SOURCE: Wolf, William D. “Anthony Munday as Popular Artist.” Journal of Popular Culture 13, no. 4 (spring 1980): 659-62.

In the essay below, Wolf discusses The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington as a work of mass entertainment.

Studying the “high art” of the English Renaissance through popular works is hardly a new direction, since sociological, historical and biographical approaches have provided a good start.¹ Yet these are too often audience- rather than text-oriented; studying the popular arts requires and yields an even stricter historicism, and a sense of why and how previously Apocryphal mass culture (as Shakespeare's plays undoubtedly were) becomes part of the secular Testament. The critic functions as an anthropologist, a literary-cultural geologist, so to speak, in addition to being an exegete, sociologist, historian, biographer, editor and even bibliographer of his own and others' commentaries.

Anthony Munday's career and works provide a particularly copious and varied core sample...