Bricklayer’s stepson became Jacobean comedy’s satirist-in-chief
Ben Jonson (c. 1572–1637) popularized the comedy of humours and minted Volpone and Every Man in His Humour while arguing with half of literary London. Classically trained yet apprenticed to a bricklayer stepfather, he spanned stage, poem, and feud.
Jonson was born in or near London in June 1572, a month after the death of his father, a Protestant who had been jailed and stripped of property under Queen Mary. Two years later his mother married a master bricklayer. A family friend paid for Westminster School, where the historian William Camden taught him and became a lifelong friend. He lasted only a month at St John’s College, Cambridge, before being pulled back into the building trade, then volunteered for the English regiments in Flanders, where he said he killed an enemy soldier in single combat.
Back in London he acted, playing Hieronimo in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, and by 1597 was writing for the producer Philip Henslowe. That year The Isle of Dogs, co-written with Thomas Nashe, landed him in the Marshalsea. In 1598 he killed the actor Gabriel Spenser in a duel, won leniency by reciting the neck-verse, and was branded on the thumb; in prison he became a Catholic. Every Man in His Humour, with Shakespeare in the cast, made his name the same year.
Feuds followed. Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster mocked John Marston and Thomas Dekker, who answered with Satiromastix, before the War of the Theatres ended in truce. Eastward Ho! jailed him again in 1605 for jokes about Scots, and weeks later he dined with most of the Gunpowder plotters, then told Robert Cecil what he knew.
Under James I he wrote about two dozen court masques, often clashing with the designer Inigo Jones. He claimed his plays had earned him under £200 in total, but a royal pension of 100 marks in 1616 led some to call him England’s first poet laureate. That year he also published a folio of his works. He died on 18 August 1637.
Source: Ben Jonson
