Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson — bricklayer's stepson, soldier in Flanders, and Shakespeare's great rival playwright — killed an actor in a duel in 1598 and escaped the gallows only by reciting a Latin verse, the medieval loophole known as benefit of clergy. He went on to receive a royal pension as, in effect, England's first Poet Laureate.

For all his swagger, his most lasting poems are heartbreakingly tender. "On My First Son," written when his boy Benjamin died of plague at seven, calls the child "his best piece of poetrie." And "Song: To Celia" — "Drink to me only with thine eyes" — has been sung at gatherings for four hundred years.

He is buried upright in Westminster Abbey under the misspelled epitaph "O Rare Ben Johnson."