You, that have so graced monsters, may like men - Every Man in His Humour

Ben Jonson was, like Shakespeare, an actor-playwright from a modest background. He had a better education, of which he was enormously vain, and had a Horatian, satirical temperament, compared to the Ovidian Shakespeare and Marlowe. More importantly, he was a born Londoner. His best plays are full of London. Like Every Man in His Humour (1598), not his first play (he did a lot of co-writing) but…