Although The Magnetic Lady is a rich and mature work of art in its own right, it is also an important play for Jonson in two major interlocking ways. First, the play allows him what he thought would be his final summing up of his lifetime achievement as an artist and thinker, demonstrating his still vigorous and frequently daring theatrical experiments, social critiques, and range of intellectual interests. These interests intersected with literature, ancient and modern, rhetoric of all kinds, mathematics as a significant agent in the new science, and the performance of social and cultural responsibility in the economy of a nation currently in a tug-of-war over who wields the power: the king or the Parliament, the theorists or the merchants, the law or the church, itself divided. Second, overlapping with the first, the play lets Jonson offer a major tribute to the family of his best patron, William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, a man whose ‘virtue’ was not merely of blood, but more significantly of merit in all the fields Jonson considered worthwhile: as a soldier, a scholar, and an artist.

Partly paralysed and in poor health by 1632, Jonson planned The Magnetic Lady as the ultimate work that would integrate his dramatic activity from Every Man In His Humour, later revised from an Italian to an English setting, and Every Man Out of His Humour, his first published play in 1600, up to The New Inn, victim of a hostile audience in 1629 (see ‘Ode to Himself’, Und. 23). Jonson describes all of his plays as following the same principle, with ‘some recent humours still, or manners of men, that went along with the times’ (Ind. 78–9). Having stirred up and exposed the foibles of his age throughout his career, he planned this play, ‘finding himself now near the close or shutting up of his circle’ (Ind. 79–80), as a way of coming to terms with the predominantly urban and sophisticated world he had been depicting for more than thirty years. The subtitle, Humours Reconciled, emphasizes his goal as closure, the debates and practices of his lifetime now at an end. But it was not the end of his dramatic production; it was only the end of Jonson’s experiments in city comedy. Before his death he went on to write the rustic Valentine’s Day love-chase, A Tale of a Tub, and most of the Robin Hood pastorale, The Sad Shepherd, both tributes to the Cavendishes of Welbeck near Sherwood Forest.

The Magnetic Lady bears the hallmark of Jonson’s customary complexity of composition, with busy, often jeering, groups of characters noisily distracting the audience from the secrets of the plot until the moment of discovery. Only a few relatively silent characters (Compass, Lady Loadstone, Pleasance) seem to withdraw psychically or physically from groups to await the success of the plot, carefully set up ‘like a skein of silk which, if you take by the right end, you may wind off at pleasure on the bottom 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 elf-lock, which nothing but the shears or a candle will undo or separate’ (Ind. 105–9). Unity of time and place – being on the spot at exactly the right moment – assists the careful unravelling of the story and its happy end. Jonson’s plot, as usual, depends on at least one level-headed, wittily observant character playing the waiting-game, refusing to panic under pressure, until patience pays off: Young Knowell marries his bride in Every Man In His Humour; Dauphine wins his uncle’s money in Epicene; Face gains control over his master’s house with his master’s consent in The Alchemist; Mistress Fitzdottrell acquires financial independence in The Devil Is an Ass; and everyone in The New Inn regains family connections, thanks to Prudence, the incomparable chambermaid. Similarly, The Magnetic Lady’s hero, Compass, the superior strategist, restores a broken family and marries a worthy, wealthy bride.

The Magnetic Lady, like most of Jonson’s comedies, works on the principle of the audacious gamble in face of often unscrupulous competition. The overt occasion is the birthday party of the heiress, Placentia, but the real concern is the girl’s physical condition (is she green-sick, or is she pregnant?) and the consequent need to get her married off to someone who can be responsible for her and her huge estate. The girl’s aunt, Lady Loadstone, is torn between advice from Polish, the girl’s governess, backed by Keep, the nurse, and from Compass, a mathematical scholar who had been Lady Loadstone’s late husband’s trusted companion. Lady Loadstone is the magnetic figure who draws in guests to help solve the problem: the minister, the doctor, and the apothecary are on hand for recovery of soul and body; the suitors – the courtier, the lawyer, the political under-secretary – arrive to compete for the girl’s hand. Ironside, the morally upright soldier, agrees to participate in his friend Compass’s plan to force the girl’s miserly uncle, Sir Moth Interest, into releasing the inheritance without penalty, although Interest himself plans to marry the girl to the politician with a partial pay-off, retaining the bulk of the money for himself.

The organization of plot follows Jonson’s usual practice of gradually introducing characters in the first few acts to achieve a very full stage by Act 3, bustling with activity, followed by a false lulling of the crisis in Act 4, and catastrophic exposure of the truth in Act 5. So the male guests arrive for the party in Act 1; we meet the women of the house in Act 2, including the two girls, Placentia and Pleasance, and we learn that Compass is in love with Pleasance; Act 3 begins after the guests have gone in for dinner, at which a fight breaks out, and Placentia collapses – in premature labour. The midwife arrives in Act 4, followed by a quick delivery and clean-up, all the women prepared to deny that any birth occurred. But the tension produces quarrelling. Compass overhears Polish and Keep reveal the baby-switch of a generation earlier, when Pleasance, the true niece of Lady Loadstone, was exchanged with Placentia, Polish’s daughter, and he takes the opportunity to marry Pleasance immediately. In Act 5, Compass reveals the truth to Lady Loadstone, forces Sir Moth Interest to release the inheritance, and leaves the fates of Polish, Keep, Placentia, her illicit lover Needle, and their infant in the capable hands of Ironside, shortly to become the second husband of the magnetic Lady Loadstone. The false curve of the plot, represented (as Damplay points out) by the curve of Placentia’s pregnant belly, distracts the audience from the real plot, the truth about Pleasance. As in many of Jonson’s plays, the false plot explodes (this time in childbirth, not unlike the literally exploding experiment in The Alchemist), and the explosion precipitates the truth, which actually arrives from another direction.

The preparation and reception of The Magnetic Lady is well documented. It was readied for theatrical production in October 1632. Before the performance was licensed, but certainly while the production was being planned, the news-writer John Pory wrote to Sir Thomas Pickering on 20 September 1632, ‘Ben Jonson (who, I thought, had been dead) hath written a play against next term called The Magnetic Lady’ (Harley MS 7000, f. 336; Life Records, 85). The book-keeper for the King’s Men at Blackfriars paid the £2 fee on 12 October 1632 to acquire a licence for performance from the Master of the Revels, Sir Henry Herbert, who noted: ‘Received of Knight for allowing of Ben Jonson’s play called Humours Reconciled or the Magnetic Lady to be acted’ (Bawcutt, 1996a, 176). The text was not printed until Thomas Walkley’s F2(3) in 1640/41, grouped with A Tale of a Tub and The Sad Shepherd.

The play’s early stage history is also well documented. The 1632 production at Blackfriars – the only production before 1987 – is satirically recorded in Alexander Gil’s verses (‘Upon Ben Jonson’s Magnetic Lady’) as a notable failure, although Jonson’s friends praised the play and condemned those who sneered at it. Outspoken about politics as well as about theatre, Gil, a junior schoolmaster at St Paul’s School, ran into serious trouble with the authorities in 1628 for his criticism of the King’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, and his approval of the Duke’s subsequent assassination. Gil’s attack on Jonson may have arisen opportunely from the lead of two of Jonson’s satiric victims, Nathaniel Butter, mocked as the unprincipled retailer of news in The Staple of News, and Inigo Jones, with whom Jonson had been feuding for years about top billing in masques: who is more important, the poet or the designer of set, costume, and special effects? Jonson lost the battle with Jones, and wrote no more masques for court after 1631. According to Gil, both Jones and Butter came to Blackfriars to jeer the play:

Oh, how thy friend Nat Butter ’gan to melt,

Whenas the poorness of thy plot he smelt;

And Inigo with laughter there grew fat

That there was nothing worth the laughing at.

(Literary Record, Electronic Edition, 15–18)

Although the fifth Chorus of The Magnetic Lady was apparently ‘Changed’ in favour of the ‘epilogue to the King’ that now ends the play, no evidence indicates that a court performance took place. The silencing of the audience at the end of a play is not unusual in Jonson, however. The final Grex (Chorus) of Every Man Out of His Humour (Q1) was also eliminated (although partly restored in F1) in favour of an epilogue which could be adjusted to address the Queen; the chorus of gossips in The Staple of News, the more immediate precedent, has no final say at the end of Act 5. Unfortunately, Jonson could not silence the real audience as authoritatively as his invented ones, judging from Alexander Gil’s response.

Although Gil’s lampoon seems to attack the performance as well as the plot of the play (as an example of ‘bedridden wit’ staged at Blackfriars), his mention of ‘three shameful foils’ (23), a possible reference to the 1631 folio, hotly argued over but never released, suggests that his primary goal is to prevent a ‘paper plague’ (30), the further printing of Jonson’s plays. His particular mention of news-publisher Nathaniel Butter, other printers like Thomas Purfoot and John Trundell, the classing of Jonson’s Works with the output of alamanac-writer Richard Allestree, and the lengthy gibe at how shopkeepers (‘druggers, grocers, cooks, / Victuallers, tobacco men, and suchlike rooks’, 47–8) reuse his printed pages as wrapping paper tell us more about the popular press than about Jonson’s play onstage. Gil also expresses resentment at being told how to respond to a play, and no doubt this feeling was shared by some of Jonson’s audiences, especially those who had been on the receiving end of his satire: Inigo Jones, Butter, and Gil himself, whose father was briefly ridiculed in Time Vindicated to Himself and to His Honours (142–58). Gil’s final mention of the actors Lowin and Taylor might suggest mock-sympathy either for their having to perform in a bad play (Taylor probably played Compass), or, more likely, for being managers of a playhouse losing money on a flop. Lowin and Taylor had managed the King’s Men (Globe and Blackfriars) as major shareholders since 1631. Lowin was probably too old to play Ironside, but might have played a gruff part like Master Damplay or Sir Moth Interest; the only other role he is identified with in the 1630s is the Prologue of The Platonic Lovers (1635), which refers to his thirty years’ service with the King’s Men (Bentley, JCS, 2.500–3).

Otherwise, Gil might be commenting on the trouble the actors got into, possibly for expanding the play with interpolations of their own. Censorship of the play followed performance, although the number of performances in the month preceding this charge is not known. Sir John Pory writes to Sir John Scudamore, 17 November 1632:

The players of the Blackfriars were on Thursday called before the High Commission at Lambeth, and were bound over to answer such articles as should be objected against them. And it is said to be for uttering some profane speeches in abuse of Scripture and holy things, which they found penned for them to act and play in Ben Jonson’s new comedy called The Magnetic Lady. (Life Records, 85)

A year later, the Master of the Revels, Sir Henry Herbert, recorded a settlement of the charge, exonerating his own and Jonson’s competence at controlling staged profanity:

Upon a second petition of the players to the High Commission court, wherein they did me right in my care to purge their plays of all offence, My Lord’s Grace of Canterbury bestowed many words upon me, and discharged me of any blame, and laid the whole fault of their play, called The Magnetic Lady, upon the players. This happened the 24 of October 1633, at Lambeth. In their first petition, they would have excused themselves on me and the poet. (Bawcutt, 1996a, 184)

The intervention of the Court of High Commission indicates that the offence pertained to some doctrinal trespass ‘offensive to church hierarchy’ (Butler, 1991–2, 472), although presumably Herbert overlooked it or did not think it was offensive. The satiric attack on Parson Palate for greed, flexible conscience (marrying Compass to his bride outside of canonical hours), and sycophancy seems merely to recycle literary anticlericalism common since Chaucer, and in any case, the court did not insist on Palate’s removal from the play. But the anti-Arminian (‘worse than papists!’) and anti-moderate or ‘lukewarm’ Protestant views expressed by Polish at 1.5.10–25 were likely to offend Laud, then Bishop of London, who preferred the Arminian programme of formal worship as the route to salvation, rather than Calvinist determinism (Butler, 1991–2, 472–5). Perhaps before Herbert ‘purged’ the script, Jonson had more specific commentary on the Laudian programme, but all that remains are occasional tantalizing references to schism in the church (Ind. 82–5); off-hand references to Palate as ‘our parish pope’ (1.1.87) and to confession (2.4.18); ‘heterogene’ opinions in Ironside’s diatribe on religion or values (2.6.106ff.); snide remarks about ‘doctrines’and ‘uses’ next to a ‘recusant’ preferring ‘French wine’ (3.1.18–21); and Palate’s enthusiasm for the Latin posy in Pleasance’s wedding-ring, about which he promises, ‘I’ll make the whole house chant it, and the parish’ (4.6.54). As Julie Maxwell argues, Jonson’s satire attacks Laud’s policies on elaborate clerical vestments, rituals, and church decoration (cf. Polish’s rage at ‘Their branching sleeves, branched cassocks, and branched doctrine’, 1.5.22). The central event of The Magnetic Lady, Lady Loadstone’s dinner party, is unlikely to be understood, as Maxwell suggests, ‘in terms of a Pauline love feast’, given its offstage location and very different context (Maxwell, 2002, 41–3). But she also contends (persuasively, given Jonson’s love of particular settings), that Jonson directs satire not only at the wealthy neighbourhood located near or on Threadneedle Street and its side-street Bartholomew Lane, served by the parish church known in Jonson’s time as St Bartholomew-Exchange (see 4.6.10–11 and notes), but also at its rector Dr John Grant, a known Laudian sympathizer. Grant had, since 1630, attempted to impose changes on the parish church despite often fierce resistance from the vestry council, who opposed fencing off the communion table and the vicar’s refusal to allow its practical use for parish meetings. The play’s level of particular mockery may have been the cause of the High Commission’s extended debate on the play, at a time when ecclesiastical authorities were trying to silence controversial opinions (Maxwell, 2002, 47–56). On the other hand, the high court’s intervention in the Master of the Revels’s authority and their dragging out the case over a year also coincided with their questioning of several other plays, especially Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, which seemed to voice both anti-Catholic and specifically anti-Henrietta Maria opinions about dominant women (Petruccio’s second wife is named Maria) (Dutton, 1998b, 54). The degree of threat here is high, in other words, even though the court’s decision on The Magnetic Lady eventually was forgiving. The second verdict absolving Herbert was a relief because if he had been removed from his post, Jonson, who held the frst reversion, might have suffered the embarrassment of replacing him as Master of the Revels, even though the players initially blamed Jonson equally with Herbert (Dutton, 1998b, 41–2). The actors seemed to suffer no long-term distress for accepting the blame; Joseph Taylor later became Yeoman of the Revels in 1639, serving under Sir Henry Herbert, who apparently retained no hard feelings (Bentley, JCS, 2.596).

This censorship from ecclesiastical authorities demonstrates the degree to which Jonson remained, even in his sickroom, a rebellious critical thinker, getting his digs in despite potential retaliation by authorities more significant than Alexander Gil, a mere gnat beside the hive of legal and political officialdom in London. As usual, Jonson’s plot is largely original, combed through with buried references to his favourite classical sources (Plautus, Terence, Horace, Homer) and explicitly to Chaucer’s ‘General Prologue’ to The Canterbury Tales, which he used as a model for the character sketches of Act 1 and elsewhere (see annotations). The child-exchange, the plotting servants, and the hints of witchcraft are features not only of new comedy (Terence is mentioned in the Ind. 33), but also of popular romance, folk tale, and contemporary theatre. A good model or analogue is Lyly’s Mother Bombie (c. 1591), also closely based on Roman comedy: the local witch eventually elicits the confession of how Vicinia, a wet nurse, exchanged her two children, placing them with different families to give them a better future (Polish’s motive). Ultimately Vicinia exposes her own plot in order to prevent incest and help her foster-children to marry. The money motive here is not greed, but concern for those who cannot care for themselves, and, happily enough, the parents who fostered Vicinia’s defective children agree to maintain them as wards – possibly the future envisioned for Placentia. Another source for stories about changelings (aside from the fairy belief exploited in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) is Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hoxton (first performed c. 1605); this witch runs a number of businesses that include a health and midwifery service, with a side-market in the adoption of bastards, who might otherwise burden the poor of the parish and destroy the reputations of the mothers. When asked ‘what after becomes of the poor infants?’, the wise woman responds, ‘Why, in the night we send them abroad, and lay one at this man’s door, and another at that, such as are able to keep them; and what after becomes of them, we inquire not’ (see 3.1). This seems also to be Mother Chair’s plan (see 4.7.1–3, 23ff., and 5.10.70n.), rather than the more grisly infanticide to render baby-fat for flying ointment as in Middleton’s The Witch (1616). Midwifery information may have come from Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia (1615, revised in 1631), or one of the influential European texts translated into English: Jacques Guillemeau, Childbirth (1612), and Eucharius Rosslin, The Birth of Mankind (1540 and 1545) (see Hobby, 2001, for further discussion of these early texts).

An important theatrical source for Placentia’s undiagnosed pregnancy is commedia dell’arte, where the usual joke (domestic versus university-educated wit) is that the pregnant girl is the Doctor’s daughter. In Flaminio Scala’s ‘The Fake Magician’ (1611) in Scenarios of the Commedia dell’Arte: Flaminio Scala’s Il teatro delle favole rappresentative (trans. Henry F. Salerno, 1967), two pregnant women escape detection: Pantelone’s daughter pretends to be sick with dropsy, and the Doctor’s daughter pretends to be possessed (loosely parallel to Needle’s sleepwalking and prophesying). A physician suggests, like Rut, that the dropsy victim marry as soon as possible to relieve her condition. Arlecchino, in a conspiracy with other servants, disguises himself as a magician who exorcises the household by trapping the two fathers in magic circles and terrifying them into agreeing to two weddings to release the girl’s demon. A variation on the Arlecchino disguise in the same Scala collection appears in another scenario, ‘Flavio the Fake Magician’, in which Flavio, like Compass, uses his superior wit to disturb and then reconcile a household so that he can outwit rivals and marry the daughter. Jonson used Scala’s figures earlier in The Vision of Delight (1617), and was at least aware of commedia traditions, if not Scala’s work, when he wrote Volpone. Medical detail on tympanies, also mentioned in The Cavendish Entertainment (1618–19), comes from Lanfranke of Mylayne, translated by John Halle (1565).

The conspiracy and quarrel among the women partly derive from Gammer Gurton’s Needle (c. 1550), another classically indebted comedy which pits male university-educated wit against female domestic knowledge in a clever plot about a missing needle – the sign of the phallic and economic power binding social relations. Hodge’s torn breeches prevent him from working and from courting, and because of his dependence upon the household economy (like Needle) his future depends on the women’s ability to ‘keep a nee’le’ in its proper place (see Wall, 2002, ch. 2). The association of the needle with pleasure explains Needle’s alliance with Placentia. The pompous interference of Dr Rat (a close homophone for Dr Rut), which ends with his being caught in a privy conduit and beaten, loosely sets up Dr Rut’s violent ‘cure’ of Interest, including the tumble down the well; and Diccon, like Compass, deliberately puts two groups of women at odds before he reveals the truth about the needle and reconciles all the humours he aroused.

A similarly important source is Massinger’s The Roman Actor, performed by the King’s Men in 1626 with Joseph Taylor as Paris, and published in 1629: this play uses a structure of plays within the play, including various onstage audiences who respond, sometimes inappropriately, to what they see. This is especially true of Act 2’s ‘The Cure of Avarice’, imitated in The Magnetic Lady, 3.4 (see 7 SDn. and 32n.): a miserly patient enters unconscious in a chair and the doctor attempts to cure him with violence, loud noise, and opening and scattering his hoard as a way of opening his mind to cure, as Rut does in offering equivocal purges of Interest’s ‘purse’ and other places afflicted with ‘stoppages’. Massinger’s doctor promises, ‘I will cause a fearful dream / To steal into his fancy, and disturb it / With the horror it brings with it, and so free / His body’s organs’ (2.1.324–7), a plan Rut follows with the sleepwalking scheme in 5.5, 7, and 10, which also owes a debt to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In another structural similarity to Jonson’s play, The Roman Actor develops and concludes with a conspiracy of women who ultimately get their revenge on Caesar before their own capture, unrepentant confession, and punishment. Despite the generic differences between Massinger’s tragedy and Jonson’s comedy, the larger theatrical concepts are strikingly similar in their choices of how to use spectacle and audience response in the service of understanding ideas.

A final significant source for the play is in the Cavendish family ‘romance’: the quest of the younger son of Bess of Hardwick, Sir Charles Cavendish, to separate himself from the horrifically powerful matriarch of the clan and build his own family circle based on affectionate forebearance, close friendship, intelligent skills, and diplomacy, for which his own sons were later renowned. Central to that quest were his friendship with his stepbrother Gilbert Talbot, later Earl of Shrewsbury, and his marriage to Katherine Ogle, the woman whom Jonson first described as ‘magnetic’ (see ‘Katherine Ogle’, 1629, 6.315–16, line 19). The children of that marriage, William and Charles, benefited significantly from their mother’s courage and determination in re-establishing the title to the Ogle barony, as much as they did from their Cavendish and Talbot connections.

When Anne Barton commented on William Cavendish’s patronage of Jonson and their friendship as cemented in a nostalgic ‘harking back to Elizabeth’ (Barton, 1981, 706), she alerted readers to important links with the Cavendish family in The New Inn, The Magnetic Lady, and A Tale of A Tub, as well as in the commissioned Welbeck (1633) and Bolsover (1634) entertainments for Charles and Henrietta Maria. She identified Lovel in The New Inn as a compliment to Cavendish, the soldier and scholar; Cavendish modelled his own play, The Variety, on The Magnetic Lady, with a rich widow as heroine; he also borrowed the jeerers from The Staple of News and a hero based on Manly and Wittipol from The Devil Is an Ass (707–9). But Barton’s insistence on nostalgia for the age of Elizabeth as a new direction for Jonson’s late plays, and on what she sees as his ‘Shakespearean’ mode, seems perversely to ignore Jonson’s consistent values as a playwright and masque-maker. The large gap in Barton’s theory is that she ascribes bardolatrously to Shakespeare what she should be ascribing to Jonson’s interests from the beginning of his career, when he invented the comical satires and developed the antimasque and masque – the revelation of the ideal lurking behind or beyond the reach of earthly and demonic powers who try to destroy it, or at least dismay or discompose it. The original ending of Every Man Out gives a miniaturized masque effect of the sudden purifying power of the Queen: she passes over the stage and in so doing converts Macilente’s envy into profound community spirit. As the plays tended less to focus on the ideal and more to focus on consequences of the real (Volpone, Epicene, The Devil Is an Ass) and the need for toleration in a fallen world (The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair), the masques developed the stunning contrasts between warm, messy, capering, appetitive life and the cool purity of ideal truth. Jonson’s late plays, like Shakespeare’s, move towards reconciliation, but that is not to say that Jonson was operating in a Shakespearean mode: the masquelike ending of Every Man Out (see Ostovich, 1992) precedes the masquelike ending of The New Inn (see Ostovich, 1997), and in between those experiments, shooting up among the early court masques, are Shakespeare’s masquing variants in Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Both men, probably working from mutual influence through their contact in the King’s Men, played with the same ideas but came up with different theatrical results.

Jonson’s early plays, like his late plays, are part of a continuing experiment that balances the ideal against the real. His nostalgia was not so much for Elizabethan values as for those enduring values that modern fashion tends to discount. He expresses and critiques those values in various ways that hark all the way back to Aristophanes and even earlier playwrights who opened the gates and served as guides to Jonson’s muse. His continuing effort to educate his audiences about the recovery and updating of still pertinent, if ancient, wisdom appears in the Grex of Every Man Out, the complaints of the elder Knowell in Every Man In, and generally in the Aristophanic comedy of the humours plays. The recourse to Aristophanes is by definition nostalgia that pits youth against age, as the older generation tries to hold on to its power. Aristophanes shapes Jonson’s Jacobean comic characters who either, like the middle-aged Volpone, want to relive the power and excitement of their own youth (as when Volpone acted Antinous) or, like elderly Morose in Epicene, try to recover the past by marrying a young, silent, and obedient woman. The impulse reverses in his nephew Dauphine, who yearns for the power of the middle-aged, with their sexual (the aging Ladies Collegiate) or financial (Morose) security. So too in The Alchemist, the widower Lovewit returns to profit from his cheeky servant’s alchemy game by marrying Dame Pliant, who not only enriches him, but also makes him feel spry and sexually athletic. In Bartholomew Fair, Justice Overdo tries (and fails) to restore the sterner morality he thinks he remembers from his youth – just as the elderly stage-keeper of the Induction wants Jonson to revive the clowns and pranks of the 1570s and 1580s. The puppet show of Act 5 does just that – revives Marlowe in a crude burlesque that celebrates ultimately the wisdom of Dionysian theatre. It is not simply the moral interlude demons of The Devil Is an Ass that mark a turning point in Jonson’s career. Jonson had been, in one way or another, harking back and bringing forward anything that sparked his imagination, from ancient Greece and Rome to Chaucer, Lyly, Marlowe, and, yes, Shakespeare – as well as very up-to-date acknowledgements of impressive youngsters like Massinger.

The real mark of difference in Jonson’s late work may be the influence of the Earl of Newcastle as Jonson’s new patron. In the Cavendishes, Jonson found admirers of his intellect, promotion of his sensitivity in his eulogies for members of the Cavendish family, and delight in his masques and entertainments, especially those written for the Cavendishes, The Cavendish Christening Entertainment and the entertainments at Welbeck and Bolsover. He also shared their intellectual interests in the new science, typified in both ancient and current works on magnetism, such as Claudian, Magnes (see epigraph), Gilbert, De magnete (1600), Ridley (A Short Treatise, 1613; 1617), and Barlow (Magnetical Advertisements, 1616; 1618). Jonson admired Cavendish’s intellectual involvement in the new philosophy and science of the day, as for example his mathematical improvements on the art of dressage and his architectural talent revealed in the stable at Bolsover (Und. 53), or his friendship with Hobbes, who later wrote a ‘mathematical demonstration’ for Cavendish’s treatise on swordsmanship (see Raylor, 1999b, and Und. 59). The mathematicial studies of William and Charles Cavendish help to explain the tribute Jonson embedded in The Magnetic Lady.

Why did Jonson characterize Compass as a ‘scholar mathematic’ from Oxford? What kind of intelligence is he defining with this information? The answer turns out to be both simpler and far more complicated than the play’s metaphor of the mariner’s compass which controls meaning in the play (Ostovich, 1994). By 1632, Oxford was a centre of mathematical learning, mostly owing to Henry Briggs, brother of Jonson’s friend Richard Briggs (see Letter 13 and Brock, 1983, 26). Henry Briggs was appointed the first Oxford professor of geometry in 1619 on the basis of his development of John Napier’s gentleman-scholarly hobby, the invention of logarithms (1614). The history of English mathematics in the early modern period begins in the 1550s with Robert Record, who set a standard for the intelligent study of practical mathematics by defending its application to other fields of knowledge in his preface to The Whetstone of Wit (1557) as a kind of key to the ‘castle of knowledge’ housing law, medicine, divinity, astronomy, navigation, and the weights and measures so necessary to the running of any business or institution. Expanding on Record, John Dee’s Mathematical Preface (1570) argues that mathematics provides the logic that informs our understanding of all things physical and metaphysical because we are looking for the lines, planes, numbers, that will allow us to connect concepts and apply a method of comprehension. As a mathematical scholar, then, Compass is able to predict, subvert, or absorb the schemes of all the plotters, representing all classes and occupations, in Lady Loadstone’s house, thus ensuring the ultimate success of his own su-perior plot. Mathematics, as a study of logical principles and practical applications, prepares the mind for anything that requires the processing of relations and functions.

Alongside this mathematical quest to comprehend the shape and functioning of the universe, especially after 1600, was a simpler fascination with the mathematical tools themselves. Although many of the tools (like the mariner’s compass) were certainly used, many were objets d’art acquired and displayed for their beauty and curiosity value (see Oxford’s online illustrated catalogue, Epact: Scientific Instruments of Medieval and Renaissance Europe, which publishes holdings from the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford; the Museum of the History of Science, Florence; the British Museum, London; and the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden). The invention of these tools and the theories behind them often came from ordinary men of middling education and practical experience, who learned their mathematical skills from numerous books, tables, and public lectures devoted to the subject in the post-Record mathematical explosion, and for whom mathematics was both a spur to professional and financial advancement and a pleasure for its own sake. By 1630, Edmund Wingate, in Arithmetic Made Easy, assumes that everyone can work with logarithms well enough to follow his solutions for the calculation of interest, which the reader can then test by solving the following problem (pp. 473–6):

A having a daughter of the age of 3 years, delivers at the same time a thousand marks or 666l. 13s. 4d. upon condition that B shall deliver unto his daughter at the age of 15 years two thousand marks, or (which is all one) 1333l. 6s. 8d. Now the question is, at what rate B enjoys the 666l. 13s. 4d. that it may augment to 666l. 13s. 4d. in 12 years: facit at the rate of 5.19 per centum. For here first I deduct 2,82390, the logarithm of 1333.6.8; this done, their difference is 30103, which if I divide by 12, the quotient is 2508.6; this quotient if I add to 2.00000, the logarithm of 100, the sum is 2.02509, which is the logarithm of 105l. 19s. I conclude therefore, that the 666.13.4 will increase in 12 years to 1333.6.8 at the rate of 5.19 per centum, which is the facit or resolution of the question propounded, as aforesaid.

No wonder then that Sir Moth Interest engages almost constantly in the computation of interest on his niece’s inheritance, working with more complicated numbers than Wingate’s 5 per cent, given that the official interest rate was 10 per cent up to 1624, and then changed to 8 per cent.

The popularity of mathematical problems appears in another phenomenon of the times: the game book. Claude-Gaspar Bachet de Méziriac’s Problèmes plaisans et délectables (Paris, 1612) was the basis for Récréations mathématiques, a hefty volume divided into three parts totalling 350 pages not counting the many tables, first compiled in 1624 by Henry Van Etten, and then expanded (1629) and translated into various languages including English. It offers a variety of problems, ranging from sophisticated mathematical puzzles to facetious logic, jests, and magic tricks. Some problems involve testing counterfeit money: how does one correctly determine which box is full of gold and which full of lead, if they look identical from the outside and weigh the same (1.58)? Such problems resemble Compass’s problem of sorting out which girl is the true niece and heiress and which is the ‘slip’ or false coin. Another problem that seems to pre-echo Compass’s wit concerns circles: which is more difficult and astonishing, to make a perfect circle without a compass, or to find the centre and middle of the circle? (1.86). The answer is the former, as all of Compass’s rivals discover, and as the end of Jonson’s Induction reveals about the playwright’s intentions in completing the perfect circle of his career.

If mathematics had, by 1632, ‘now become a game’ testing the skill of the players (see the first line of the translated dedicatory verse, ‘To the most worthy author’, in John Napier’s Rabdology, 1617, 1990, a text describing three devices to aid arithmetical calculations), it had also become a fierce battle to stake claims on intellectual and economic property. Jonson’s Induction makes clear that the battle also extended to theatrical property, as the Boy’s huckstering (‘What do you lack, gentlemen?’1ff.) within the ‘poetic shop’ indicates. In scientific circles, the ‘magnetic’ rivalry of Barlow and Ridley (see 1.4.5n.), both students of William Gilbert, who wrote the initial study De magnete (1600) in consultation with other scholars, was parallelled by other rivalries in the creation of better tables and instruments of measurement, like the competition between William Oughtred and his students Richard Delamain and William Forster over who should claim to have invented the slide rule (1631–2). The Magnetic Lady presents a broadly comparable situation: several people of different backgrounds and orientations attempt to attain the same goal (the heiress and her fortune), and most of them fail because their narrow understanding of how to navigate through obscure or partly known territory limits them. The real competition, Polish, the inventive governess who represents women’s education, almost reaches the goal first, but she is hampered by her lack of a strong theoretical position. She has the instruments and the practical authority to use them, but her grasp of the larger situation is inadequate, partly because of timing and partly because of miscalculations based on incomplete information. Only Compass, the scholar mathematic from Oxford, has access to theory and practice in many fields – especially the theory and application of magnetism – and the ability to navigate through military strategy (Ironside), divinity (Palate), law (Practice), politics (Bias), finance (Interest), medicine (Rut and Item), and court diplomacy (Silkworm). As a result, he is able to control and compensate for all the competing directional pulls in order to arrive at the destination he seeks: a rich wife. Pleasance Steel’s name says it all. She gives pleasure; and her maiden ‘steel’, touched by Lady Loadstone’s power, is strengthened magnetically, empowering both herself and her new husband to enjoy a secure future. Compass would certainly agree with Robert Record that ‘Besides the mathematical arts there is no infallible knowledge, except that it be borrowed from them’ (O’Connor and Robertson, 2001, Record entry).

Mathematics, however, was the province of men; female knowledge was limited to the basic arithmetic of household accounts, especially multiplying and the subsequent subtracting of child from mother. Such ‘women-matters, / Smock-secrets’ (4.7.40–1) have a three-pronged representation in the play through the midwife, the (wet) nurse, and the governess, who, like the triple Hecate, form an alliance controlling menstruation and pregnancy (the role of Selene, the moon-driver), fertility and childbirth (presided over by Artemis, the moon goddess), and retaliation against men (a Fury, associated with Hecate, goddess of the dark side of the moon) (see Ostovich, 1999, 99–101). Jonson offers a more jocular representation of this trio in Dugs, Kecks, and Holdback, the nurses and midwife of The Cavendish Christening Entertainment, and alludes to Hecate’s power in several masques, from The Masque of Queens (1609) to Time Vindicated (1623). Between 1512 and 1720, midwives were licensed by the Church of England, because of concerns over infant baptism, sorcery, illegitimacy, and medical competence. Their oaths included promises to rely on ‘cunning’ (skill and experience, not witchcraft), to report bastard births, never to harm or switch infants, and to keep delivery-room secrets from men (Evenden, 2000, 24–8, and Cressy, 1997, 65–6). Although Mother Chair seems prepared to bend some of her oaths of office, she holds firm on patient confidentiality until the charge of infanticide forces her to speak out. Her authoritative presence confirms that midwives were respected women in the community who maintained ‘long-term and intimate relationships’ with clients, on whom they depended for repeat business and referrals (Evenden, 2000, 90–1). Although Jonson does run a witchcraft motif through his depiction of the gang of three, the women’s activities merely reveal a female version of male cunning in reaching a desired goal; Jonson never suggests that a male midwife (like Dr Rut) would be more competent or trustworthy (see Sanders, 1999c).

Nurse Keep, by contrast to Chair, seems more sentimental, less rational, responding by feeling hurt rather than acting efficiently in the difficult situation that develops. Although Jonson does not explain the logistics of wet-nursing in the women’s conspiracy, clearly three women had infants at about the same time: the late Mistress Steel, Polish, and Keep. Either Keep nursed all three infants, or her own infant died or was weaned so that she could nurse two; or Polish nursed her own infant, as a good puritan mother should (see Cressy, 1997, 89) while Keep nursed the Steel infant. At some point, Polish decided to switch the infants’ indenties, probably after the two-year nursing period, when she took over the training of the heiress before delivering her fully ‘Polished’ at age twelve to her aunt, Lady Loadstone (1.4.46). Although Jonson does not specify the division of duties in nursing and raising the girls, or why the device escaped detection, he relies on common fears that breast-feeding of an upper-class child by a lower-class nurse permitted the infiltration of class difference that could potentially corrupt English culture. Such nursing also explains why so many children failed to resemble their parents: they suck in the milk of the wet nurse and are re-bred with her worker’s blood, thus eroding the dominant culture, diminished because the nurse has appropriated the role of parent (Wall, 2002, 36–8). Jonson, however, argues for heredity (nature over nurture) in the superiority of the true heiress. If (as I speculate) Polish nursed her own daughter while Keep nursed Pleasance, Keep’s impulse to honesty and her discomfort with personal guilt are partly responsible for maintaining Pleasance’s elite moral instincts, while Polish’s aggressive creation of an ersatz heiress fails because Placentia has sucked in falseness, exposed as aggressive sexuality, with her mother’s milk. As Damplay objects in Chorus 3, 1–3 (see notes), structuring the play on the ‘pitiful poor shift’ of Placentia’s pregnancy and labour makes a negative statement on how women’s physicality overwhelms female intellectual aspirations.

Polish is the most significant member of the domestic triumvirago-ate: she is the governess, the godmother, and the decision-maker who manipulates the midwife and the nurse into keeping the family secret. Her plot combines several strands in the play’s ‘skein of silk’, navigating her course as the ‘fly’ on the mariner’s compass, and, for modern audiences, seeming to co-operate with cultural materialist and feminist agendas to challenge class and gender prejudices. Middle-class notions of education allow her to gain power by accepting that children may be better reared in households other than the ones they are born into, and give her twelve years (1.4.39ff.) in which to train the girls for their life-roles (see Ostovich, 1997, on women’s early education in relation to The New Inn).

Her role in training the girls also places Polish in the position of the cruel stepmother found in folk tales like Cinderella, or its Scottish version, Rashin-Coatie, first printed in 1540. Cinderella stories require at least two girls: one the true heiress, the other an interloper. The interloper gains access to the heiress’s rights through the power of the governess or stepmother, who supplants the true child with her own daughter. The rightful heiress is then degraded in status, usually to the kitchen hearth, her true self hidden from all, until magic means channel the power of the heiress’s dead mother, mitigating the girl’s harsh treatment and ultimately helping to restore her proper place in society. Often this restoration requires the agency of a prince, who falls in love with the rightful heiress, recognizes her virtue in her goodness or beauty, and offers to marry her. The secret recognition and betrothal while Cinderella is still in her humble state seems to be vital to the tale as the magic that ensures she can permanently escape her servitude.

In Jonson’s play, Pleasance (the Cinderella) has been displaced by Placentia as the Steel heiress. Instead of a pet calf or a fairy godmother, the magic resides in the Steel family genes and the magnetic metaphor, represented by Lady Loadstone, which ensures that true steel, magnetized by the loadstone, draws the true prince, Compass, to her rescue. Compass’s humanist cunning as an Oxford scholar mathematic allows him to figure out the plot and defeat the domestic cunning of Polish and her circle. Polish tries to get rid of Pleasance by locking her into an ‘old bottle-house / Where they scraped trenchers’ (5.9.49), until Polish can marry Placentia off to a wealthy husband, but Compass locates Pleasance and restores her to her rights – by law, not by the magic test of silk shoe or glass slipper. Although Polish jeers that Compass ‘has fished fair and caught a frog’ (5.2.4), magically the frog he kisses turns out to be a bride whose wealth and beauty give the tale its happy ending.

Jonson prepares his audience for that happy ending in two ways: through the discussions of the play in the Chorus, and through the analogy to Cavendish family history. The Boy tells his audience in the Induction that Jonson, ‘finding himself now near the close or shutting up of his circle, hath fancied to himself in idea this magnetic mistress’ (Ind. 79–81). Jonson first used ‘magnetic’ in its figurative sense in his ‘Epitaph on Katherine, Lady Ogle’ (1629) to describe this mathematically perfect lady whose ‘just symmetry, / In number, measure, or degree / Of weight, or fashion’ (6.315–16, lines 22–4), defined not only an inspiring figure for her family, but also an exemplar for the entire world: ‘All circles had their spring and end / In her, and what could perfect be, / Or without angles, it was she!’ (14–16). Jonson may have met Katherine (Ogle) Cavendish during his journey to Scotland, when he may have stopped at Welbeck Abbey, since he had been asked to write the inscription for the plaque on her husband’s monument at Bolsover. Since then, he might have met her while preparing The Cavendish Christening Entertainment, a celebration commissioned from Jonson by her elder son William for the christening of her grandson or great-nephew Charles Cavendish (that is, either the son of Newcastle or of his cousin the second Earl of Devonshire; no record identifies the child, but both men had sons at about the same time). Perhaps a further occasion of meeting was after the death of Katherine’s older sister Jane, for whom Jonson wrote a memorial poem (‘To the Memory of that Most Honoured Lady Jane, Eldest Daughter to Cuthbert, Lord Ogle, and Countess of Shrewsbury’, 5.715).

Doubtless, Jonson had heard stories about Katherine and her husband Sir Charles Cavendish of Welbeck, whether from his patron or from other sources, that inspired him to write a play loosely praising herself, her husband, and their sons. Katherine Ogle, the younger daughter of the wealthy northern baron of Bothal, Sir Cuthbert Ogle, had apparently lost her right to her father’s barony when it fell into abeyance between Jane and herself for lack of a male heir. Although their mother continued to live at Bothal until her death in 1622/3, Jane (Ogle) Talbot, later Countess of Shrewsbury, failed in her petition to James for the title in 1606; no record exists of any earlier petition to Elizabeth. After Jane’s death in 1625, Katherine, now sole heir, petitioned Charles I, from whom she ‘obtained special letters patents . . . bearing date the 4^th of December, in the 4^th year of his reign [1628], declaring her to be Baroness Ogle, of Ogle in Com. Northumberland, as also ratifying that title of honour to her and her heirs forever’ (Cokayne, 1945, 10.37). Although the 1591 marriage between Katherine Ogle and Sir Charles Cavendish was evidently arranged, it was apparently a loving one, and very likely the two knew each other before their wedding as part of the extended Cavendish–Talbot clan, since Jane had married Charles’s stepbrother Edward Talbot in 1583, and Charles himself was particularly close to his older stepbrother/brother-in-law Gilbert Talbot. The Talbots’ sister Mary later married Jonson’s other long-term patron, the Earl of Pembroke; Jonson knew Mary Talbot well enough to tease her about the status of wives, and write a poem as ‘penance’ (see Forest 7).

Given that the Cavendishes were a very clannish clan, with close ties to extended family and important places at court, thanks to their ambitious matriarch Bess of Hardwick, Jonson had ample opportunity to have heard about Sir Charles Cavendish of Welbeck’s exploit of 1599, an incident so swashbuckling and romantic that all hearers must be impressed by his heroism. Sir Charles had attempted to mediate in disputes between Gilbert and the Stanhopes. When he was out riding one morning with two of his wife’s relatives, Henry and Launcelot Ogle (the latter a boy acting as Charles’s page), attended only by one groom, Stanhope attacked him with twenty horsemen. Sir Charles’s horse stumbled, and while he was down, they shot at him, but despite wounds all over his body he and his companions used rapiers and daggers to fight back, killing two, unhorsing six, and severely wounding another two. One of the finest swordsmen of his day, Sir Charles gleefully recorded the day’s spoils of victory: several good horses, two or three cloaks, some hats, a sword, two rapiers, and a dagger. The Queen censured Stanhope as the aggressor.

Echoes of this story seem to lie behind the figure of Ironside in The Magnetic Lady, as he generates fear among the other men in the house in 2.4, 3.3, 3.5 (particularly the argument about valour and duelling), and 4.2. In the play, his valour and modesty win him the love of Lady Loadstone, parallelling the love that seemed to exist in the senior Cavendish marriage. Charles’s will left his wife all his personal estate, plus a life-interest in all the family chattels, with outright ownership of the plate in her cupboard and her bed: ‘And he did appoint the said Lady Katherine Cavendish executrix of the said will’ (Collins, 1752, 22). The monument at Bolsover records the ‘Sad and Weeping Remembrance of his Sorrowful Lady Katherine’, who devised the memorial with her sons (Collins, 1752, 23; and Parry, 1994a), and Jonson’s later epitaph for her records the bright side of her death: her reunion with ‘her lovèd lord’ (39). The couple generally lived at Welbeck, busying themselves with estate management, building renovations, and encouraging their sons’ intellectual and social skills. Even the audience’s perception of offstage space in The Magnetic Lady seems to compliment the Cavendish zeal for renovation and Vitruvian architectural principles of proportion and balance, followed in the rebuilding of Bolsover Castle. In the play, we enter Lady Loadstone’s house near the Old Exchange from the street in Act 1, and from Act 2 on, we become aware of spaces adjacent to the main reception room: the dining-room, so vital to the Act 3 crisis at the table, for which Jonson supplies a clear seating-plan; two bed-chambers, Placentia’s, to which she is carried when she collapses, and Lady Loadstone’s (3.3); Compass’s chamber in which he and Pleasance are married, with Ironside as witness (4.6); Sir Moth’s chamber, where he conducts business; hallways through which servants pass (4.1) or argue (4.4); the buttery, where Polish hides the bride (5.2), and the garden where Sir Moth falls down the well (5.10). The other concept of space comes from the Chorus, clearly located in the theatre at Blackfriars, where two stage-sitters discuss the scenes with Trygust, the poet’s representative in the company. Their discussion of theatre as a stimulus for a thinking audience brings us back to Jonson’s tribute to the Cavendish family, where intellectual growth stemmed from family affection and physical energy.

Aside from training his sons in estate management and renovation, Sir Charles Cavendish trained both William and Charles in horsemanship and swordsmanship. William inherited his father’s athletic ability, spending more time on sports than on books at university, and because his father recognized that intelligence and charm would take him far, he encouraged his son to perfect his skills with horses and weapons. William’s intellectual and creative life as playwright and patron of arts and sciences emerged later, partly out of the continuing affectionate contact with his brother. The younger son Charles ‘was inclined, from his youth to learning, and became a great proficient in the study of the mathematics, wherein he was singularly well versed’ (Collins, 1752, 24), corresponding with such men as Oughtred, Hobbes, Descartes, Fermat, and other notable scholars in Europe. His modern biographer particularly praises Charles as a sound interpreter of ‘his own physical experiments’, and an ‘appreciative’ patron of scientists, ‘by asking intelligent questions or formulating valuable objections, and by helping the circulation and exchange of scientific information’ (Jacquot, 1952, 13).

On this basis, Charles seems a likely model for the Oxford scholar mathematic, Compass. Although Charles was not robustly healthy like his brother, he was, by contemporary standards, ‘a man of the noblest and largest mind, though the least and most inconvenient body that lived’ (Collins, 1752, 24), and like his brother performed well in military service. His sister-in-law Margaret (Lucas) Cavendish later eulogized him as ‘a person of so great worth, such extraordinary civility, so obliging a nature, so full of generosity, justice, and charity, besides all manner of learning, especially in the mathematics, that not only his friends, but even his enemies, did much lament his loss’ (Memoirs of William Cavendish, 1880, 25). The ‘brotherly’ relationship between Ironside and Compass seems to replicate the brotherly warmth between the Cavendishes, who had, besides their boyhood at Welbeck and military training, shared the experience of touring Europe with Sir Henry Wotton in 1610–12. Wotton, an old friend of Jonson’s, would be another source of information about the brothers and their escapades, especially since Jonson too had had the experience of shepherding a teenager (Ralegh’s son) through France in 1613.

Even more significantly, the philosophy expressed in Jonson’s play echoes the Cavendish interest in Hobbes, a frequent visitor at Welbeck since at least 1630, who discussed with them his ideas on the principles of natural science, ‘and sought to explain sensation, imagination, and thought in terms of motion’ (Jacquot, 1952, 17) – a concept that lies behind Compass’s argument in 3.3, especially 116–23, as he expounds the difference between imagining an act and performing it. Similarly, the play expresses an interest in optics and the physiology of perception as the underlying factor of psychology: witness the difficulty characters have in seeing Placentia’s condition and accepting what it is; how Polish’s plot depends upon that very ‘double-think’ of perception in the baby-switch, and in Jonson’s whole fascination with good and bad audiences as represented onstage – an interest, to be sure, that precedes Hobbes (see Every Man Out of His Humour, Induction and Grex), but one that became richer and more problematic over time.

Indeed, Jonson makes it clear from the Induction that he is deliberately recollecting Every Man Out of His Humour as he completes the circle of his career: the play-within-a-play format, the onstage audience’s discussions which draw attention to the play’s structure and purpose, and the offstage and backstage tension between theatre-workers and audience are all features of Jonson’s earlier work. Other echoes of Jonson’s earlier works, beginning with Every Man Out of His Humour and continuing throughout his writing for the stage, include the choice of representative types (the lawyer, the courtier who cares most for his clothes, the parasite, the grasping merchant), the specific urban location or resort, and the commedia dell’arte farce routines. The focus on performance also tests the audience’s knowledge of the classical stage and of contemporary practice in specific theatres, often pointedly teasing the audience with pornographic stagings, like the libidinous focus on Placentia’s pregnancy, hotly complained of by Damplay, who reminds us indirectly of other staged pregnancies that focus on their sexual origins (The Duchess of Malfi, The Winter’s Tale, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and The Birth of Merlin, to name a few). Other Jonsonian preferences appear in the staging of groups, often marked by lightly veiled hostility, watching one another critically, muttering asides within groups, and attacking across groups, moving towards a full stage which audiences can assess by recognizing degrees of competence or wit. Part of that process of recognition depends on the audience’s literacy, in learned as well as popular writings, and on observations of contemporary life and current affairs.

Through such complex tactics, Jonson reminds us that theatre jogs our understandings, toying with our fantasies; the onstage audience is important in helping us, the offstage audience, separate our emotional or physical responses from our intellectual judgements. The point is not to agree with the onstage audience, but to try to resolve the questions they ask or the objections they raise. As Rowe (1984) has argued of The New Inn and The Sad Shepherd, and Fitzmaurice (1998) of the Cavendish entertainments, Jonson’s celebration of the Cavendishes in The Magnetic Lady offers the kind of teasing praise that is a keynote of Jonsonian theatre, addressing a particular, intelligent audience, who will be judiciously appreciative of his work. If Jonson expresses, more clearly than other playwrights, his own anxieties at the public reception of his art, that clarity is a feature of Jonson’s self-conscious metatheatricality in urging the value of that art. Surely that desire motivates all playwrights who hope they will stimulate the mind and tickle the senses in pleasures communally shared in the theatre and individually savoured later in recollection.