Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson was a bricklayer’s stepson who fought in the Low Countries, killed an actor in a duel and escaped hanging by pleading benefit of clergy, and became the most learned dramatist of his age and its first Poet Laureate in all but name. The Alchemist of 1610, in which three rogues run a con from a plague-emptied London house, is the tightest comedy in English; Volpone and Bartholomew Fair stand beside it. He published his own works in folio, which no playwright had done, wrote masques for the court, held court himself at the Mermaid, and wrote the poem that prefaces Shakespeare’s Folio. He is buried standing up in Westminster Abbey.