ABSTRACT
The absence of stage history may well be accidental: there are many dramatists who feel that their play did not have a fair run first time out. When Jonson wrote The Magnetick Lady, presumably in 1632, he had been confined by illness to his chamber for about four years and the Induction, making direct reference to his absence, shows that he was all too conscious of not being able to influence the performance by being in the theatre personally. What seems to have happened at the initial performance at the Blackfriars in November 1632 is that a number of Jonson's enemies, amongst whom we must number Inigo Jones, Nathaniel Butter and Alexander Gill, ridiculed what was going on. Moreover there was subsequently a legal problem in that the actors seem to have embroidered the dialogue with unacceptable oaths, drawing the attention of the Court of High Commission at Lambeth. 1 If we add to this a sense that Jonson had never been quite as successful with King Charles as he had been with his father, we get the impression that the odds were against the play. There is admittedly a mocking reference to Arminians and Precisians which might have attracted the attention of Archbishop Laud.2 Perhaps Jonson contributed to his uncertain fortunes by his Ode to Himself which was printed with the first edition of The New Inn in 1631. This was two years after the first performance during which time the Ode had been widely circulated. 3 He wrote,
Come, leave the loathed stage, And the more loathsome age,
Where pride and impudence, in faction knit, Usurp the chair of wit. (1-4)
There was also the contemporary view, sustained by Dryden's later comment about 'dotages', which held that Jonson's powers faded after 1616 though it is now very difficult to decide what this view is based upon.
