The tender mother and the faithful wife: theater, charity, and female subjectivity in eighteenth-century Ireland

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Fall-Winter, 2002 by Susan Harris

I. NO PLACE FOR A LADY

IN 1745, thanks largely to the efforts of Irish obstetrician Bartholomew Mosse, the first maternity hospital in the British Isles was established in Dublin. A few years later, realizing that the Lying-In Hospital was chronically short of cash, and yet unwilling to give up his dream of expanding it, Mosse devised a novel solution. In his design for the hospital's new site on Great-Britain Street, which would finally open in 1757, Mosse combined the hospital buildings with an entertainment complex that began with a pleasure garden and eventually included a suite of assembly rooms and the Round Room for which the hospital was eventually renamed. (1) Money generated by the concerts, balls, and assemblies that took place on one side of the complex would pay for the medical care given to the indigent mothers who were delivering their children on the other.

For modern readers, the pains of childbirth and the pleasures of entertainment belong to different worlds; the juxtaposition achieved by the construction of the Rotunda Hospital seems, if not inappropriate, at least bizarre. But to Mosse's contemporaries, the relationship would have seemed natural enough. Throughout the first half of the century, polite amusements such as music, opera, and the theater had played an important role in raising money for Dublin's charities, including and especially its hospitals. By the time the Lying-In Hospital first opened, Mercer's Hospital, the Charitable Infirmary, and the Hospital for Incurables were all regularly benefiting from money raised by concerts and plays. Through charity benefits, theater in Dublin contributed significantly to the creation and maintenance of the public buildings that housed Dublin's "hospitals and institutions for poor relief, such as almshouses and orphanages" (Greene and Clark 44). Many of the hospitals supported by theater benefits were established in the 1730s and 1740s, just as Dublin's theaters were beginning to compete successfully with London's; charity benefits, which generally drew large and brilliant audiences, provided important financial and cultural support for both institutions. (2) The construction of the Rotunda Hospital's new site simply materialized an already intimate relationship between cultural production and charitable institutions. What Bartholomew Mosse envisioned, and what would eventually be constructed along Great-Britain Street, was a permanent charity benefit.

This article is an attempt to unpack the cultural significance of the charity benefit--for Dublin, for Ireland, and for the legitimate theater, but most of all for the women who were caught up in it as benefactors and patients, spectators and actresses, patrons and "proper Objects." The phenomenon of the Dublin charity benefit suggests that linking the two public institutions most closely associated with the city's resident "ladies of quality"--charities and the legitimate theater--helped further the Anglo-Irish elite's attempts to reproduce Ireland-the-savage-wilderness as Ireland-the-civilized-nation. The construction of the Rotunda complex indicates that this process of reproduction was both discursive and material. The collaboration between private entertainments and public charities could reshape not only the identities of Dublin's inhabitants but also the city itself--a city that was much under construction during the middle decades of the eighteenth century.

My discussion will be grounded in a reading of a specific charity benefit: a 25 April 1745 production of Ambrose Philips's The Distrest Mother at the Theatre-Royal in Smock Alley for the benefit of the Lying-In Hospital, which had just opened on its original site--a building that had once been a theater called Madame Violante's Booth. The money raised in Smock Alley on 25 April would help complete the reinvention of a site that had once been a space for non-legitimate theater as a space for the production of legitimate Irish subjects--literally through the children being delivered by the poor mothers for whom the hospital was designed, and symbolically through the performance of "public virtue and public love" on the part of the hospital's wealthy and powerful donors. (3) The transformation of that space thus forms an important part of this performance's cultural and material context.

Now remembered primarily for having discovered the Irish actress Margaret Woffington, Madame Violante was a celebrated rope-dancer who opened her own theater in Dublin in 1730, after which it operated sporadically until 1735 (Greene and Clark 25-28). (4) Since Violante did not have a royal patent, she was not entitled to produce "legitimate" theater. At first she restricted herself to acrobatics, dance, and pantomime, but eventually branched out into drama--at which point the government closed her down. As William Chetwood remarks in his 1749 history of the Irish theater, Violante's company of young actors and actresses "play'd several Dramatic pieces with grotesque entertainments, till stop'd by the Lord Mayor of the City of Dublin, Mrs. Violante, having no Sanction, or proper Authority to exhibit such Entertainment. The Place is put to another use" (Chetwood 61). The "other use," as Chetwood's footnote to this passage informs us, was as the original site of the Lying-In Hospital (61n).