Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson was, after Shakespeare, the most influential dramatist of the Jacobean stage, known for satirical comedies of humours including Volpone, The Alchemist and Epicoene, or The Silent Woman. Self-educated beyond a grammar-school start at Westminster, he worked as a bricklayer and a soldier before turning to the theatre, and killed a fellow actor in a duel in 1598, escaping hanging by pleading benefit of clergy. He wrote court masques for James I and became the first English poet to hold something like an informal laureateship. He was buried standing upright in Westminster Abbey.