The Magnetic Lady is an altogether fitting last play for Ben Jonson, for it reads like the final exertion of a dramatist who has stubbornly devoted himself to the higher aims of satiric comedy and who has seen his public only partially receptive at best. “Finding himselfe now neare the close, or shutting up of his Circle” (as the boy describes the author), he seems determined to reexamine the purposes of the art form, to survey his own efforts in that direction, and to restate his convictions before, like Prospero, he releases his magical powers, lays down his mantle, and drowns his books. The intercalary materials contain a virtual exegesis on comedy, and the frequent buffets at the unreceptive audiences reveal a playwright embittered by public scorn. The plot itself carries an allegorical level which delineates the function of the comic poet in exposing to ridicule and derision unreasonable divergences from normal behavior. Consequently, in a study of Jonson’s comic intent The Magnetic Lady might well be either a beginning or an end; it is, in effect, a dramatic portrayal of his ars poetica. Moreover, in its sweep of dramatic devices it is a remarkable summation of Jonson’s comic technique.
On stage, though, The Magnetic Lady met the same fate as its predecessor, The New Inn. Licensed to the King’s Men in October 1632,1 the play did not outlive its initial performance. In a sense the play had two disadvantages at the outset. First, the players evidently took it upon themselves to enliven the play with a flurry of oaths. This resulted in a charge which Jonson had to answer before the High Commission Court, with the actors finally admitting the fault was totally their own. Second, the opening-night audience was sprinkled with Jonson’s enemies who were determined the play should be jeered into oblivion. Among these were the journalist Nathaniel Butter, whom Jonson had lampooned in News from the New World Discovered in the Moon and The Staple of News, and the architect Inigo Jones, with whom the poet had broken openly concerning the relative importance to the masque of the scene and the plot:
O, how thy frind, Natt Butter, gan to Melte
Whenas the poorenes of thy plott he smelte,
And Inigo wth laughter ther grewe fatt
That thear was Nothing worth the Laughing att.2
(11. 15-18)
Since the play was not worth printing, even on brown paper, a critic advised Ben to return to his more fitting work as brickmason: “A Brickehill’s fitter for the[e] then A stage; / Thou better knowes a groundsell how to Laye / Then lay the plott or groundework of A playe” (11. 52-54). James Howell, a devoted “son” of Ben, reluctantly admitted that Jonson was less than inspired when he wrote it, and John Taylor, in his elegy describing the virtues of the earlier work, sadly admits the want of felicity in this play. It was as if the age, like John Pory, were expressing surprise that the old poet “who I thought had been dead”3 should compose at all.
Later commentary, what little there has been, has not differed appreciably in tone. These scenes composed from the sickbed are described as merely the “dry leaves from a nosegay of brighter days”4 which bear the obvious marks of old age. No one can be expected to take interest in the plot of this wooden comedy, with “the vein of humor . . . exhausted, and the breath of mental life . . . passed from its stiff personages.”5 Critics have said the work exposes the final dregs of dramatic dissipation,6 a descent into the kind of comedy “that almost anyone else could contrive.”7 Although a few critics have mildly qualified these views,8 only Swinburne in his exuberant praise has contradicted them seriously. To him the play represents “a brilliant flash of parting splendour” of Jonson’s higher genius as a comic poet “before its approaching sunset. . . . Any competent spectator of its opening scenes must have felt a keen satisfaction at the apparent revival of the comic power and renewal of dramatic instinct.”9
The basic plot is a refinement of the rival wooing of Lady Pecunia in The Staple of News. Here, for similar avaricious purposes, the heiress Placentia is the object of pursuit. The locale is provided by her aunt, Lady Loadstone, to whose home scavengers flock in hope of marrying a fortune. Acts I and II, the protasis, introduce the various characters of the piece. Compass, a “scholar mathematic,” and Captain Ironside, his brother and a soldier, appear in the street before Lady Loadstone’s house and function much like a prologue in their discussion of the magnetic lady who attracts a host of visitors and suitors. Compass describes the humour characters as they arrive at the house one by one—Palate, the parson; Rut, the physician; Practice, the lawyer; Diaphanous Silkworm, the courtier; Sir Moth Interest, the usurer; and his politic friend, Bias. Compass also contrives the plan to perplex the suitors by thrusting the soldier into their midst. With the introduction in act II of Placentia and her retinue—Gossip Polish, Nurse Keepe, and Pleasance, her waiting woman—comes the first news of the eligibility of the niece as a desirable heiress, along with early hints of her pregnancy. Lady Loadstone favors the lawyer, Practice, as a prospective husband for Placentia, though he admits a prior engagement to Pleasance. Meanwhile, Diaphanous bribes Palate to act as an agent in his favor. As this assorted collection moves in to dinner, the foundation of the plot is complete—the characters and their motives are introduced, and the narrative is established.
Acts III and IV, the epitasis and core of the plot, are concerned with a systematic exposure of the various types of social corruption represented by these characters. Essentially, act III reveals the façade of respectability, honor, and courage behind which pretentious individuals operate in society, while act IV depicts the decadent core within. The revelation in act III is accomplished by Ironside, who, at dinner among the foppish pretenders, becomes so enraged that he draws his sword. Immediately, the “brave group” scatter like flies, Interest undergoing a severe attack and Placentia being shocked into labor. Diaphanous pompously desires to challenge Ironside, but his empty threats and hollow charges, followed directly by his frantic attempts to avoid the battle, merely subject him to greater ridicule. Of special interest here is the conversation between Diaphanous and Compass concerning the nature of true valor. Diaphanous remarks, true to character in his misinterpretation, that The New Inn denounces virtue which cannot be seen and praised by others, that it “decries all other valor, but what is for the public.” He is apparently well versed in the conversation of all “which the town calls valour.”
I would have no man thinke me so ungovern’d,
Or subject to my passion but I can
Reade him a Lecture ’twixt my undertakings,
And executions.
(III, vi, 108-11)
He proceeds to enumerate the various types of valor—a rash and headstrong inexperience, an indiscreet presumption, a dull desperate resolving, and a judicial judging or noble undertaking of a danger. The comic aspects of the scene are realized through Compass’ interposed remarks, subtly indicating that Diaphanous’ valor includes precisely the first three forms—false valor which “he will spin out in’s shirt, fine as a thread.” To Silkworm’s contention that he desires to avoid an actual fight because his valor is the last-named “judicious resolving,” Compass retorts that such is rather the type found in gentlemen who have a true honor to defend and who do not shun the responsibility of defending it (III, vi, 154-56, 163-65). Bias quickly adds two types of valor omitted by the courtier, a philosophical contempt of death and “an infused kind of valour, wrought in us by our Genii,” and Practice adds the “Christian valour ’bove these two.” When Diaphanous desperately seizes upon this opportunity to excuse himself from battle, asserting that his valor is Christian and therefore long-suffering and patient of insult and injury, Bias explodes the excuse with his specious conclusion. While one cannot justify defacing the divine image in a man through a duel, both combatants are images and can fight “if they will fight, a God’s name.” Compass’ broad comic baiting ridicules the pretentiousness of the hypocritical dandy. Needless to say, verbal heroics are the limits of the courtier’s bravery, and in a comic reversal a few lines later he finds convenient grounds for reconciliation with the captain. Outrightly commending Ironside for quarreling with him and insulting him, he claims that the wrangle forced Placentia into labor and thus prevented his being duped into wedding her.
Just as act III sets forth the sham conventions of false valor in Diaphanous, act IV reveals avarice as the true motivation of the entire assemblage of suitors. The major agent of exposure in act III is Ironside, whose true courage confronts the false valor of Diaphanous. In act IV Compass outwits the fortune hunters at their own game. He overhears an argument between Polish and Nurse Keepe in which Polish admits switching her child in infancy with the real Placentia. Thus realizing that the real Placentia (Pleasance) is still virgin, Compass secretly persuades her to marry him. Meanwhile, Polish and Keepe, resolving their differences like another Face and Subtle, determine to conceal the birth of a child to the false Placentia, confident that their fraud can yet be carried to a successful financial conclusion for both themselves and the daughter. Meanwhile, Interest rejoices upon learning his niece is a whore, since he will be able to retain both her initial inheritance and the accrued interest. When the true Placentia’s innocence is established, Moth effects his next best plan by offering his niece to Bias at a set price considerably lower than that which would otherwise be charged. In this act with the suspicion of Placentia’s guilt, which would also involve loss of her inheritance, the suitors flee. A few moments later when the turn of events suggests her inheritance is still available, however, they again are groveling for acceptance. Throughout the epitasis the narrative directs satirical emphasis upon both the perversities veiled behind the cloth of respectability and the sordid and unchecked desire for material gain which motivates such characters.
As act IV draws to a close, the forces of Dame Polish and the false Placentia appear to be firmly entrenched, with a favorable marriage to take place in the immediate future. Thus, the focus of the epitasis portends success for the avaricious, hypocritical characters. All of this is disrupted in the catastasis with Compass’ startling pronouncements at the end of act IV. The suspicion that Placentia gave birth to a child was by no means unfounded; the true Placentia, however, is Pleasance, the supposed daughter of Polish; he himself has married the true Placentia; and, consequently, the full inheritance is owed to him. Act V, the catastrophe, is thus a resolving of the narrative on these grounds, the struggle between Polish-Interest and Compass-Ironside. Polish refuses to acknowledge the fraud until confronted by charges of murder unless the child is produced. Even then she is defiant in the face of overwhelming evidence. Admitting that the child was by Needle, she still claims for her daughter the contract with Bias, for which Interest, thinking the daughter to be the true Placentia and visualizing huge financial gain, has agreed to pay a specific sum as dowry. Thus Interest, like Volpone and Mosca or Subtle and Face, has tied the noose around his own neck as a result of greed. Tricked by the supposed sickbed ravings of Needle concerning a hidden treasure, he is subsequently driven by uncontrollable avarice to search for coins hidden in the bottom of a well. In the fifth act he falls headlong into the well, losing the ten thousand pounds contracted to Bias for the false Placentia and the entire initial amount plus the interest accrued to Compass and the true Placentia. To such losses Sir Moth can only quip ironically:
Into what nets of cous’nage am I cast
On ev’ry side? each thred is growne a noose:
A very mesh: I have run my seife into
A double breake, of paying twice the money.
(V, x, 109-12)
The catastrophe has reversed the apparent solution of the fourth act. At the same time, it has properly castigated a derisive figure and has comically reasserted the values upon which Jonson’s play is constructed.
Jonson seemed to be aware of what the public wanted in romantic comedy, but he seemed equally determined not to compromise his concept of comedy to accommodate public taste, even though he had not had a success on the popular stage in nearly two decades. Instead, he continued to tell the spectator what sound art is and how the audience must discipline itself in viewing it. The Magnetic Lady reads like a dissertation on comedy. Particularly, the intercalary materials provide a thesis or running gloss to the plot. The intermeane (conversation between the boy, Probee, and Damplay) establishes three main points—the nature and purpose of comedy, the proper structure of the piece, and the perversity of those who insist on viewing the play with prejudicial interests.
The poet speaks to us most transparently through the character of the boy, who greets Probee and Damplay as they arrive at the theater, and the identification is a direct one. In the Induction the playgoers ask to see the poet and are told that in Jonson’s absence the boy has “dominion of the Shop, for this time, under him.” Probee and Damplay, who represent the general audience, acknowledge they would like to know more about the play. Set in the role of an instructor, the boy asserts he “can shew you all the variety the Stage will afford for the present” and promises to “venter with your people” by describing the art “so as you againe will undertake for them, that they shall know a good Play when they heare it; and will have the conscience, and ingenuity beside, to confesse it.” The boy then explains that Jonson has established his comic technique in Every Man In His Humour and Every Man Out of His Humour and has continued throughout his work to depict “some recent humours still, or manners of men, that went along with the times.” To his “centre attractive” is drawn “a diversity of Guests, all persons of different humours to make up his Perimeter.” The scene must be plotted with decorum, something “most of those [whom] your people call authors, never dreamt of.” When all is properly arranged, the plot, the characters, and the theme are united in an artistic whole:
A good Play, is like a skeene of silke: which, if you take by the right end, you may wind off, at pleasure, on the bottome, or card of your discourse, in a tale, or so; how you will: But if you light on the wrong end, you will pull all into a knot, or elfe-lock; which nothing but the sheers, or a candle will undoe, or separate.
(Induction, 11. 136-41)
After the first act the boy proclaims Jonson’s cardinal point: the poet instructs through entertainment. The higher purpose of art is to communicate to the hearer a desire for a more reasonable life, “either of human letters, or severe honesty,” which “shall speak him a man though he went naked.” At the conclusion of the second act the boy faces the complaint that Jonson repeats the same kind of plot—guller against gull. The boy replies:
If you doe the same reprehensible ill things, still the same reprehension will serve you, though you heard it afore: They are his owne words. I can invent no better, nor he.
(Second Intermeane, 11. 31-33)
Comedy, then, as Probee must admit, holds up the glass of custom so that in it may be viewed “the daily examples of mens lives, and images of Truth, in their manners, so drawne for my delight, or profit, as I may (either way) use them.”
The boy describes the matter of decorum in the structure of the play with equal care. He explicitly defines the protasis at the conclusion of the first act10 as “a faire Presentment of your Actors. And a handsome promise of somewhat to come hereafter” (Intermeane, 11. 3-4). To Damplay’s charge that it is no act because nothing is concluded in it, the boy retorts:
A fine piece of logick! Doe you looke, Mr. Damplay, for conclusions in a Protasis? I thought the Law of Comedy had reserv’d [’hem] to the Catastrophe: and that the Epitasis, (as wee are taught) and the Catastasis, had beene interveening parts, to have beene expected.
(First Intermeane, 11. 7-11)
At the conclusion of the next act, all characters having been introduced, Probee remarks: “Let us mind what you come for, the Play, which will draw on to the Epitasis now [acts III and IV].” Damplay’s later charge that Placentia’s pregnancy was sprung upon the audience in the third act as a sudden alteration provides the boy an opportunity to describe how carefully a plot must be devised:
The streame of the Argument, threatened her being with child from the very beginning, for it presented her in the first of the second Act, with some apparent note of infirmity, or defect: from knowledge of which, the Auditory were rightly to bee suspended by the Author, till the quarrell, which was but the accidentali cause, hastned on the discovery of it, in occasioning her affright; which made her fall into her throwes presently, and within that compasse of time allow’d to the Comedy.
(Third Intermeane, 11. 6-14)
At the conclusion of act IV Damplay observes that the poet has puckered the knot of intrigue past solution and scoffs that here “his Play might have ended, if hee would ha’ let it: and have spar’d us the vexation of a fift Act yet to come” (Fourth Intermeane, 11. 21-23). Assuring him that if the plot had concluded here it would have “showne dull, flat, and unpointed: without any shape, or sharpnesse,” the boy admonishes him to “Stay, and see the last Act, his Catastrophe, how hee will perplexe that, or spring some fresh cheat to entertaine the Spectators, with a convenient delight, till some unexpected, and new encounter breake out to rectifie all, and make good the Conclusion” (Fourth Intermeane, 11. 27-31). Jonson seems to delight in expounding his doctrine to the audience, as if mounting one last charge against the illogicality of those romantic plays filled with improbable coincidences and incredible characters. Such a plot is well described in the First Intermeane (11. 16-24), cited in the previous discussion of The New Inn.
Finally, the intermeane conversations describe the decisive ingredient necessary for stage success—a spectator with sufficient intelligence and interest to profit from his delight. Probee’s leading comments give the boy, as spokesman for the author, an opportunity to thrust gibes at the poetasters, poetaccios, and poetitos “that drive that trade, now” (Induction, 11. 9-10) and for whom the play will provide an excellent study in decorum and structure. He brands them the “Faeces, or grounds, of your people,” and, “carelesse of all vulgar censure, . . . is confident it shall super-please judicious Spectators” (Induction, 11. 32-33, 122-24). The boy constantly outwits both Probee and Damplay in their charges that the play drags or is improperly motivated. In a thrust obviously directed toward the injudicious spectator, Jonson has Damplay assert:
I care not for marking the Play: Ile damne it, talke, and doe that I come for. . . . I will censure, and be witty, and take my Tobacco, and enjoy my Magna Charta of reprehension, as my Predecessors have done before me.
(Third Intermeane, 11. 19-25)
In answer the boy quips, “Even to license, and absurdity.” In similar fashion the boy denounces Damplay’s attempts to associate Bias with some particular person. One might as reasonably ask “of Plautus, and Terence . . . who were Davus, or Pseudolus . . . who Pyrgopolinices or Thraso? Who Euclio or Menedemus?” (Second Intermeane, 11. 14-17). Such Picklocks are “no other but narrow, and shrunke natures; shriveld up, poore things, that cannot thinke well of themselves, who dare to detract others, . . . fitter Spectators for the Beares, then us, or the Puppets” (Second Intermeane, 11. 48-50, 71-72). To pick the lock of a scene rather than to open it “the faire way with a Key” is to fail to see the universality in the vice or virtue which the play depicts and its applicability to mankind in any age. “If you will utter your owne ill meaning on that person, under the Authors words, you will make a Libell of his Comoedy.” Throughout the tone is that of an adamant Jonson, baiting those who judge without understanding and those who assume dramatic entertainment to be merely the gratification of one’s baser desires to vilify contemporary figures, all of this comically portrayed through the situation in which a youth mentally outstrips two seasoned play-damners.
The text itself is an allegorical declamation of proper comedy with Compass symbolizing the poet-entertainer, Ironside the poet-moralist, Lady Loadstone and her house the theater and its dramatic performance, Pleasance the spectator, and Dame Polish the debasement of romantic comedy.11 In the opening scene Compass stands outside Lady Loadstone’s house where all are welcome and where there are “Gentlewomen and male Guests, / Of severall humours, cariage, constitution, / Profession too.” Shortly after, she thanks him for always bringing a variety of good persons to her table and is described as one “That drawes, and drawes unto you, Guests of all sorts: / The Courtiers, and the Souldiers, and the Schollers, / The Travellers, Physicians, and Divines” (I, iv, 2-4). Compass and Ironside are the complementary halves of prodesse et delectare, the true poet being both an entertainer who writes for the delight of the spectators and a moralist who writes for their profit. As entertainer, Compass, “with sundry humours,” can suit himself to the company. He relates his plan to hold the group together and “draw ’hem to a sufferance of themselves, / But till the Dissolution of the Dinner” (I, i, 10-11). “The perfect instrument” for Loadstone to “sail by,” “the very Fly she moves by,” he is responsible for all his riches and wealth. For that she respects him as a scholar.
To aid him in his entertainment he requests the company of Ironside, who accepts the opportunity to observe “particular causes” of ridiculous behavior and to “specifie their acts” (I, i, 71-72). His presence will “run their feares to any hole of shelter, / Worth a dayes laughter!” (11. 50-51). Indeed it does at the conclusion of act II. The array of humours scatter “like Cimici, / Into the cranies of a rotten bed-stead” (II, vi, 150-51). Ironside, angered by the perversions around him, threatens to beat them. “No man deserves it better (now I thinke on’t) / Then you: that will keepe consort with such Fidlers, / Pragmatick Flies, Fooles, Publicanes, and Moathes” (II, vi, 142-44). The assault leads Lady Loadstone to complain that he has discredited her house and board with his swaggering manners and has endangered her niece. Allegorically, the theater is frequented by a diversity of human types, all of whom welcome the poet as an entertainer to flatter their egos or to remove them from reality with ridiculous and improbable plots. Yet, when the poet worthy of his title uses his entertainment as a vehicle for exposing abuses of the age to ridicule, he is assailed by those who either refuse to understand or lash back in their guilt.
The niece, of course, needs to be “endangered,” for she is a falsehood foisted upon the household by Dame Polish and manipulated purely for monetary gain. Polish’s story sounds intriguingly like the ingredients of romantic comedy—the switching of infants in the cradle, the servant-child disguised as heiress and the heiress as waiting woman, the passing of two decades while the principals mature, an inheritance hanging in the balance. In the fifth act, the true poet, in his attack upon Polish, decries the corruption of the writer of such drama:
Thou that has put all nature off, and woman:
For sordid gaine, betray’d the trust committed
Vnto thee by the dead, as from the living:
Chang’d the poore innocent Infants in their Cradles:
Defrauded them o’ their parents, chang’d their names,
Calling Placentia, Pleasance; Pleasance, Placentia.
(V, ix, 6-11)
Working in conjunction, Compass and Ironside purge Lady Loadstone’s house and expose the scheming manipulations of Dame Polish as well as the corrupt nature of the assemblage of fantasticks. Obviously, the true Placentia stands to gain most from the flurry of events. Just so, the poet-teacher purges the theater of the extravagances of romantic comedy, and the spectator, confronted with entertainment which is carefully constructed to counsel as well as to please, is rescued from a debasement too long endured. Aptly enough, then, Lady Loadstone’s anger turns to gratitude to both Compass and Ironside:
[W]ee are all now reconcil’d to truth.
There rests yet a Gratuitie from me,
To be conferr’d upon this Gentleman;
Who (as my Nephew Compasse sayes) was cause,
First of th’offence, but since of all th’amends.
The Quarrell caus’d th’affright; that fright brought on
The travell, which made peace; the peace drew on
This new discovery, which endeth all
In reconcilement.
(V, x, 126-34)
The narrative concludes in the only way the allegory could be meaningfully maintained. Compass (the poet-entertainer) is wed to the true Placentia (the judicious spectator with eyes and ears to join his pleasure with his profit). Ironside (the poet-moralist) is wed to Lady Loadstone (the theater). Allegorically, comic drama and the stage are reconciled just as the humours are reconciled in the realistic plot.
In order to establish the allegorical theme as well as to broaden the potential of comic conflict, Jonson has doubled the figure of the comic pointer. Compass is not the only “sympathetic character” of the piece, as the Yale editor has stated.12 Clearly, Captain Ironside is allied with Compass in viewing and commenting upon the circle of humours. As we have previously noted, it is the soldier in act III (i, 30-33; ii, 3-5; iii, 12-16, 30-31; vi, 6-10) who exposes the false values which lurk beneath the façade of respectability in the humour characters, just as it is Compass, the clever manipulator, in act IV (ii, 28-30; iii, 48-53; viii, 46-56) who exposes the motivating force of each of these warped persons and outwits them at their own game. Both Compass and Ironside quickly establish themselves as objective figures. Compass, described as “one well read in men and manners,” declares that for the sport of it he has devised a plot to play these perversities off against one another and invites Ironside to join him in furnishing “particular causes . . . to specifie their acts” (I, i, 71-72). Later at the soldier’s first gesture of a test of physical prowess, the humours scatter, to the derisive pleasure of both Ironside and Compass (II, vi, 150-51).
The comic aim of the dramatist, however sick and bedridden and however unsuccessful his play on stage, is manifestly consistent with that of his other work. He is again exposing hypocrisy and pretension and again depicting the antithesis between intellect and the follies of fashion, between the scholar-poet and the poetaster, and between the genuine aristocrat and the fops and dandies of court. As before, judicious laughter is directed at those characters who openly misuse or fail to develop fully their intellectual potentialities. Unlike his three previous plays which have concentrated on particular facets of the contemporary scene—the bogus projector, the irresponsible journalist, the fatuousness of a court fad—The Magnetic Lady levels its criticism upon a broad spectrum of hypocritical and specious types. The poet seems to illustrate that, although the range of profession and personality is wide, the range of motives such as ambition, avarice, and lust which actually motivate man to debase himself in any one of many fashions is narrow indeed. He sets forth the humours of courtship, rival wooers motivated not by affection but by avarice and manipulated by Polish, a she-parasite with the more garrulous characteristics of a Mistress Quickly.
Of all Jonson’s dramatic assemblages, this group is one of the more interesting. Without doubt it is the most representative of society in general—the usurer and money-bawd, the timeserver and politic statesman, the fawning courtier, the doctor, the apothecary, the lawyer, the parson, the gossip and she-parasite, the circumspect nurse, and the midwife. Each individual character, with the exception of Polish, unquestionably has his counterparts in previous Jonsonian plays, yet this play is not merely a repetition of earlier creations. The innovations in each humour character and the combination of them as prototypes of specific professions—prototypes motivated by an avaricious craze for material possessions—is new and provides an opportunity for the widest sweep of Jonson’s caustic brush.
Sir Moth Interest, again a portrait of a miserly individual whose sense of values has been distorted by avarice, is Jonson’s most effective character of this nature, with no trace of the sordid, the bitter, and the malignant of earlier characters. Sordido, for example, in Every Man Out of His Humour, worships the almanac because it conveys information whereby he can gain the greatest crop yields. His interest, however, is not so much in acquiring grain and material wealth for its own sake as in venting his hatred upon those around him. When famine strikes the land, he will “let ’em starve . . . licentious rogues and sturdy vagabonds”; he will burn or bury his wealth before he will give one grain “though a world of wretches starve the while.” When the weather promises an excellent crop for others, he is so outraged at the prospects of another’s good fortune that he attempts to hang himself. Much the same vicious and malignant quality is noted in the characters of Corbaccio in Volpone and Penniboy Senior in The Staple of News. Corbaccio is willing to estrange himself from his son, to disinherit his own kin, to make a handsome gift to Volpone in the fatuous hope that the gift will bring a greater one in return. Similarly, Penniboy Senior’s only interest in his ward, Pecunia, is monetary. Unmercifully, he keeps her in close quarters, fearing to let her see the light of day; when she is of age to marry, his concern is not for her but for the suitor who will pay most liberally for the privilege. The miserliness of Sir Moth Interest, on the other hand, is not complicated by these qualities, resulting in a miser drawn in pure comic terms. Sir Moth stolidly defends the acquisition of money on grounds that covetousness is natural in men; money represents power, and power represents the ability to perform real actions; money, as opposed to wisdom, can be left tangibly to posterity. His elaborate defense is deflated, however, and he is left speechless when he is reminded that, without wisdom to realize the value of one’s possessions and to utilize the potential power, money itself is sterile, useless, and undesirable—a curse rather than a blessing. His avarice leads him to search for nonexistent treasure in the bottom of a well, and all he discovers is the law of gravity. His stinginess incites him to withhold Placentia’s dowry which he had in trust, to withhold the interest which has accrued, and to “buy” a bargain marriage with “half-a-dowry.” Yet all such schemes backfire comically in the face of the perpetrator, and his manipulating costs him far more than the sum he originally was to pay. In a very real sense Moth is a derisive portrait of one in whom the worship of money has caused decay of the mental faculties; he is blind to the obvious dangers in any given situation so long as there is the faint glimmer of financial gain.
The false courtier, Diaphanous Silkworm, is also a variation of a conventional type. In him there is the specious seeking after fashion, the sham self-importance, the hollow ritual of a courtier’s life, all of which are prevalent in Matthew, Carolo Buffone, and Sir Politick-Would-Be. Diaphanous is the “courtier extraordinary” whose “whole happinesse [is] the trim of Court” (I, vi, 9). The courtier will “shine in plush.” “Like a young night-crow, a Diaphanous Silkworme” (II, i, 15-17), he will partake only of French wine “with an allay of water” (III, i, 22). This gallant braggadocio clearly is descended from Jonson’s various versions of the miles gloriosus earlier depicted in such humours as Bobadill, Tucca, Daw, La Foole, and Sir Glorious Tipto. But in this respect, especially, Jonson seems to have refined his creation. Bobadill constantly vaunts his prowess with the sword, attempting to teach the fine art to Matthew; even so, he was courageous enough to face Downright in a brief scuffle, though his courage was short-lived and he was easily bested at his own game. Sir Amorous La Foole and Sir John Daw are played against one another; both boast of their own skills while attempting to avoid physical combat. Sir Glorious Tipto issues ominous threats only to flee before Huffle’s mild countercharge. In Diaphanous Silkworm, Jonson has drawn the consummate coward. Words alone are sufficient to expose his true color. Having issued a challenge to Ironside in a fit of rhetoric, he desperately searches for some means to avoid battle. He is terrified even more by Compass, who slyly assures him that “he [Ironside] has kild so many; as it is ten to one his turne is next.” In a situation reminiscent of Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Cesario in Twelfth Night, Ironside is described to the quaking coward as so consistently successful in dueling that he is certainly due for a fall in his next battle, logic which fails to convince the apprehensive fop. The adversary does not even have to appear in body; the “sound” of his valor is sufficient to expose the blatant cowardice of Diaphanous. Quick to detect the empty threat in Silkworm’s challenge, Ironside does appear, however, labeling the terrified courtier a “mushroom” and informing him he has come to anticipate the challenge. In a desperate attempt to delay an actual struggle Diaphanous refuses to fight in his coat.13 The anticipated battle degenerates into a verbal harangue with Diaphanous studiously explaining the forms of false valor. He assures the audience he does not possess these false forms, but Compass, well aware of the nature of Diaphanous’ “bravery,” exposes him to comic ridicule:
O let’s heare this!
I long to heare a man dispute in his shirt
Of valour, and his sword drawne in his hand.
.....
His [Silkworm’s] valour will take cold.
(III, vi, 97-100)
The entertainment concludes with the fop’s complete exposure. Forced to eat his threats, he now claims Ironside as a friend with whom he could not force himself to duel. This has nothing to do with the original issues of the challenge, but it is an excuse not to fight.
In Rut, the physician, Jonson is expanding his earlier humour character of Almanach in The Staple of News. As a jeerer constantly tormenting Penniboy Senior, Almanach offers to cure the miser’s melancholy with a pill “to purge it away.” This suggests that Senior suffers from a surfeit of money and should spend a portion of it in feting the jeerers to a dinner. The miser retorts that the doctor has debased his practice by dabbling in necromancy and horoscopy. The rebuffed physician, violating professional confidence, angrily tells the group of Senior’s “hernia in your scrotum . . . fistula in ano.” In The Magnetic Lady the character of the physician is more fully developed, and the satirical gibes are utilized for greater comic possibilities. Rut is obviously interested not in the welfare of his patients, but in the ready acquisition of material wealth. Licentious and obscene in discourse, he is an agnostic voluptuary, a buffoon in manners, and a slave to money (I, ii, 36ff.). Jonson achieves comic derision of the false practitioner in two ways—by his obviously false and ignorant diagnoses of various illnesses and by the overbundance of medical jargon in his speech. The first false diagnosis occurs in act II, when Placentia’s pregnancy, recognized as such by the spectators, is labeled by Rut as tympanities: “A wind-bombe’s in her belly, must be unbrac’d, / And with a Faucet, or a Peg, let out, / And she’ll doe well” (II, iii, 20-22). The happylexe14 contracted in act III by Interest furnishes the next opportunity for Rut to proffer his services. Here his cure, which consists of tweaking Moth by the nose and boxing him on the ears, leads Polish to quip ironically that it is strange indeed for a physician to “beat one into health!” (III, iv, 15). As did Almanach, Rut determines to “purge the purse” of the usurer, a remedy which he “sputes in Latin” to Bias. The height of satirical intensity directed against Rut occurs in the final act. The spectator, fully aware that Needle’s illness is feigned, sees the doctor elaborately diagnose the case as:
[C]old dry fumes,
That are melancholicke, [which] worke at first,
Slow, and insensibly in their ascent,
. . . which we, the sonnes
Of Physick, call a walking in the sleepe.
(V, vii, 6-8, 11-12)
He proposes to cure this malady by a pill between the muscles of the tongue. Jonson then reminds his audience that the affiliation of medicine and astrology was still strong in the seventeenth century. Unsuccessful in preventing Moth’s tumble into the well, Rut is quick to make his excuse: “I wish’d you stay Sir, till to morrow: And told you, / It was no lucky houre: since sixe a Clock / All starres were retrograde” (V, x, 13-15).
The figure of the Machiavellian statesman is in some respects a new creation for Jonson. There have been suggestions of the timeserver and flatterer in Lupus, who in The Poetaster gleefully and maliciously conveys information to Augustus leading to Ovid’s banishment. In Volpone, Sir Politick-Would-Be, duped by Peregrine, fancies himself in possession of secrets of state. But a statesman along sterner lines, “a kind of a laborious Secretary to a great man” “cut from the Quar of Machiavel,” “a Vi-politic! Or a sub-aiding Instrument of State” (I, vii), is a new departure for Jonson. Bias is indeed a timeserver, but more than that he is a politic statesman who “Neglects the sacred letter of the Law; and holds it but a dead heape of civill institutions.” The satire is effected here primarily through the interposed comments of Compass. For instance, when Moth asserts that Bias is an invaluable intelligence agent who “Will screw you out a Secret from a Statist,” Compass retorts, “So easy, as some Cobler wormes a Dog.” To Moth’s avowal that the statesman will serve with unswerving fidelity, Compass quips, “Why should that fright me, Master Bi—, from telling whose—as you are?” To Bias’ claims to policies, conventions, and precedents of court, Compass exclaims, “Some call [it] a formall, flat servility.” The true character of Bias is later exposed through his fear of physical combat, even of carrying a challenge. Using the conventional reasoning of the trimmer, he remarks:
For a twi-reason of State: Ile beare no Challenges;
I will not hazard my Lords favour so;
Or forfeit mine owne Judgement with his honour,
To turne a Ruffian.
(III, vi, 7-10)
The parson, too, represents a variation of a previous character type. In both Tribulation Wholesome and Zeal-of-the-Land Busy men of the cloth are comically depicted in moments of concession to secular temptations. Both are possibly sincere in their religious offices, though both are far from what ministers of God should be. Busy incorporates elements of Puritan hypocrisy of which he is unaware, while Tribulation’s better judgment is stifled momentarily by his own avarice and Subtle’s assertions that only a bit more gold is needed to insure the success of the alchemy. Parson Palate, on the other hand, is an obvious hypocrite. Jonson describes in him the parson who is obsessed with material values and who regards the parishioner as the least of his concerns. Introduced through Compass’ character sketch in act I, scene ii, his predilections are for things of the body rather than of the spirit. He quickly responds to the overtures of Diaphanous suggesting that he represent the courtier in the quest for Placentia. Also, as Needle remarks, the name Palate indicates not only the “palatable quality” of his religion, but also his first love—good food in ample quantity.
The Parson has an edifying stomack,
And a perswading Palate (like his name:)
Hee hath begun three draughts of sack in Doctrines,
And fower in Uses.
(III, i, 16-19)
In the figure of the lawyer Jonson reveals his disgust for the unethical, parasitic activities of the legal profession. Throughout Jonson’s comedies the lawyers have one code of ethics during their association with their clients, but quite a different one after the clients have departed. If monetary gain can result from duping a client who has proffered confidential information, the lawyers never hesitate to act in accordance with their own avarice. Thus, Voltore in Volpone was quite willing to switch clients and cases for the expectation of greater reward; Picklock in The Staple of News was only too willing to deny the feoffment of Penniboy Senior; and, in a similar fashion, Practice, who never would miss his nightcap, is dedicated more to the preferments that attend his profession than to the equal distribution of justice throughout his jurisdiction (I, vi). Like the physician, he derives information from astrological media. He too is motivated by a desire for financial gain—so much so that he is quite willing to give up Pleasance (for whom he had claimed complete devotion) for an even greater love, monetary compensation.
One further humour character explicitly illustrates that Jonson still possessed mental agility. Critics otherwise hostile or indifferent to the late plays have generally recognized Polish as a fresh departure in characterization, “an amazing compound of volubility, religious cant, and downright fraud.”15 Her ingenuity forms the core of an action based upon a bold fraud of transplanted children which she carries out with admirable self-possession. Only briefly does she allow anger to blur her singleness of purpose, when she alienates Dame Keepe by charging her with a lack of respectability in Placentia’s unfortunate pregnancy. Keepe, an accomplice in the earlier transfer of Placentia and Pleasance, threatens to expose all, “her patience stirr’d to fury.” In a delightful aside Polish quips: “I have run my Barke, / On a sweet Rock, by mine owne arts, and trust: / And must get off againe, or dash in peeces” (IV, iv, 53-55). In the final act, when the discovery of her scheme is imminent, she is unruffled and proclaims in a final assertion of equanimity:
I scorne to be prevented of my glories.
I plotted the deceit, and I will owne it.
. . . wherein though th’ event hath fail’d
In part, I will make use of the best side.
(V, x, 84-85, 87-88)
Quite in possession of her wits, she holds Interest to the contract (made prior to the discovery) to bestow ten thousand pounds upon Bias and her daughter. In addition to this remarkable effrontery, one of the most delightfully comic elements throughout the play is her loquacity. Her initial entry in act I, when she rants incessantly upon the virtues of Lady Loadstone, leads Rut to interject:
Well, if you know it, peace.
.....
Sure shee is not long liv’d, if she spend breath thus.
.....
I sure thought
She had a Lease of talking, for nine lives—
(I, iv, 21, 38, 48-49)
Shortly thereafter Compass implores her to stop talking:
Spare the torture,
I doe confesse without it.
.....
Take her off,
Some body that hath mercy.
(I, v, 1-2, 5-6)
Later in the action Pol’s tongue again provokes comic censure:
Save thy colours, Rainebow,
Or she will run thee over, and all thy lights.
(V, v, 20-21)
’Tis such a Fly, this Gossip, with her buz,
Shee blowes on every thing, in every place!
A busie woman is a fearefull grievance!
(V, vii, 1-3)
In volubility and sheer effrontery Pol is easily the best of Jonson’s female characters.
In drawing his comedy to a close Jonson once more adheres to the idea of reconciling the humours from Every Man Out of His Humour. Subtitled “Humours Reconciled,” The Magnetic Lady pacifies the various characters through gratification of their avaricious desires. Thus, Compass reconciles Bias and Interest through the latter’s payment of a contracted bribe; Keepe and Polish reconcile their differences to further their fraudulent scheme of the exchanged children; Practice, to whom money is more attractive than love, is reconciled by Compass’ payment of his reversion to Surveyor of the Projects General in exchange for the hand of Pleasance, his fiancée; and, finally, the marriage of the niece and the subsequent disappearance of an heiress’ fortune reconcile all by removing the motivating incentive. In effect, Jonson is once more illustrating his comic concept that overt punishment which might dampen the comic tone is unnecessary if a play is properly constructed. The context of the stage world will render the character naive and reprehensible, and the spectator will be properly led to shun the vice or mannerism through laughter rather than through fear of legal reprisal. Here the reconcilements derisively emphasize the perversities of a world characterized by the worship of material possessions.
In The Magnetic Lady Jonson shuts up his circle much as he had opened it thirty-four years earlier. He has used features from his previous works—the intermeane conversation, the comic pointer, the contrivance which draws an aggregation of unusual characters together, and the moral overtones common to the late comedies. Yet, obviously repetitious elements have too easily blinded critics to the relative merits of The Magnetic Lady. The artificial “centre attractive” and the fact that the play was written later than those works considered the masterpieces detract from what is actually one of Jonson’s happier collections of humour characters. But, above all, the play is a personal tour de force. Nothing in it is more evident than the immutability of Jonson’s artistic principles, despite his sickness and flagging popularity. Jonson remains true to the faith of his youth, firm in the humanist’s conviction that drama is an artistic medium for the propagation of entertainment and instruction, and zealous in its defense.