Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ben Jonson was an English playwright, poet, and actor born around the 11th of June 1572, regarded as the second most important English dramatist after William Shakespeare during the reign of James I. He popularised the comedy of humours, shaped Restoration comedy, and exerted lasting influence on both the playwrights and poets of the Jacobean era (1603-1625) and the Caroline era (1625-1642).
Ben Jonson's best-known plays are the satirical comedies Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone (c. 1606), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1614). Volpone and The Alchemist were immediately successful on stage, and Coleridge later claimed The Alchemist had one of the three most perfect plots in literature.
Jonson and Shakespeare knew each other personally; Shakespeare's company produced several of Jonson's plays and Shakespeare acted in at least two of them. Jonson privately criticised Shakespeare's art, but in the posthumously published Timber he praised Shakespeare as "honest, and of an open, and free nature", concluding there was "ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned." Jonson contributed the most influential poem to the prefatory verse of Shakespeare's First Folio.
Jonson killed the actor Gabriel Spenser in a duel on the 22nd of September 1598 in Hogsden Fields and was tried for manslaughter. He pleaded guilty but escaped execution through benefit of clergy, a legal device allowing leniency to those who could recite a brief Bible verse (the neck-verse). He forfeited his goods and was branded with the Tyburn T on his left thumb.
In 1616 Jonson received a yearly pension of 100 marks (roughly £60), leading some to identify him as England's first Poet Laureate, though the royal family never formally granted him the title. King Charles I later increased the pension to £100 and added a tierce of wine and beer.
Ben Jonson is buried in the north aisle of the nave in Westminster Abbey, in an upright position reflecting his reduced circumstances at death. The inscription on the slab reads "O Rare Ben Johnson" - with the name misspelt. John Aubrey records that the tribute was paid for on impulse by a passer-by, John Young of Great Milton in Oxfordshire, who gave a workman eighteen pence to carve it.