His stepfather's trade proved one that Jonson ‘could not endure’ (Informations, 183). Fuller pictures him with trowel in hand and book in pocket, labouring reluctantly at his uncongenial task. John Aubrey tells of a lawyer overhearing Jonson reciting verses from Homer while working on the new buildings at Lincoln's Inn; ‘discoursing with him and finding him to have a wit extraordinary’, he provided ‘some exhibition to maintain him at Trinity College in Cambridge’ (Early Lives, Aubrey). No evidence of Jonson's connection with Trinity has been found, however, and Aubrey (or his informant, Richard Hill) may have been muddled in their memories of the timing of Jonson's stay at Cambridge. Taunts about his early work as a bricklayer followed Jonson throughout later life. As late as 1633, after the failure of The Magnetic Lady, Alexander Gil abusively suggested it was time the ageing Jonson abandon the theatre and return to his former trade (6.541–2). Yet Jonson had in fact been attached to this trade throughout a surprisingly long period of his life. The quarterage book of the Tylers’ and Bricklayers’ Company shows him making payments to the company from 1595, and still paying his dues as late as 1611, when he was at the height of his career as a dramatist and writer of court masques. It is possible, but unlikely, that Jonson's continued membership of the guild was a hedge against unemployment, and that he returned to bricklaying during periods of financial need, when work for the court and the theatres was slack. More significantly, guild membership was an avenue to citizenship, and a warrant therefore of social standing. In 1618 Jonson was welcomed to the city of Edinburgh not as a celebrated writer, but as ‘inglisman burges and gildbrother in communi forma’ (Life Records, 57). ‘Burges’ (a Scottish term) implies that Jonson had served his apprenticeship to full term, and ‘gildbrother’ that he was still associated with the Tylers’ and Bricklayers’ Company at this advanced stage of his career. Such qualifications may have eased his ready acceptance by the civic community in Edinburgh; later still, in 1628, they made possible his appointment as Chronologer to the City of London.

At some time in the early 1590s, however, Jonson abandoned his work as a bricklayer and joined the English expeditionary forces to the Low Countries. The dates of this period of service, as of other events in his early life, have been disputed, but it is likely that he was recruited during the early months of 1591, when special efforts were made to reinforce the English presence in the Netherlands. In the spring of that year Maurice of Nassau, commander of the army of the States General, began his first campaign to drive the Spanish out of the inland provinces of the north. The English general Sir Francis Vere, accompanied by his younger brother, Sir Horace, whom Jonson was later to celebrate in Epigr. 91, gave brilliant support and tactical advice. Zutphen fell in May, Deventer in June, and Nijmegen in October. English troops were also involved the following year in the successful siege of Steenwijk in June and the capture of Coevorden in September. Jonson may have seen service at all or several of these sites. One notable feat he described to William Drummond with evident pride almost thirty years later: ‘In his service in the Low Countries he had, in the face of both the camps, killed an enemy and taken opima spolia from him’ (Informations, 184–6). Opima spolia are the arms traditionally taken by victors from the vanquished on the field of battle: the Latin phrase hints at the antiquity of the custom. Single-combat fighting of the kind suggested here, originally undertaken by opposing kings or leaders as a way of avoiding wider bloodshed among their men, was rarely practised in this period; Jonson's victory would have brought him to the notice of his superior officers. But it was also the forerunner of other, less happy, fights in which he was later to be involved.

Entering the theatre

After ‘returning soon’ to England – probably with the first contingent of homecoming troops in autumn 1592 – Jonson ‘betook himself to his wonted studies’ (Informations, 183–4). Where and when he chose to enter the theatre remains unclear. Aubrey believed that on his return from the Low Countries Jonson ‘acted and wrote at the Green Curtain, but both ill – a kind of nursery or obscure playhouse, somewhere in the suburbs (I think towards Shoreditch, or Clerkenwell)’ (Life Records, Electronic Edition). Later in the decade Jonson was certainly to be associated with the Curtain Theatre, Shoreditch, where Every Man In His Humour was performed in 1598, but there is no other evidence of an earlier connection. Possibly Aubrey (or his informant, J. Greenhill) was again confused about the exact sequence of events in Jonson's early life. Aubrey's assertion that Jonson ‘was never a good actor, but an excellent Instructor’ (Electronic Edition, Early Lives) nevertheless has the ring of truth. Once he had firmly established himself as a writer, Jonson – unlike Shakespeare – chose to abandon his career as an actor altogether. In several of his plays, however, he gives an amusing glimpse of his own anxious presence behind the scenes. Gossip Mirth in the Induction to The Staple of News (1626) speaks of the author in the tiring house ‘rolling himself up and down like a tun’ (50–1) in sweaty agitation as he issues last-minute directions to the actors.

The gibes of Captain Tucca in Thomas Dekker's Satiromastix (1601) suggest that early in his career Jonson may have worked as ‘a poor journeyman player’ with a travelling company, playing the part of the royal marshal Hieronimo, crazed by the murder of his son and his thwarted search for justice, in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy: ‘thou hast forgot how thou amblest in leather pilch by a play-wagon, in the highway, and took'st mad Hieronimo's part, to get service among the mimics’ (Satiromastix, 4.1. 161–5). It has been plausibly suggested that the company with which Jonson was travelling were Pembroke's Men, who were on the road in 1595–6 (Bowers, 1937, 396–7). The Spanish Tragedy was to leave a strong, though not entirely positive, impression on Jonson's creative imagination: humorous and parodic echoes of the play are to be found throughout his later work. In 1601 and 1602 the theatre manager Philip Henslowe was to pay Jonson for writing ‘additions’ to Kyd's play. That Jonson is in fact the author of the surviving additions to The Spanish Tragedy now seems, however, unlikely (see Craig, Dubia).

On 14 November 1594 Jonson was married to Anne Lewis in the church of St Magnus the Martyr, by London Bridge. Mark Eccles has argued that the location of this church, close to the theatrical parish of St Saviour, Southwark, suggests that by this date Jonson was working as an actor on or near the Bankside: at the Rose Theatre, or Newington Butts, or the Paris Garden – where, according to Dekker (Satiromastix, 4.1.150–3), he played the part of Zulziman in a now-lost tragedy (Eccles, 1936, 261). Jonson's earliest surviving play, The Case Is Altered (published in quarto in 1609, but not included in the 1616 folio), was performed by Pembroke's company probably during the first half of 1597. Modelled on two of Plautus's comedies, Captivi and Aulularia, the play has elements that Jonson would later ridicule, but to which he would return in his final years: cross-wooings, lost children, happy reunitings.