ABSTRACT
In Ben Jonson’s The Magnetic Lady, Placentia, a 14 year-old unmarried heiress, goes suddenly into labor. Although she has been eating coal, lime, hair and soap, no one has guessed that she is pregnant, least of all Doctor Rut, who has prescribed marriage as a cure for what he diagnoses as ‘the green sickness’ (1.4.17), ‘a dropsy’ (2.2.37), or ‘a wind bomb’ (2.3.20).2 The women call in the midwife, Mother Chair, who enjoins them to ‘keep these women-matters/Smock-secrets to ourselves, in our own verge’ (4.7.40-41). With Placentia’s inheritance predicated on her virginity, the women decide to bleach the bloody linen, dispatch the illegitimate baby boy to the country, restore the new mother’s breached hymen and get her back on her feet immediately in order to convince the household and its guests that Placentia has had merely a ‘fit o’ the mother’ (5.1.11). Mother Chair’s plot – designed to erase the culturally legible sign of childbirth, the lying-in – very nearly succeeds in convincing the men that no child has been born. It fails only when Jonson himself takes over the midwifery function in the play in order to deliver a witness from the womb of the tiring house.
