How Ben Jonson escaped the gallows

The late 16th century was a precarious time to be involved in – or just to meet anyone involved in – the theatre. There was cash flow, of course. And the threat of closure, on either political or health-and-safety grounds. But there were other risks too.

One of them was death. For a small group of people, actors and writers in the theatre seem to have been involved in a remarkable number of fatalities. In June 1587, actor William Knell was stabbed in the neck with a five-shilling sword in Thame by fellow actor John Towne after an argument. In 1589, poet and playwright Thomas Watson killed a man name William Bradley in what is now Curtain Road in Shoreditch, after Bradley had reportedly attacked Watson’s friend Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe himself died after being stabbed in the eye. Henry Porter died the day after an assault by fellow playwright John Day. Actor Gabriel Spencer killed a man in 1596 by driving a sheathed rapier – again into his eye, again in Shoreditch.

But it seems Gabriel Spencer met his match in up-and-coming playwright Ben Jonson. The two – together with another actor – had been imprisoned in 1597 over a now-lost play called The Isle of Dogs, which so incensed the court that all the theatres in London were closed by the Privy Council. Jonson’s co-writer Thomas Nashe was lucky to have fled London.

The following year, on 22 September, Spencer challenged Jonson to a duel. We don’t know why. Perhaps Spencer didn’t know that Jonson had already fought in the Netherlands and killed a man in single combat as a kind of spectacle between the two warring camps. Perhaps although it seems the sort of story Jonson like to tell about himself.

Duels were illegal, but like a lot of illegal things, then and now, there were locations were it was understood such things took place. In this instance, it was the fields by Shoreditch.

Accounts of what happened next differ. Jonson himself, in later life, said that Spencer’s sword was ten inches longer than his own and than he had been wounded in the arm before he fought back. Well, perhaps. In any event, the duel ended with Spencer dead on the grass.

At the Old Bailey the following month Jonson pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He would have hanged were it not for a quirk in English law – a holdover from the medieval battle for jurisdiction between the church and secular courts – which allowed those who could read Psalm 51, the Miserere, to receive branding and, potentially, imprisonment instead of the death sentence. Jonson read the psalm – known darkly but not inaccurately – as ‘the neck verse’ and was branded with the letter M on his thumb. You could only have recourse to the neck verse once; branding ensured that.

While in prison, Jonson – not a man with much taste for the easy life – converted to Catholicism. He would be imprisoned a few times in his career, including with regard to the Gunpowder Plot. Sometime around 1610 he returned to the Church of England. At his first communion, he “drank out all the full cup of wine,” he said. In all things, he was not a man of half measures.

This is an extended version of a piece that first appeared in the September 2023 issue of History Today.

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