Before the year 1598 was out, however, Jonson found himself in prison and in danger of the gallows. In a duel, fought on the 22nd of September in Hogsden Fields, he had killed an actor of Henslowe's company named Gabriel Spenser. The quarrel with Henslowe consequent on this event may account for the production of _Every Man in his Humour_ by the rival company. In prison Jonson was visited by a Roman Catholic priest, and the result (certainly strange, if Jonson's parentage is considered) was his conversion to the Church of Rome, to which he adhered for twelve years. Jonson was afterwards a diligent student of divinity; but, though his mind was religious, it is not probable that its natural bias much inclined it to dwell upon creeds and their controversies. He pleaded guilty to the charge brought against him, as the rolls of Middlesex sessions show; but, after a short imprisonment, he was released by benefit of clergy, forfeiting his "goods and chattels," and being branded on his left thumb. The affair does not seem to have affected his reputation; in 1599 he is found back again at work for Henslowe, receiving together with Dekker, Chettle and "another gentleman," earnest-money for a tragedy (undiscovered) called _Robert II., King of Scots_. In the same year he brought out through the lord chamberlain's company (possibly already at the Globe, then newly built or building) the elaborate comedy of _Every Man out of his Humour_ (quarto 1600; fol. 1616)--a play subsequently presented before Queen Elizabeth. The sunshine of court favour, rarely diffused during her reign in rays otherwise than figuratively golden, was not to bring any material comfort to the most learned of her dramatists, before there was laid upon her the inevitable hand of which his courtly epilogue had besought death to forget the use. Indeed, of his _Cynthia's Revels_, performed by the chapel children in 1600 and printed with the first title of _The Fountain of Self-Love_ in 1601, though it was no doubt primarily designed as a compliment to the queen, the most marked result had been to offend two playwrights of note--Dekker, with whom he had formerly worked in company, and who had a healthy if rough grip of his own; and Marston, who was perhaps less dangerous by his strength than by his versatility. According to Jonson, his quarrel with Marston had begun by the latter attacking his morals, and in the course of it they came to blows, and might have come to worse. In _Cynthia's Revels_, Dekker is generally held to be satirized as Hedon, and Marston as Anaides (Fleay, however, thinks Anaides is Dekker, and Hedon Daniel), while the character of Crites most assuredly has some features of Jonson himself. Learning the intention of the two writers whom he had satirized, or at all events of Dekker, to wreak literary vengeance upon him, he anticipated them in _The Poetaster_ (1601), again played by the children of the queen's chapel at the Blackfriars and printed in 1602; Marston