Ben Jonson
English playwright, poet, and actor (1572-1637) · United Kingdom · Writers · Died at 65
Ben Jonson is read about 519 times a day, in 63 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 23 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 398 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?The playwright who stood second only to Shakespeare in the Jacobean theatre - and invented the comedy of humours, a form that mapped character to bodily fluid and mined human obsession for satire sharp enough to cut through four centuries.
Also in Deutsch
Photos 6
Westminster School master William Camden cultivated the artistic genius of Ben Jonson.
The Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden was friend and confidant to Jonson.
Title page of The Workes of Beniamin Ionson (1616), the first folio publication that included stage plays
The Ben Jonson Memorial, in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey
A 19th-century engraving illustrating Thomas Fuller's story of Shakespeare and Jonson debating at the Mermaid TavernAwards
In their orbit
About this person
Born around 11 June 1572, Jonson came up through classical education and emerged as a poet, actor, and the most formidable stage satirist of the English Renaissance. Every Man in His Humour arrived in 1598, then Volpone around 1606, The Alchemist in 1610, Bartholomew Fair in 1614 - each a machine for exposing greed, delusion, and the appetites that warp men into types. He courted controversy on every front, personal and political, artistic and intellectual, and his breadth of influence over the playwrights and poets of the Jacobean and Caroline eras had no rival. He died 18 August 1637, leaving English comedy rewired and a body of lyric and epigrammatic poetry that held its own against the age.
Writers from the United Kingdom 6
Fame.am measures public visibility signals. It does not measure human value, talent, morality, or credibility.