Ben Jonson wrote plays before he wrote poems and laid bricks before he did either. These activities - to which we should add his still later writing of court masques and entertainments - represent steps in a difficult but extraordinarily successful climb Jonson made up the steep face of fortune's hill, a climb that marked everything he wrote.

According to his own account, Jonson was born the posthumous son of an English clergyman, the grandson of 'a gentleman' who had served King Henry VIII. But this gentle lineage was obscured by his mother's marriage to a London bricklayer, whose craft Jonson was 'put to' at the age of sixteen: a humiliation he could, as he later said, 'not endure'. Military service in the Low Countries offered a first escape from bricklaying; acting and writing plays provided a second. The rapid success Jonson achieved as a playwright did not, however, satisfy his ambition — nor could it. The audience for plays was predominantly common and unlearned; actors were mere artisans; playwrights were a rag-tag mix of would-be gentlemen and players. Writing poems and circulating them through the private network of manuscript transmission opened the way to more elevated company. Among Jonson's earliest datable poems are an epitaph on Margaret Radcliffe (a maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth), an ode to James, Earl of Desmond, a 'proludium' and 'epode' to Sir John Salusbury, an ode to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and a verse epistle to Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland — all figures of considerable social distinction. But Jonson did not stop there. The production of masques and entertainments carried him still higher, to the royal summit of power and prestige. He wrote masques and entertainments directly for the king, who was their chief spectator; they were performed by the queen, the princes, and the leading aristocratic courtiers.