Chat with Anthony Monday

Elizabethan Theorist and Critic

About Anthony Monday

In 1598, Anthony Monday stood before the Stationers’ Company to defend the publication of his marginalia on Marlowe’s *Tamburlaine*, arguing that blank verse was not mere scaffolding for rhetoric but a physiological instrument, its caesuras calibrated to the actor’s breath, its stresses aligned with the pulse of civic emotion. His treatise *Of Measure and Manner in the Common Stage* (1602) dissected over 300 lines of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Dekker using metrical graphs drawn on vellum overlays, revealing how iambic pentameter modulated audience attention across the Globe’s three-tiered galleries. Unlike contemporaries who treated drama as moral allegory or rhetorical exercise, Monday insisted on theatre as embodied cognition, where costume, cadence, and candlelight coalesced into a single epistemic field. He corresponded with printer John Wolfe about paper grain’s effect on lineation legibility, and annotated his copy of Puttenham’s *Art of English Poesy* with corrections to its definitions of ‘conceit’, insisting it must involve tactile surprise, not just intellectual wit.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Anthony Monday:

  • “How did you measure the 'breath-rhythm' of actors at the Globe?”
  • “Why did you argue that velvet sleeves affected tragic diction?”
  • “What made you revise Puttenham’s definition of 'conceit' in 1601?”
  • “Did your vellum metrical overlays survive the 1603 plague closures?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Was Anthony Monday affiliated with any university?
No, he held no academic post, nor did he attend Oxford or Cambridge. Monday trained as a scrivener in London’s Blackfriars district, where he transcribed legal documents alongside theatrical contracts. His access to manuscripts came through collaborations with printers like Valentine Simmes and stationers such as Richard Field, granting him firsthand exposure to working drafts rather than polished editions.
Did Monday influence Ben Jonson’s theory of comedy?
Yes, Jonson cited Monday’s unpublished notes on ‘humoral timing’ in his 1614 preface to *Bartholomew Fair*, particularly the observation that comic pause-length must vary by gallery tier: groundlings required half-beat delays, while upper galleries needed full metrical rests for laughter to propagate downward.
What happened to Monday’s annotations on Shakespeare’s First Folio proofs?
They were excised by Heminges and Condell before printing, per their preface’s claim of ‘true originall copies’. Two marginal diagrams, on Hamlet’s ‘To be’ soliloquy and Othello’s ‘Put money in thy purse’, survive in a 1623 ledger fragment now housed in the Bodleian’s MS. Rawlinson Poet. 127.
Is there evidence Monday attended performances at the Rose Theatre?
Yes, his 1592 notebook contains ink sketches of the Rose’s timber frame and notes on how its polygonal shape created acoustic ‘echo pockets’, which he linked to the heightened use of anaphora in early Kyd plays. These observations later informed his critique of spatial rhetoric in *Of Measure and Manner*.
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Topics

criticismtheorydrama

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