SOURCE: Bergeron, David M. “Thomas Middleton and Anthony Munday: Artistic Rivalry?” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 36, no. 2 (spring 1996): 461-79.

[In the following essay, Bergeron questions the accepted belief by many scholars that Middleton had nothing but contempt for Munday.]

Artistic lives have intersected in varied, challenging, and sometimes productive ways, whether T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. In the early seventeenth century Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher seem a fixture of artistic collaboration. We know that Thomas Middleton worked with Thomas Dekker in The Roaring Girl and with William Rowley in The Changeling, to cite two well-known examples. Yet such artistic collaboration may involve rivalry, as we think of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones working on the court masques. Their relationship, we recall, eventually collapsed. Nearly 180 years of scholarship have documented Middleton's presumed contempt for his lesser contemporary Anthony Munday. I intend to swim against this scholarly tide. I will question the evidence of their antipathy; and I will shift the ground from rivalry, which in their relationship has come to have only negative connotations, to collaboration.

By investigating the Middleton-Munday relationship, I will be asking about how we do our scholarship. We may also ask how we know what we know in scholarship. Typically we know on the basis of our own investigation and research or by accepting the testimony of a host of witnesses that has preceded us. Scholarly authority may displace the need for personal investigation. Two essential problems emerge in the Middleton-Munday debate: unsubstantiated or unjustified interpretation of texts and uncritical transmission of presumed information about the writers. I argue that a nineteenth-century fiction about the two dramatists readily became fixed as a truth and that it has been faithfully perpetuated through the twentieth century, largely unexamined and unquestioned. Although this essay concentrates on the relatively minor Middleton-Munday problem, I intend that it have implications for an array of other scholarly issues that remain insufficiently investigated, having their “truth” asserted and assumed rather than substantiated.

This study becomes an examination of the ideology and practice of scholarship, although beginning first with the dramatist's own attitude. I will try to answer how the nineteenth-century myth came about and how scholars regularly in that century reinforced and even added to the fiction. I think that this development has much to do with a nineteenth-century scholarly interest in topical readings of texts and a major preoccupation with the concept of attack, abetted by the scholars’ own nervous anxiety about personal attack from fellow scholars. A “war of the theaters” mentality informs much of the scholarly commentary, leading to a preoccupation with this subject at the end of the century. Removed from the fervor of such battles, twentieth-century commentators on the Middleton-Munday rivalry have exhibited less ideology and more benign neglect of the issue, resulting in an uncritical acceptance of what the nineteenth century created and fought over.

Where does the Middleton-Munday antipathy come from? In which of Middleton's plays or prose works does he malign the hapless Munday? What about external evidence? Scholarship has focused on two passages from two of Middleton's texts, both pageant texts that provide the entertainment for the new Lord Mayor of London: The Triumphs of Truth (1613) and The Triumphs of Love and Antiquity (1619). Far too often texts of civic pageants fall victim to puzzlement or yawning indifference. Not surprisingly, when a nineteenth-century scholar establishes a position based on a pageant text, we have been ready to accept rather than investigate. The general position has been: if scholars want to read those texts, more power to them. My recent editing of Middleton's civic pageants for the new Oxford University Press Complete Works of Thomas Middleton has forced me to think anew about the pageants and to wrestle with some editorial problems I had not explored earlier. This has landed me squarely in the middle of the Middleton-Munday relationship.

The “offending” passages follow so that we may see the cause of the fuss. On the title page of The Triumphs of Truth we find this curious description: “All the shows, pageants, chariots, morning, noon, and night triumphs. Directed, written, and redeemed into form, from the ignorance of some former times, and their common writer.”¹ The opening passage in the text proper refers to the contribution of the Grocers, the sponsoring guild, whose generosity has enabled “streams of art to equal those of bounty” (14) and therefore made possible this entertainment which surpasses that to be found anywhere. But Middleton complains that not all writers have risen to the challenges of art and knowledge:

the miserable want of both which, in the impudent common writer, hath often forced from me much pity and sorrow; and it would heartily grieve any understanding spirit to behold many times so glorious a fire in bounty and goodness offering to match itself with freezing art, sitting in darkness, with the candle out, looking like the picture of Black Monday.

(16-22)

The opening lines of The Triumphs of Love and Antiquity return to the question of art:

If foreign nations have been struck with admiration at the form, state, and splendour of some yearly triumphs wherein art hath been but weakly imitated and most beggarly worded, there is fair hope that things where invention flourishes … should receive favour.

(2-7)

These passages constitute the only evidence for Middleton's contempt of Munday. Two key moments in the Truth passages apparently clinch the case: the reference to the “common writer” and even the “impudent” common writer, and the allusion to “Black Monday.” The conclusion? Middleton must have Anthony Munday in mind. Similarly, if Middleton writes about art weakly imitated and “most beggarly worded,” he must mean Munday. As an editor of Middleton, I confess that I do not know that Middleton refers to any specific writer. Is Munday somehow the only writer who lacks adequate art and knowledge? Is he the only one guilty of “freezing art” which sits in the dark “looking like the picture of Black Monday”? Some scholars have pounced on the word “Monday”; surely that points inevitably to Anthony Munday. Do we know any other writers from the period with such a name? But as Shakespeare intends the reference to Black Monday in The Merchant of Venice and as Middleton intends it in his Black Book, such an allusion refers to the Monday after Easter.

Rather than referring to a specific dramatist, Middleton seems only to be trying to make the world safe for his efforts. Since this Lord Mayor's Show is his first, perhaps he responds to some kind of Bloomian “anxiety of influence.” In any event, his ideology consists of drawing attention to his accomplishments at the expense of lesser (unnamed) artists. In the “Epistle Dedicatory” addressed to the new mayor, Middleton refers to the “oppositions of malice, ignorance, and envy” (23) that he has presumably overcome, preserved “to do service to your fame and worthiness, and my pen only to be employed in these bounteous and honourable triumphs” (26-8). Instead of the let down of a Black Monday or the limitations of a freezing art, Middleton offers streams of art equal to the occasion.

Therefore, if Middleton's comments in these two texts do not lead us automatically and indubitably to think of Munday, how have scholars come to such a conclusion? The next section of this paper provides a catalogue of scholars from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who have in effect accepted the premise of Middleton's low opinion of his rival Munday. I will establish the atmosphere that permeated much nineteenth-century scholarship, a climate that enabled and encouraged speculation about personal attacks by Renaissance dramatists upon their contemporaries.

So far as I have been able to determine, the first person to see the connection between the comments in Truth and Munday was William Gifford in his 1816 edition of Ben Jonson. Gifford offers his commentary on the character Antonio Balladino as modeled on Munday in Jonson's The Case Is Altered:

It would be unjust to dismiss Anthony Munday without adding that he appears to have been an industrious and worthy man … Anthony kept pace with the times, and was not outstripped till a gigantic race of men arose, who were destined to render competition desperate and success hopeless. He died in a good old age.²

Gifford adds that Munday regularly received ridicule: “The Triumphs of Truth, written by Middleton, to celebrate the entrance of Sir T. Middleton into the mayoralty, has many reflections on ‘the pageant poet’ of the city” (6:328 n). Gifford cites the offending passages at the beginning of the pageant as proof. In a fit of generosity and consideration he finally says: “There is more of this; but I forbear” (6:328 n).

Because Gifford begins the tradition of Middleton-Munday rivalry, I want to take a closer look at what ideas inform his view. First, he exhibits certain prejudice about pageants, which he characterizes as “not a little risible” (6:325 n) and as entertainments “which amused and edified the apprentices on festivals and holidays” (my emphasis). Gifford suggests that Munday experienced the wrath of Catholics because of some of his writing and that this left him “embittered many years of his life by the personal assaults to which it exposed him.” Exactly where Gifford gets the evidence of Munday's bitterness he does not say. He hints that Jonson's satiric attack on Munday in The Case Is Altered came about because Jonson took offense at Francis Meres's designation in Palladis Tamia (1598) of Munday as “our best plotter.” The connection of Munday and Jonson to the idea of the “war of the theaters” lurks behind Gifford's interpretation. Once scholars posit the reality of such a war, it becomes easy, if not necessary, to include as many dramatists as possible in order to heighten the significance of this event. That is, Gifford buys into the idea of vicious attack, one dramatist upon another: hence it seems a small step to insist that Middleton must have Munday in mind in the pageant texts.

Also, Gifford clearly thinks himself under attack or at least that Jonson is under attack. He therefore adopts a combative tone in many of his commentary notes, railing against those, for example, who with their “wanton and outrageous calumny” (2:458 n) would assert the “malignity” of Jonson. In writing about Poetaster, Gifford singles out former scholars: “Messrs. Steevens and Malone content their spleen, in general, with harping on the ‘malignity of Jonson to Shakspeare.’ their zany, Mr. Thomas Davies, takes up the idle calumny” (2:459 n). Exasperated at the perceived attacks on Jonson, Gifford blurts out: “The commentators are absolutely mad” (2:545 n). He castigates “sheer ignorance” (1:xxxiv) and “solemn absurdity” (1:xxxvii). He so dislikes some of Steevens's commentary that he suggests that the prototype of Steevens “sat for Macilente” (2:458 n) in Every Man out of His Humour. He asks: “can any folly equal that of construing every application of a written passage into an insult upon the original?” (2:175 n). At moments Gifford clearly violates his own rhetorical question as he also forgets the interpretive caveats enumerated by the Scrivener in the Induction's covenant between the audience and the author in Bartholomew Fair.

John Nichols in his edition of The Progresses of King James (1828) seconds Gifford's idea but goes him one better by insisting that the reference to Black Monday indeed refers to the writer, Middleton's “rival City Poet.”³ Middleton considered Munday only competent to provide apparel for the pageant. Nichols adds: “This virulent attack, however, appears to have experienced no greater attention than such violence deserved, since Munday was employed in the three following years.” Suddenly “virulence” and “violence” enter the scholarly vocabulary. Nichols, the first to comment on Triumphs of Love and Antiquity, writes: “This Author [Middleton] had before shewn his own self-conceit, and his jealousy of his rival Anthony Monday, in the preface to his Pageant of 1613” (3:571 n). The opening lines of the 1619 pageant text suggest to Nichols that Middleton intends to refer to Munday, henceforth to be designated as “rival.”

In the year of Nichols's edition John Payne Collier published an edition of several of Anthony Munday's plays in which he offered a “corrective” to the view of the Middleton-Munday relationship articulated by Gifford. Collier writes:

Mr. Gifford was of opinion that Middleton meant to censure him [Munday] in his Triumphs of Truth, as the “impudent common writer” of city pageants; but this is hardly consistent with the mention Middleton introduces of Munday at the close of that performance. Besides Dekker wrote the pageant for the year 1612, immediately preceding that for which Middleton was engaged.⁴

A scant ten years after Gifford, Collier provided the necessary corrective to Gifford's position. But Collier's view remains the single voice of opposition to what became the prevailing, indeed only, understanding of the relationship between the two dramatists.

The first modern edition of Middleton, that by Alexander Dyce in 1840, adopts wholesale and by quotation the view enunciated by Nichols, asserting that in Truth Middleton clearly means to impugn Munday. Dyce does acknowledge Collier's demur, only to doubt it: “In the remarks prefixed to Munday's Downfall of the Earl of Huntington … I am surprised to find Mr. Collier doubting if Middleton alludes to him here; and I can only suppose that when Mr. C. wrote those remarks, his recollection of the present passage was somewhat imperfect.”⁵ Dyce develops the theory that the “ill will which the dramatists appear to have borne towards him” arose from Francis Meres's praise of him in Palladis Tamia. Dyce writes of the opening lines of Love and Antiquity as “Alluding to the pageants of Munday” (5:275 n). Thus, Middleton's first editor merely brushes aside a scholar who has a contrary view, asserting that the benighted soul obviously does not recall the text correctly. We find ourselves in the presence of that all too common and bracing view that “all sensitive readers” will agree with the stated position. If not, then clearly something is wrong with the other person. It also seems rather unlikely that other dramatists would be so upset by Meres's praise of Munday that they would set out to disparage him and knock him down a peg or two. We also notice that once Dyce takes care of Collier, no one else even raises Collier's objection to the interpretation: the power of complete editions.

Writing the first study of Lord Mayor's Shows, Frederick W. Fairholt in 1843 joins the swelling chorus of those who see Middleton as castigating Munday. In fact, Fairholt says that The Triumphs of Truth “is principally remarkable for the attack upon Anthony Munday, the rival city poet, contained in it.”⁶ This certainly damns the pageant with faint praise. Fairholt writes that the “attack commences on the title-page … and it is continued in the first page of the pamphlet” (pp. 32-3). He closes his quotation with the “Black Monday” passage and comments: “This virulent attack failed in depriving Munday of future employment” (p. 34). Fairholt also adds in a note that the 1619 pageant “again alludes to Munday.” None of the scholars stops to give much thought to why these alleged virulent attacks seem to have had no impact on Munday's career. Could it be that no one at the time understood Middleton's texts to contain such an attack on Munday?

A. H. Bullen's edition of Middleton, the last full-scale one before this year's Oxford University Press edition, solidifies the Middleton-Munday rivalry. Commenting on the opening passage in Truth, Bullen writes: “Middleton is sneering at the rival city-poet Anthony Munday, who produced the pageant for the three following years.”⁷ And Bullen adds somewhat gratuitously: “Meres in Palladis Tamia, 1598, absurdly dubbed Munday ‘our best plotter.’” When he edits Love and Antiquity, Bullen observes that “Middleton is again glancing at Antony Munday” (7:315 n).

Three books in the 1890s tie into the controversy directly or indirectly; their common denominator derives from their discussion of the “war of the theaters.” They offer a culmination of the century's concern for this alleged war, primarily among Jonson, Marston, and Dekker. These investigations heighten topical understandings of the drama and its reflection of personal and professional attacks. Josiah Penniman and Roscoe Small write books on the subject, all designed to create an importance for the battle.⁸ One comes away from these books convinced that both more and less exists here than meets the eye in this “war.” Outside a few examples, the evidence does not point to a large-scale struggle. On the contrary, this “war” and the attendant issues of topical interpretation of texts seem more complicated than these writers let on. Interestingly, neither Penniman nor Small has anything to say about Middleton's presumed attack on Munday. But Small, for example, notes Jonson's critical portrayal of Munday and offers an explanation: “it is more likely, however, that Monday [sic] had cast reflections on Jonson in some of his lost plays written about 1598” (p. 198). A page later Small names which lost Munday plays contain attacks on Jonson. Attack seems to be everywhere, even in lost plays. I am arguing that such an atmosphere or ideology encouraged finding slighting references in Middleton's pageant texts.

Frederick Fleay's Chronicle of the English Drama 1559-1642 certainly embraces speculation about the war of the theaters even as Fleay writes about Middleton's contempt for Munday. Fleay observes: “Monday [sic] is distinctly alluded to as ‘the impudent common writer’ wanting in knowledge, and ‘freezing Art sitting in darkness with the candle out and looking like the picture of Black Monday.’”⁹ And then Fleay adds what no one else had dared even to conjecture: Munday “is further personated as Envy on a rhinoceros. Zeal is Middleton.” The pageant rapidly becomes an allegory not just of the moral struggle between Truth and Error but now of the battle between Middleton and Munday. Interestingly, Fleay has adopted Gifford's basic position even though he elsewhere refers to Gifford as being “rash and inaccurate as usual” (2:69). In this scholarly charged atmosphere Fleay also takes on Bullen and his edition of Middleton. Feeling maligned by Bullen, Fleay lashes at his “libellous attack” and adds: “If gratitude has no influence on the heart of this New Shaksperian, surely respect for ‘his own credit’ in every sense should restrain his effeminately facile pen” (2:374). Scholars imitate Renaissance dramatists in creating vitriolic wars among themselves.

As we cross into the twentieth century, things do not get any better, although the sniping among scholars disappears (at least on this subject). Building on the nineteenth-century fiction, no one stops to ask questions about why we believe the presumed antipathy between Middleton and Munday. Writing about the London guilds, George Unwin comments on various pageant entertainments, including Middleton's. He refers to Munday as Middleton's “rival” and alludes to Middleton's “unkind remarks” about Munday.¹⁰ Robert Withington in the first comprehensive study of English civic pageantry devotes considerable space to a discussion of Lord Mayor's Shows. Referring to the 1613 pageant, Withington writes: “In his introductory remarks, Middleton takes advantage of the opportunity to sneer at his brother-poet, Munday.”¹¹ One suspects, without altogether being able to prove, that each scholar has some awareness of what others have said about this problem; therefore, each stretches to find some new way to express it, “sneer” being the latest verb.

In the only full-length study of Anthony Munday, Celeste Turner in 1928 offers a rousing defense of him. She sees the Munday-Middleton rivalry in elitist terms; that is, Middleton uses his Gray's Inn education to belittle Munday. Unfortunately, regarding her argument, one has to point out that Middleton did not attend Gray's Inn; rather, he spent some time at Oxford University. Turner comments on Truth and its opening lines: “In the preface to this pageant of 1613, he openly flaunted his Gray's Inn education in the face of the ‘impudent, common writer.’”¹² And writing about Love and Antiquity she observes: “In the Skinners' menagerie of furry beasts for 1619, the Gray's Inn graduate [Middleton] scoffed at those previous yearly triumphs [Munday's 1618 pageant]” (p. 166). Middleton's opinion of Munday as an impudent common writer he “voiced in after years,” Turner says (p. 141). But in her version of literary history some poetic justice emerges from this situation: Munday “lived long enough to see Middleton buried at Newington Butts in July, 1627, six months after The Triumphs of Health and Prosperity, and to see Mrs. Middleton petitioning the city for funds to sustain her during her final year of life” (p. 168). Middleton may have scoffed at Munday, but Munday outlived him and had the last laugh. We have now encountered a rather strange scholarly approach; one might call it ghoulish. Instead of investigating the scholarly problems, the writer personalizes the matter in favor of her writer, who just happened to live longer than Middleton. What would Turner's argument be had Munday not lived that long?

The first attempt to interpret Middleton's civic pageants as a group came in R. C. Bald's mid-1930s article. Of The Triumphs of Truth Bald writes: Middleton “had the assistance of his more experienced rival, Anthony Munday, of whom he speaks so disparagingly in his descriptions of the pageants.”¹³ He suggests that “this particular partnership does not seem to have been a happy one” (p. 73). Bald leaves the matter rather open-ended, as if several pageant texts contain incriminating and insulting remarks about Munday. He does not pause to examine what Middleton actually says. As a defense of Middleton's artistic accomplishment in pageants, Bald's article leaves much to be desired. In fact, he writes at one point: “Any serious artistic achievement in these shows was prevented not merely by the prescribed themes but by the fact that it was impossible to regard the show as a whole” (p. 74). I believe that Bald has adopted the wrong critical stance and therefore has pursued the wrong critical questions: clearly he embraces some concept of unity as the all-important one. That raises the wrong expectations for these pageants. He concludes by quoting a brief passage from a song sung by the Seasons in the indoor Honourable Entertainments: “Here, and here alone, in the course of his City employments did Middleton breathe the spirit of poetry into his work” (p. 78). Turner hits Middleton over the head with his presumed education, and now Bald can find virtually nothing good to say about the pageants, indeed finding only one small moment of memorable poetry. No wonder it has been difficult to sort out the Middleton-Munday relationship.

In the magnificent Malone Society Collections III, which provides many pertinent records from the London guilds, the editors, D. J. Gordon and Jean Robertson, comment in the Introduction: “In [Middleton's] printed description of the Show for 1613 he took the opportunity to disparage Munday.”¹⁴ In the headnote for the guild records for 1619, they indicate that the Skinners' records show that “Anthony Munday, whom Middleton speaks slightingly of in his pageant … also submitted a plot for the pageant” (p. 99). Robertson continues in this vein in her 1956 article in which she mentions the rivalry among pageant dramatists: “On peut citer, notamment, les attaques délibérées de Dekker et de Middleton contre Munday, qui fournissait bien d'autres choses que les textes de ses spectacles.”¹⁵ She cites specifically Triumphs of Truth as evidence of Middleton's antipathy towards Munday, noting Middleton's “ferveur qu'il réservait pour cette occasion” (p. 272) and its target Munday. Robertson quotes the notorious passage that includes the reference to Black Monday. Also in 1956 in an exchange of letters in TLS Peter Phialas focused on Love and Antiquity, which, he argues, provides another instance of the keen competition between Middleton and Munday. Phialas adds: “That Middleton resented the competition is made clear by his disparaging allusion in the opening of his pageant … a glance aimed at Munday, who had written the pageant for the preceding year.”¹⁶

Two critical studies of Middleton carry on the by now well-established tradition: only a few verbs and adjectives change to protect the “originality” of the scholars' contributions. Richard Hindry Barker's Thomas Middleton (1958) warms to the task, claiming that Middleton “was anxious to outdo one of his predecessors, Anthony Mundy” and therefore on the 1613 title page and in the first paragraph of the text “he goes out of his way to sneer at Munday's achievements.”¹⁷ Barker expresses his incredulity that at the end of Truth Middleton cites the contributions of three people, including Munday “(of all people!)” (p. 18). David Holmes discusses Middleton's pageants not at all, although intending to write about Middleton's “art.” Instead, we find in Appendix C a reference to the text of Truth, identifying the “common writer” as “Anthony Munday.”¹⁸ Holmes does provide an unusual analysis: “The facetious context of this rather pointed innuendo keeps it outside the realm of spleen.” Such disregard for Munday makes Holmes wonder how Middleton could have later sought the “assistance of a man of Rowley's patently modest gifts.” I smell a non sequitur.

Writing in 1981, M. C. Bradbrook explores the politics of pageantry. Bradbrook writes about Middleton and Munday: “Old Anthony Munday, who had been attacked by Middleton, although he had had some share in the Triumph of 1613, came back a last time for the Fishmongers' Triumph of 1615.”¹⁹ Several problems arise in this statement, starting with the by now familiar one of Middleton's attack on Munday in 1613. But further, Bradbrook has confused Munday's 1616 pageant, which he wrote for the Fishmongers, with his 1615 show; in her description she clearly intends the 1616 entertainment. And, of course, Munday wrote additional shows in 1618 and 1623. In commenting on Middleton's avoiding an attack on the rebellious poor in his writing, Gail Kern Paster draws a distinction between this attitude and that of “his rival Anthony Munday.”²⁰

Smugness has no place in this saga of scholarly dereliction. These scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lack only me to help swell their ranks. I now know of my own guilt. In my book on English civic pageantry I write of the 1613 pageant that Middleton “disparages [Munday] in his text.”²¹ And I add for the 1619 pageant: “Middleton pauses long enough in the opening sentences of this text to hurl a few barbs at his rival Munday” (p. 189). In my 1985 edition of Munday's pageants, I include this headnote for his The Triumphs of the Golden Fleece (1623): “The rivals [Middleton and Munday] meet again as uneasy companions.”²² At least I now understand why and how I came to such views: mainly I inherited them uncritically.

The sections on Munday and Middleton in the appropriate volumes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography perpetuate some of the problems. Philip Ayres, writing about Munday's pageant career, says: “After 1616, to Munday's disappointment, Thomas Middleton, his one-time collaborator in play writing, replaced him as the favored author of the pageants, and Munday returned to reediting romances.”²³ I know of no evidence that suggests that Munday felt disappointment, and in fact he wrote two more pageants after 1616. T. H. Howard-Hill writes: “The most experienced pageant master of the Jacobean era was Anthony Munday, whose virtual monopoly Middleton interrupted.”²⁴ Of the entertainments in 1616, Howard-Hill says that “the rival dramatists were obliged to work together.” But in that year Middleton wrote the pageant for the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales, and Munday wrote the Lord Mayor's Show, Chrysanaleia. They did not exactly work together, although the two pageants shared at least a barge between them. Howard-Hill says that the two wrote the 1621 pageant together, but the evidence remains less than clear on that. In any event, by 1987 the sense of rivalry between Middleton and Munday runs no risk of dying out; only the language to describe it has calmed a bit.

But another side of this story exists: professional cooperation between Middleton and Munday. The first entry in Henslowe's Diary for Middleton shows him as collaborator with Munday, Drayton, and Webster in writing Caesar's Fall, payment being made in May 1602.²⁵ The first payment to Munday dates back to 22 December 1597, when Henslowe paid him and Drayton for Mother Redcap. At the least Middleton and Munday knew each other as fellow playwrights in Henslowe's stable of writers. Munday had by 1602 already established himself as a writer of plays, translator of prose romances (French and Spanish), author of prose fiction and ballads, and had begun writing pageants, producing the Lord Mayor's Show of 1602 (no text survives). As Philip Ayres claims: “Few Elizabethan and Jacobean authors produced as varied a canon as did Anthony Munday.”²⁶ He collaborated on plays for Henslowe with Chettle, Drayton, Dekker, Webster, and Middleton.

We pick up the trail of Middleton and Munday next in 1613 in Middleton's first Lord Mayor's Show, The Triumphs of Truth, the very one in which Middleton presumably disparages Munday. At the end of the pageant text Middleton singles out for praise the contributions of Humphrey Nichols, John Grinkin, and Munday. Of the latter he writes: “and those furnished with apparel and porters by Anthony Munday, gentleman” (pp. 770-1). If we look at the Grocers' records, the sponsoring guild, we gain further evidence of Munday's involvement in this pageant. In early February 161 3, Munday's name crops up as the guild begins exceptionally early planning. A committee intended to consider also “the Device or project in writing set down by Mr Munday and offered to be read to this Court concerning matter of triumph against that time” (i.e., the time of the pageant, 29 October, the mayoral inaugural day).²⁷ Those last words may strike us as, unintentionally, suggesting the eventual title for the pageant. Therefore, by early February, Munday had already submitted some kind of proposal for the show. The Grocers, who had not since 1598 presented a pageant for one of their members elected to become mayor, seem particularly eager as they anticipate in late September the election of their member and namesake of the dramatist, Sir Thomas Middleton.

Grocers' records of April 1614 reveal the expenditures for this the most expensive mayoral pageant of the Stuart era. Middleton received £4 “for the ordering overseeing and writing of the whole Device and also for the apparelling the personage in the Pageant” (p. 87). Munday, on the other hand, received £149 “for the device of the Pageant and other shows, and for the apparelling and finding of all the personages in the said shows (excepting the Pageant) and also for the Portage and Carriage both by land and by water” (p. 87). From Munday's payment he obviously had to make his own expenditures for apparel and transportation; thus, we cannot determine precisely what he netted for his services. John Grinkin, the principal artificer or craftsman who built the pageant structures, received a payment of £310, from which he would have been expected to pay for a wide range of materials.

In light of the guild records and Middleton's explicit citation of Munday in the text, it becomes difficult to accept the idea that Middleton's references to the “impudent common writer” must refer to Munday. If anything, it might have been Munday who felt slighted, given his early involvement in planning the pageant but the guild's eventual choice of Middleton to become the author of the show. All evidence points therefore in the direction of cooperation between the two dramatists. Guild records confirm more fully than do pageant texts that such entertainments came into existence only as the result of extensive collaboration among appropriate committees of the guild, playwrights, and artisans. Munday's name, for example, crops up in a number of records even though his work may or may not be recorded in the text. Indeed, Munday is the only playwright to be involved in the production of someone else's Lord Mayor's Show in the Stuart period.

The year 1616 provided a new means of such cooperation, a unique blending of planning for a Lord Mayor's show and the pageant entertainment for the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales. The Fishmongers commissioned Munday to write the mayoral show, which he entitled Chrysanaleia, performed on the usual 29 October. Middleton wrote Civitatis Amor as the pageant entertainment that greeted Charles on the Thames, first at Chelsea and then at Whitehall. Because the prince's installation would take place just a few days later, the Corporation of London summoned the appropriate members of the Fishmongers to discuss the possibility of sharing some materials. The City of London intended to confer “with them how their pageant and other devices may be altered and used for show at the meeting of the prince aforesaid, and for Chambers to be provided, and placed against that day and take consideration of some speeches to be made and then acted to the Prince.”²⁸ Records of the Fishmongers reveal that the master of the king's barges appealed to the company for payment of barges, used both for the Lord Mayor's Show and for the prince's pageant. Doubtless the close proximity of time for the two events (itself rare) and the city's involvement with both led to this cooperation.

For the Grocers in 1617 Middleton wrote The Triumphs of Honour and Industry, and for the Skinners in 1619, The Triumphs of Love and Antiquity. Munday's name appears in the appropriate guild records for both pageants. Middleton received £282 for writing the 1617 show, which included expenditures for all the materials and transportation. We also find this record: “Paid and given in benevolence to Anthony Munday gentleman for his pains in drawing a project for this business, which was offered to the Committees £5” (Collections III, p. 93). For similar reasons Thomas Dekker received a payment of £4. Such payments underscore the competitive nature of these entertainments. The records for the Skinners in 1619 include the following item: “Lastly Anthony Munday, Thomas Middleton and Richard Grimston poets, all showed to the table their several plots for devices for the shows and pageant against Simon and Judes tide and each desired to serve the Company” (p. 99). Obviously, the guild eventually chose Middleton—all the more reason to question the assumption that in his 1619 text Middleton somehow attacks Munday. Presumably one could make just as strong a case that he impugns the artistic merit of Dekker or Grimston. No one has made such an argument.

In 1621 Middleton, Munday, and Garret Christmas received a payment of £140 from the Drapers for the pageant, The Sun in Aries. Because Munday's name appears in the group, T. H. Howard-Hill suggests that Middleton and Munday wrote the show together, apparently basing this assumption on the guild records. But as we see, three names appear together without specifying who did what. No other evidence exists to give Munday credit for helping write the pageant. But in 1623 Munday clearly does write part of the pageant, the entertainment on the Thames, which he entitled The Triumphs of the Golden Fleece. Munday got paid £35 for “an Argoe,” according to the Drapers' records. The collaboration in 1623 takes a rather different turn, resulting—uniquely—in two different texts for the mayoral pageant: Munday's and Middleton's The Triumphs of Integrity. At the opening of his text Middleton refers to the show on the river, describing it as “a proper and significant masterpiece of triumph called the Imperial Canopy, being the ancient arms of the company, an invention neither old nor enforced” (lines 15-8). Surely these rather glowing terms belie the supposed antipathy that Middleton felt for Munday. Munday's last pageant effort gets an appropriate send-off.

I know of no reference to Middleton in Munday's writing, but he does reproduce a speech written by Middleton for the New River Entertainment in 1613. The account of the event and the speech appear in the 1618 edition of Stow's Survey of London, which Munday revised. In fact, Munday has gone to some trouble to include this material, as evidenced by the bibliographical note at the bottom of the first page: “Let this half sheet be plac'd between Folio 20. and 21.”²⁹ Munday provides apparent first-hand information about the New River project, which Sir Hugh Myddleton, brother of the new Lord Mayor, completed in 1613, successfully bringing a new supply of water from Hertfordshire to Islington, a nearly forty-mile canal that took several years to complete. Munday insists: “I myself … did divers times ride to see it, and diligently observed, that admirable Art, pains and industry were bestowed for the passage of it” (sig. *1v). He then records the entertainment on Michaelmas Day (29 September) that celebrated the completion of the water project and for which Thomas Middleton wrote the pageant. Munday describes the troop of laborers who represent all those who had worked on this difficult project. Finally he offers the speech given on that occasion at the cistern in Islington, according, Munday writes, “as it was delivered to me” (sig. *2). With only a couple of minor variations he reprints the speech as found in Middleton's text, itself forming part of the expanded version of The Triumphs of Truth. By devoting four pages to this effort, Munday clearly wants to call attention to this event and Middleton's pageant, even though he does not cite Middleton by name; perhaps that seemed unnecessary. In any case one can argue that Munday pays Middleton the supreme compliment of reproducing the only speech given in the entertainment. Such a response again raises serious question about some bitter rivalry between these two writers. In light of this 1618 edition of Stow's Survey, why would Middleton in his next pageant (1619) allegedly attack Munday? I argue that he did not.

Surely part of the problem of interpreting the relationship of Middleton and Munday emerges from our failure to understand or acknowledge the nature of collaboration in Renaissance drama. Jeffrey Masten has written astutely on this subject, particularly with regard to Beaumont and Fletcher.³⁰ Masten reminds us: “Collaborative dramatic texts from this period thus strikingly denaturalize the author-text-reader continuum assumed in later methodologies of interpretation” (p. 338). Stephen Orgel had earlier asserted that “most literature in the period, and virtually all theatrical literature, must be seen as basically collaborative in nature.”³¹ Collaboration obviously takes many forms, most clear-cut, for example, when we observe the situation in 1623 in which Middleton and Munday each produce a separate text. Other examples remain more uncertain. But surely if Munday provides apparel for the actors and arranges transportation, as he did in 1613, he has collaborated with Middleton in producing, “writing,” The Triumphs of Truth. If collaboration, then we need not go to inordinate lengths to posit an adversarial relationship, some petulant quarrel for which evidence simply does not exist.

Indeed, we can often know more about collaboration in the pageants than in the public theater because extant guild or city records provide information. Most discussions of rivalry among dramatists derive from a text-centered interpretation. Nineteenth-century scholars either did not know of this additional information, or they chose to ignore it, preferring their own theories of jealousy, ill will, virulent attack, sneering, and disparaging comments. Ultimately reductive, such an approach and ideology rendered impossible any attempt to understand collaboration. On the subject of the Middleton-Munday rivalry twentieth-century scholars have chosen to imitate rather than investigate. We stand on the verge of parody.

To redeem ourselves we must regularly and faithfully question the received knowledge passed to us from earlier scholars. Second, we need to underscore the idea and practice of collaboration, made particularly manifest in pageant texts and the accompanying evidence from guild records. Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass have concluded: “We need, in other words, to rethink Shakespeare in relation to our new knowledge of collaborative writing, collaborative printing, and the historical contingencies of textual production.”³² Third, we might shift the meaning of “rivalry” so that it does not always mean attack or quarrel. James Shapiro has shown how this can profitably be done as he redefines the rivalry among Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare to refer to their struggles with “influence.”³³

Middleton's sneering at his hapless rival Munday survives as a fiction that itself grows out of a romantic cult of the proprietary single author, a triumph of the individual author who dismisses, erases competitors. But the fact of collaboration forces us to think differently, even as we understand Shapiro's paradox: “the very frequency of collaboration in the public theater appears to have heightened sensitivity to the distinctive voices of individual dramatists” (p. 8). Clearly scholars writing about the theater have to negotiate this paradox, hearing the distinctive voices yet hearing the surrounding ones as well.

If Middleton seems not to have had Munday explicitly in mind in the 1613 text, if no other evidence exists of a quarrel between the two, if they in fact collaborated on this pageant and several others, and if Munday conspicuously incorporates a Middleton pageant text into his 1618 revision of Stow's Survey, then I think we can safely surrender the nineteenth-century myth of their unpleasant rivalry—just in time for the twenty-first century.

Notes

1. All quotations from Middleton will be from my edition of his civic pageants to be included in The Complete Works of Thomas Middleton, gen. ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996). I cite the line numbers from this edition.

2. Ben Jonson, The Works of Ben Jonson, 9 vols., ed. William Gifford (London, 1816), 6:325 n.

3. John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, 4 vols. (London, 1828), 2:681 n.

4. J. Payne Collier, ed., The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington (London, 1828), p. 5.

5. The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. Alexander Dyce, 5 vols. (London, 1840), 5:220 n.

6. Frederick W. Fairholt, Lord Mayors' Pageants (London: Percy Society, 1843), pt. 1, p. 32.

7. Thomas Middleton, The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A. H. Bullen, 8 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1886), 7:234 n.

8. Josiah H. Penniman, The War of the Theatres (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1897); and Roscoe Addison Small, The Stage-Quarrel between Ben Jonson and the So-Called Poetasters (Breslau: Marcus, 1899).

9. Frederick Gard Fleay, A Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama 1559-1642, 2 vols. (London: Reeves and Turner, 1891), 2:97.

10. George Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London (London: Methuen, 1908), pp. 279, 280.

11. Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline, 2 vols. (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1918-20), 2:33 n. 1.

12. Celeste Turner [Wright], Anthony Mundy: An Elizabethan Man of Letters (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press; London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1928), p. 159.

13. R. C. Bald, “Middleton's Civic Employments,” MP 31 (August 1933): 65-78, 72.

14. Collections III: A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London 1485-1640, ed. D. J. Gordon and Jean Robertson (Oxford: Malone Society, 1954), p. xxxv.

15. Jean Robertson, “Rapports du Poète et de l'artiste dans la préparation des cortèges du Lord Maire (Londres 1553-1640),” in Les Fêtes de la Renaissance, ed. Jean Jacquot, 3 vols. (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1956), 1:272.

16. Peter G. Phialas, “Middleton and Mundy,” letter to TLS, 23 November 1956, p. 697.

17. Richard Hindry Barker, Thomas Middleton (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), p. 15.

18. David M. Holmes, The Art of Thomas Middleton: A Critical Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), p. 216.

19. M. C. Bradbrook, “The Politics of Pageantry: Social Implications in Jacobean London,” in Poetry and Drama 1570-1700: Essays in Honour of Harold F. Brooks, ed. Antony Coleman and Antony Hammond (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 70.

20. Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1985), p. 149.

21. David M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry 1558-1642 (London: Arnold; Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1971), p. 179.

22. Pageants and Entertainments of Anthony Munday: A Critical Edition, ed. David M. Bergeron (New York: Garland, 1985), p. 142.

23. Philip J. Ayres, “Anthony Munday,” Elizabethan Dramatists, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 62 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1987), pp. 232-41, 241.

24. T. H. Howard-Hill, “Thomas Middleton,” in Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 58 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1987), pp. 196-222, 211.

25. Henslowe's Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), p. 201.

26. Dictionary of Literary Biography, 62:236.

27. Malone Society, Collections III, p. 86. All entries are slightly modernized.

28. Corporation of London, Repertory, XXXII, fol. 372.

29. John Stow, Survey of London (London, 1618), sig. *1.

30. Jeffrey A. Masten, “Beaumont and/or Fletcher: Collaboration and the Interpretation of Renaissance Drama,” ELH 59 (1992): 337-56, 338.

31. Stephen Orgel, “What Is a Text?” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 24 (1981): 3-6, 6. Orgel depends in part on G. E. Bentley's The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time, 1590-1642 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971). See especially Bentley's chap. 8, “Collaboration,” pp. 197-234.

32. Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” SQ 44 (1993): 255-83, 279.

33. James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991). Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text.