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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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?”