The Emerging Classicist

Abstract

If Every Man in His Humour created any stir at all on its opening day, Jonson had little time to enjoy it. Only two days later he fought a fatal duel in the fields at Shoreditch near the Curtain Theatre with his old colleague from Pembroke’s Men, Gabriel Spencer (then acting with the Lord Admiral’s Men), and was indicted for his murder.¹ Philip Henslowe reported the news to his son-in-law, the actor Edward Alleyn, with distress: ‘It is for me hard and heavy since you were with me. I have lost one of my company, which hurteth me greatly — that is, Gabriel, for he is slain in Hogsden Fields by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer’.² Although he was only twenty-two years old at his death, Spencer had already won fame for his acting, for he was later praised (under the name of ‘Gabriel’) by Thomas Heywood in his Apology for Actors.³ No stranger to quarrels, Spencer had previously killed a companion who threatened him with a candlestick by running him through the eye.⁴ Jonson’s account of their duel makes Spencer the aggressor and emphasises his own disadvantage: ‘being appealed to the fields, he had killed his adversary, which had hurt him in the arm, and whose sword was ten inches longer than his: for the which he was imprisoned, and almost at the gallows’ (Cony., 11. 241–4).