William Drummond of Hawthornden, Jonson told how “in his service in the Low Countries he had, in the face of both the camps, killed an enemy, and taken ‘opima spolia’ from him;” and how “since his coming to England, being appealed to the fields, he had killed his adversary which had hurt him in the arm and whose sword was ten inches longer than his.”  Jonson’s reach may have made up for the lack of his sword; certainly his prowess lost nothing in the telling.  Obviously Jonson was brave, combative, and not averse to talking of himself and his doings.

In 1592, Jonson returned from abroad penniless.  Soon after he married, almost as early and quite as imprudently as Shakespeare.  He told Drummond curtly that “his wife was a shrew, yet honest”; for some years he lived apart from her in the household of Lord Albany.  Yet two touching epitaphs among Jonson’s ‘Epigrams’, “On my first daughter,” and “On my first son,” attest the warmth of the poet’s family affections.  The daughter died in infancy, the son of the plague; another son grew up to manhood little credit to his father whom he survived.  We know nothing beyond this of Jonson’s domestic life.

How soon Jonson drifted into what we now call grandly “the theatrical profession” we do not know.  In 1593 Marlowe made his tragic exit from life, and Greene, Shakespeare’s other rival on the popular stage, had preceded Marlowe in an equally miserable death the year before.  Shakespeare already had the running to himself.  Jonson appears first in the employment of Philip Henslowe, the exploiter of several troupes of players, manager, and father-in-law of the famous actor, Edward Alleyn.  From entries in ’Henslowe’s Diary’, a species of theatrical account book which has been handed down to us, we know that Jonson was connected with the Admiral’s men; for he borrowed £4 of Henslowe, July 28, 1597, paying back 3s. 9d. on the same day on account of his “share” (in what is not altogether clear); while later, on December 3, of the same year, Henslowe advanced 20s. to him “upon a book which he showed the plot unto the company which he promised to deliver unto the company at Christmas next.”  In the next August Jonson was in collaboration with Chettle and Porter in a play called “Hot Anger Soon Cold.”  All this points to an association with Henslowe of some duration, as no mere tyro would be thus paid in advance upon mere promise.  From allusions in Dekker’s play, “Satiromastix,” it appears that Jonson, like Shakespeare, began life as an actor, and that he “ambled in a leather pitch by a play-wagon” taking at one time the part of Hieronimo in Kyd’s famous play, “The Spanish Tragedy.”  By the beginning of 1598, Jonson, though still in needy circumstances, had begun to receive recognition.  Francis Meres—­well known for his “Comparative Discourse of our English Poets with the Greek, Latin, and Italian Poets,” printed in 1598, and for his mention therein of a dozen plays of Shakespeare by title —­accords