posthumous child, born 1573, and his mother
married again) was a bricklayer, or that he went to Westminster School; it
seems much more dubious whether he had any claim to anything but an
honorary degree from either university, though he received that from both.
Probably he worked at bricklaying, though the taunts of his rivals would,
in face of the undoubted fact of his stepfather's profession, by no means
suffice to prove it. Certainly he went through the chequered existence of
so many Elizabethan men of letters; was a soldier in Flanders, an actor, a
duellist (killing his man, and escaping consequences only by benefit of
clergy), a convert to Romanism, a "revert" to the Anglican Church, a
married man, a dramatist. The great play of _Every Man in his Humour_,
afterwards very much altered, was perhaps acted first at the Rose Theatre
in 1596, and it established Jonson's reputation, though there is no
reasonable doubt that he had written other things. His complicated
associations and quarrels with Dekker, Marston, Chapman, and others, have
occupied the time of a considerable number of persons; they lie quite
beyond our subject, and it may be observed without presumption that their
direct connection, even with the literary work (_The Poetaster_,
_Satiromastix_, and the rest) which is usually linked to them, will be
better established when critics have left off being uncertain whether _A_
was _B_, or _B_, _C_. Even the most famous story of all (the disgrace of
Jonson with others for _Eastward Ho!_ as a libel against the Scots, for
which he was imprisoned, and, being threatened with mutilation, was by his
Roman mother supplied with poison), though told by himself, does not rest
on any external evidence. What is certain is that Jonson was in great and
greater request, both as a writer of masks and other _divertissements_ for
the Court, and as a head and chief of literary conviviality at the
"Mermaid," and other famous taverns. Here, as he grew older, there grew up
round him that "Tribe of Ben," or admiring clique of young literary men,
which included almost all the most remarkable poets, except Milton, of the
late Jacobean and early Caroline period, and which helped to spread his
fame for at least two generations, and (by Waller's influence on
Saint-Evremond) to make him the first English man of letters who was
introduced by a great critic of the Continent to continental attention as a
worker in the English vernacular. At last h