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Ironically, although "William Shakespeare" is by far the better-known name today, we know a great deal more about the life of his fellow Elizabethan dramatist Ben Jonson. Our knowledge of his personal life comes mainly from personal conversations conducted between the playwright and William Drummond, the Laird of Hawthornden, in 1619, which Drummond later wrote down. But it also reflects the fact that whereas Shakespeare chose solely to express himself through his plays and poems, Jonson was more of a public figure, prone to dramatic commentary on literature and philosophy, highly personalized poems (as opposed to the mystery of Shakespeare's sonnet cycle), as well as heavy involvement in the royal entertainments of both King James I and Charles I. In his lifetime, he was more honored than Shakespeare and served as an advisor to young poets until the time of his death on August 16, 1637, at the age of sixty- five.
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Despite this popularity, the facts surrounding Jonson's birth remain, for the most part, obscure. Based on evidence gathered later in his life, historians believe his birth date to be June 11, 1572, a month after his biological father's death. His birthplace and the names of his parents remain unknown. What is known is that he grew up in the village of Charing Cross, which was then a mile outside the walled City of London. Charing was home both to the townhouses of courtiers (nobles who attended at the court of Queen Elizabeth) as well as masses of the urban poor, living in close proximity. Though Jonson's family was by no means wealthy, it also was not extremely poor, since the man usually identified as Jonson's stepfather, Robert Brett, was a moderately prosperous bricklayer. As David Riggs notes, Jonson was "surrounded by extremes of poverty and wealth from the earliest years of his life."

A "friend," whose name is lost to history, paid for Jonson to attend Westminster school, one of the elite schools of Elizabethan England,...