Chasing Shakespeares by Sarah Smith

Author:Sarah Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Published: 2003-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Great. Together. I hadn’t any interest in that kind of great. Gould was gone when we got back to the apartment; a couple of silent Spanish women were washing the table and cleaning the food off the rug. I went into the library and pulled a couple of biographies of Munday off the Net.

Anthony Munday was one of those minor Elizabethans who always appear somewhere in a list of playwrights, but are never important enough to be first. He was born in either 1553 or 1560. His father was a London draper. He was an actor before he was sixteen, maybe a boy playing women’s parts, then was apprenticed to a printer, but only lasted a year. In the late 1570s he started writing.

He dedicated some of his early work to Oxford. Oxford told him he should go to Rome to study the Renaissance. Munday did, and when he got back, Oxford hired him as a secretary. Munday eventually moved on to work as a playwright, court messenger, editor, and producer of pageants for the London guilds. He’s best known for editing a revision of Stow’s London.

I wasn’t finding out much about him and Shakespeare—of course; who knew that?—but between the lines, I was finding out only too much about him and Oxford.

Munday had saved Oxford’s life.

In 1580, Munday had come back from Rome and was working for Oxford. Oxford had been separated from his wife four years. He was living in a bachelor apartment, probably leaving his socks on the floor and drinking out of the bottle. He had started hanging around with a bad crowd headed by Lord Henry Howard, the Duke of Norfolk’s literary younger brother.

He’d fallen in with real bad guys. Henry Howard was spying for Mary Queen of Scots, who was still trying to get the throne. Charles Arundel, another of the group, was on his way to being an open traitor in the pay of Philip of Spain.

Under their influence, Oxford had apparently become a secret Catholic. Which would get him imprisoned, maybe tortured, maybe killed.

Now here was Munday, just back from pretending to study for the Jesuit priesthood in Rome. In 1580, the first of a wave of Jesuits were coming from Rome to England in disguise. Some of them, like Mary Cat’s favorite, Edmund Campion, were priests pure and simple. Some were organizing a Catholic rebellion and planning the Queen’s assassination, with men just like Henry Howard.

Some of them had been Munday’s classmates.

Anthony Munday, who still had his English College sweatshirt in his closet, knew these guys’ agendas.

I figured Munday found out Oxford was Catholic.

There were any number of ways this story could have played out. Munday could have been spying for Cecil, one of those family spies Cecil liked. But Munday and Oxford stayed friends for life. So it was more likely that Munday was what Oxford had always been short of, a friend he could trust.

How did Munday get the message through to Oxford? Maybe he took a big chance, just laid it on the line.

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