wife was a good woman, but with a sharp tongue, and the marriage
does not seem to have been very happy. And although they had
several children, all of them died young.

And now, like Shakespeare, Jonson became an actor. Like
Shakespeare too, he wrote plays. His first play is that by which
he is best known, called Every Man in His Humour. By a man's
humor, Jonson means his chief characteristic, one man, for
instance, showing himself jealous, another boastful, and so on.

It will be a long time before you will care to read Every Man in
His Humour, for there is a great deal in it that you would
neither understand nor like. It is a play of the manners and
customs of Elizabethan times which are so unlike ours that we
have little sympathy with them. And that is the difference
between Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. Shakespeare, although he
wrote of his own time, wrote for all time; Jonson wrote of his
own time for his own time. Yet, in Every Man in His Humour there
is at least one character worthy to live beside Shakespeare's,
and that is the blustering, boastful Captain Bobadill. He talks
very grandly, but when it comes to fighting, he thinks it best to
run away and live to fight another day. If only to know Captain
Bobadill it will repay you to read Every Man in His Humour when
you grow up.

Here is a scene in which he shows his "humor" delightfully:--

"BOBADILL. I am a gentleman, and live here obscure, and to
myself. But were I known to Her Majesty and the Lords-- observe
me--I would undertake, upon this poor head and life, for the