Alas! It is the 425th anniversary of the demise of (admittedly quarrelsome) actor Gabriel Spenser at the hands of playwright Ben Jonson, armed “with a certain sword of iron and steel called a Rapiour of the price 3s.” in a duel.
No one seems to know why they were fighting, but they started going at each other with swords for some reason, and Jonson “maintained that Spenser had struck first, wounding him in the arm”. Spenser also, apparently, had a blade ten inches longer than Jonson’s.
However, that source — Proper Actual Historian Catharine Arnold — says Jonson had two great advantages: youth, and he wasn’t shitfaced. “Spenser had been drinking all day”, she writes, and according to the court Jonson
This was remarkable, because “Jonson was infamously a bon vivant”, according to Jo Vine, now at the Fitzwilliam Museum — which can, indeed, be roughly translated as “was a roaring pisshead himself”. But maybe he was relatively abstemious in his youth
Jonson was still in his 20s, and just starting his career — and one of his earliest works, The Isle of Dogs, written with John Nashe the year before, had seen him charged with “leude and mutinous behaviour”. So, things could have gone Not Well for him.
He could have said, in his defence, that Spenser was a violent man who had himself done someone in in a duel in 1596 — one James Feake, who had committed the heinous crime of threatening to throw a candlestick at him, and been stabbed through the eye.
But Jonson had something else on his side: Latin. He claimed ‘benefit of clergy’, which had originally meant that clergymen accused of a crime could be tried in a more lenient ecclesiastical court. By Jonson’s time, this meant reciting the Miserere in Latin.
Being an educated sort, he could, so he walked free, minus many of his possessions, which the court seized, and with a brand on his thumb — either a T for Tyburn or an X, depending on your source, but either way, preventing him using the same defence again.
It was remarkably common. So many people used this defence, in fact, that that particular bit of the psalm in question became known as the ‘neck verse’.
Jonson went on to win royal patronage, write dozens of plays and masques, and live to the age of 65. This was no mean feat in the 17th century for someone who was sober, let alone one with Jonson’s “delight in excess” — and he might not even have been branded. According to Burbage and Shakespeare’s Stage (1913):
(Jonson and Thomas Dekker each spent a good part of their careers writing insulting things about each other. Jonson was not a man given to the quiet life, and it was not a peaceable age.)
Still, at least today’s story – unlike so many that I tell – doesn’t require any sounding of the CONTEMPORARY RESONANCE KLAXON. It’s not as if we still live in a world where having the kind of education that gives you a bit of Latin allows you to walk away consequence-free from a bloody mess of your own making, is it?
