“This realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world.” With these words Parliament in 1533 declared England's independence from the Pope in Rome. Although our more familiar sense of empire as a political unit encompassing far-flung territories and heterogeneous peoples was current in the sixteenth century, the meaning here concerns absolute sovereignty. An empire is a polity that owes fealty to no one under God. Because England is an empire, England's king has, in Parliament's words, “plenary, whole, and entire power” in all matters within his kingdom. In place of the overlapping patchwork of regional, national, and international jurisdictions that had characterized medieval governance in Western Europe, monarchs in England and elsewhere were intent on seeing their rule penetrate more evenly into all aspects of life in the territories under their control. This “improvement of the sovereignty,” as the Elizabethan poet and historian Samuel Daniel was to call it, had an inevitable cultural dimension.

As its first entry for the year 1551, Holinshed's Chronicles (1577 and 1587) presents a detailed account of the murder of a certain Master Arden, a gentleman of Faversham in Kent, by his wife, her lover, and a host of accomplices. The entry is not unique. Leaving aside political assassinations, Holinshed's 1587 index lists some twenty-three murders. But its length does make it unusual. Where most of Holinshed's other murder stories get no more than a sentence or two, the Arden account goes on for a full seven tightly printed folio columns, nearly five thousand words, considerably more than he gives many events of state. Perhaps that's why he felt the need for a justification and apology: “The which murder, for the horribleness thereof, although otherwise it may seem to be but a private matter and therefore, as it were, impertinent to this history, I have thought good to set it forth somewhat at large.”

The “horribleness” Holinshed vaunts is obvious enough: a wife's adultery leading to the murder of her husband; servants rebelling against their master; neighbors turning against neighbor; the engagement first of a poisoner and then of “a notorious murdering ruffian” and his vagabond companion; a whole series of grotesque failed attempts, culminating in a successfully brutal murder in the victim's own parlor; and finally eight spectacular public executions. Nor was the horribleness only a matter of sensational transgression and violence. It also served to prompt wonder and thus led to a reawakened sense of human depravity and providential design – a design signaled by the miraculous print of Arden's body still to be seen “two years and more” after he was slain in the field where the murderers dumped him.

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.