Ben Jonson is the most colourful and explosive character among the tribe of Elizabethan- Jacobean writers few of whom were self- effacing. Aggressively self- promoting, arrogantly confident in his view of the art of writing for the stage and his contribution to it, his personal life was as lively, sometimes as tempestuous as his public stage works and they (as opposed to his poems and masques) are full of snarling satire and mockery. A combative man, a combative writer, he crusaded to establish a morally earnest theatre and elevate it to artistic respectability. To the moralist and satirist railing is the natural mode. To rail is to criticize, protest or complain in a vehement manner. Such was very much the manner of Jonson. Though he became superficially more genial in his court masques, his works for Blackfriars or The Globe retained to the end his savage mocking tone.

A number of biographical factors may have produced the growling negativity in his works. Jonson claimed descent from a gentry family, the Johnstones, from Annandale in the Scottish Borders. The religious hatreds of the time touched the family and had lasting effects. His father, a Church of England minister, imprisoned during the brief reign of Catholic Mary Tudor, had forfeited the family estate. Jonson believed this caused the family's decline in fortunes. His father died a month or two before the playwright was born in 1572. How that loss, plus the depressed status of the family, might have affected him in later life is impossible to say, but these events may have been a source of aggression, a sense of being deprived, and explain why he strove so hard to get back at the world and punish it through extreme and bitter criticism. Jonson had a deep need to succeed, to triumph over what he saw as his disadvantages and outdo those who had had privilege on their side. Life for widows (unless already rich) was difficult in those times. His mother was living in the parish of Charing Cross (between the walled City of London and Westminster, which were separate locations in those days) at the west end of the Strand.