Ben Jonson may be the most famous person to use the shortened version of his given name professionally. It is for hackneyed notes and anecdotes like these that the playwright, poet, and actor is now primarily known.

Evidently, it is really difficult to be a dramatist and poet if you lived

John Dryden achieved no small feat in having the politically tumultuous period of the mid- to late-17th century now referred to – not without disputation, and admittedly only in literary circles, and admittedly not a great deal more these days – as the Age of Dryden. This phrase