Excerpt from Poetaster: And Satiromastix
Ben Jonson was born, the son of a clergyman, in 1573, at Westminster. A month before his birth his father died and left the family in poverty. His mother then married a bricklayer, and young Jonson was "poorly brought up." He first went to school in the Church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and later, with the aid of William Camden, then an usher, to Westminster School. He probably went to neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but was afterwards given, "by their favour not his studie," a degree from each. He went as a youth to Flanders and joined the English troops in the wars of William the Silent with Spain. Here he slew in single combat one of the enemy and took spolia opima from him. He returned without a penny to London about 1592. and married. He was not happy with his wife, whom he considered "a shrew yet honest."
Jonson began to write for the stage about 1595. In 1597 he appears, from the entry in Henslowe, to have been both a player and a playwright to the Admiral's men; in 1599 he was probably writing a tragedy for them. In the same year he fought a duel with Gabriel Spenser, a fellow actor, and killed him. He was arrested, tried, convicted, but escaped the gallows through the benefit of clergy. While in prison he embraced the Catholic faith, but returned twelve years later to the Church of England. The occurrence with Spenser caused a break in Jonson's relations with the Admiral's Company, and he offered the rival company, The Lord Chamberlain's Servants, his comedy, Every Man in His Humour. It was accepted and produced with great success at The Curtain in 1598, Shakespeare taking a part. This play put him securely in the first rank of dramatic writers. To the year 1598, too, after Every Man in His Humour to which it alludes, belongs in its present form The Case is Altered.
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