The Magnetic Lady

The Magnetic Lady, or Humors Reconciled is a Caroline era stage play, the final comedy of Ben Jonson. It was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 12 October 1632, and first published in 1641, in Volume II of the second folio collection of Jonson's works.

The play was premiered by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre; it was not an overt failure like The New Inn, but does not appear to have been a great success either. The play was criticized by the dramatist's long and seemingly ever-growing list of enemies, Inigo Jones being one example.

As the subtitle indicates, The Magnetic Lady is a humors comedy, a form that Jonson had begun exploring three decades earlier and the last of the type that Jonson would write. The play is supplied with an Induction and a set of entr'actes that Jonson calls "Intermeans," through which the characters Probee and the ignorant Damplay have the play explained to them as it proceeds, by the Boy who's been left in charge of the "Poetique Shop." The focus of the play lies in the wealthy Lady Loadstone and her young, attractive, "marriageable" niece Placentia Steel. Placentia is the target of the amorous ambitions of a set of gulls and fools and hangers-on — Parson Palate, Doctor Rut, Bias, Practice the lawyer, and Sir Diaphanous Silkworm. Lady Loadstone's brother, Sir Moth Interest, is Placentia's financial trustee, and cares about little but maintaining control of her money. This crew is counterbalanced by two Jonsonian men of worth: Compass, Lady Loadstone's faithful steward, and his friend Captain Ironside.

In Lady Loadstone's household, conditions are upside down (at least in the playwright's system of values). Lady Loadstone commands her little domestic world without male rule — in the words of one critic, it is a "feminocentric environment." Yet she cannot manage her household against her obstreperous servants. The governess, Mistress Polish, the midwife, Mother Chair, and the nurse, Mistress Keep (representing the "smock-secrets" of women), are a set of females out of control — a theme that Jonson visits again and again in his works, as in the Ladies Collegiate in Epicene and the chorus of she-critics in The Staple of News.

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