ABSTRACT
William Shakespeare's career led him from boyhood in Stratford-upon-Avon to acting, writing and finally investing in the London theatre, and thence back to Stratford again, where he ended his days a well-to-do gentleman, owner of the best house in town and a fair bit of land besides. But in many ways it is the career of Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's greatest rival in the theatre of his day, which is the more revealing about the social position of the theatre in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. At one point Jonson is in and out of prison for both political and criminal offences; at another he is a court favourite with royal patronage. His erratic career is in many ways a microcosm of the position of the theatre in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The business of putting on a play in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre was very different from modern professional theatre practice.
