Ben Jonson wanted to be read, not just performed, and in 1616 he published his plays as Works — a claim to literary seriousness that his contemporaries found funny and that he made stick. It set the precedent for Shakespeare's First Folio, to which he contributed the poem calling its author not of an age but for all time. His comedies run on greed. Volpone (1606) has a Venetian magnifico feign terminal illness so that his hopeful heirs will compete in bribing him. The Alchemist (1610) confines a con game to one house over one day, in a plot as tightly engineered as anything in English drama. Bartholomew Fair sets the whole of London society loose in a fairground. A bricklayer's stepson who never went to university, he fought in the Low Countries, killed an actor in a duel and escaped hanging by pleading benefit of clergy, and was jailed more than once for offending the authorities. He wrote court masques with Inigo Jones until they fell out, and died in 1637. His slab in Westminster Abbey reads: O rare Ben Jonson.