (SR, II, 36), a few months before his son registered Webbe's Discourse of English Poetry. Intentionally or not, Webbe's praise of Spenser may have promoted the sale of the rival “calendar.” In 1591, when the Faerie Queene was popular, Robert Walley formally reminded the Stationers of his claim to what he still—confusingly—called the Shepherdes Calender (SR, ii, 576).
21 Eustace Conway, Anthony Munday and Other Essays (New York, 1927), pp. 23–25.
22 Gabriel Harvey, Foure Letters (1592), Bodley Head Quartos (London, 1922), p. 34 (third letter).
23 B. M. Ward, The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (London, 1928), pp. 157–158.
24 R. Warwick Bond, ed., The Complete Works of John Lyly (Oxford, 1902), i, 17–18, 24.
25 Percival Boyd, Roll of the Drapers Company of London (Croydon, 1934). The Drapers' roll mentions two James Bentleys; the first (evidently the father) finished an apprenticeship in 1548. The Stationers' Register identifies our printer's father (James) as a “merchaunttailor,” rather than a Draper; but this is not a real discrepancy: the Drapers were notorious for invading other crafts, and the Merchant Tailors (reciprocally) used to invade the drapery business (A. H. Johnson, A History of the Worshipful Company of the Drapers of London, Oxford, 1914–22, ii, 167–171). Similarly, though Mundy's father, a bookseller, belonged to the Drapers' Company, City records always describe him as a “stationer” (Eccles, p. 97).
26 AM, p. 26 from Hazlitt. Next year Newton, as “T.N.,” published through Mundy's friend Charlewood (SR, ii, 372 and V, item 2588). On Newton, see DNB.
27 A Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576), in The Renaissance in England, pp. 214, 217.