The "Theatre Royal in Hawkins street," so identified in Ithaca,
was one of several large theaters in Dublin in 1904, along
with the Queen's Theatre
and the Gaiety Theatre,
offering middle-brow entertainment like pantomimes, light opera,
musical comedy, music-hall
shows, variety shows, and popular drama. Over the course
of nearly a century and a half it operated in several
different buildings on the same site: the "old Royal" recalled
several times in Ulysses (1821-80), the newer
structure that Joyce knew (1987-1935), and a third facility
that was built much later (1935-62).
The Royal is first mentioned in Sirens, when Richie
Goulding recalls a vocal performance he attended there: "Never
would Richie forget that night. As long as he lived: never. In
the gods of the old Royal with little Peake." The "old"
Royal was actually the third such theater of that name in
Dublin, but it was the first to be built in Hawkins Street,
just south of the quays between the O'Connell Bridge and the
Loopline Bridge. It staged performances until it burned to the
ground in 1880. A replacement called Leinster Hall operated
from 1880 to 1897, at which time a new Theatre Royal was
constructed on the same site, capable of seating slightly more
than 2,000 people.
"The gods" refers to the high balcony seats, playing
on the notion of watching from the heavens. Gifford identifies
it as "Slang for the upper balcony of a theater," and Slote
quotes Eric Partridge's definition of the term as "those
occupying the gallery at a theatre." In Circe Mrs.
Yelverton Barry complains that Bloom has used his position in
those high seats to peer into her décolletage: "He said that he
had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a box
of the Theatre Royal at a command
performance of La Cigale. I deeply inflamed him, he
said." Being a creature of his fantasy, she knows his
libidinal assocations with the theater, confirmed later in the
chapter when he thinks of places that aroused his adolescent
lust: "I was in my teens, a growing boy. A little then
sufficed, a jolting car, the mingling odours of the ladies'
cloakroom and lavatory, the throng penned tight on the old
Royal stairs (for they love crushes, instinct of the herd,
and the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles vice), even a
pricelist of their hosiery."
Mrs. Yelverton Barry is a figment of imagination, but there
can be little doubt that Bloom has hankered after women's
provocatively displayed breasts in the theater. Since La
Cigale could refer either to an 1877 play or to an 1890
opera, his fantasy could have been triggered either pre-1880
or post-1897, but his memory of having sexual thoughts "on the
old Royal stairs" when "in my teens, a growing boy," lends
weight to the view that he is recalling an adolescent
incident. When the old theater burned down on 9 February 1880,
Bloom would have been several months shy of 14 years old. Both
theaters had box seats along the side walls. The existence of
a vice-regal box in 1880 (Henry Egerton, the stage manager and
business manager who died fighting the fire, was last seen
near this box) coheres with Mrs. Yelverton Barry's memory of "a
command performance," i.e. one commissioned by the Lord
Lieutenant. But perhaps the newer Royal also contained such a
box.
Molly has taken her daughter to see a play in the new Royal,
and her recollection of how prissily Milly guarded her fancy
skirt prompts further thoughts about the erotic currents in
theaters: "then a great touchmenot too in her own way at the
Only Way in the Theatre royal take your foot away out of
that I hate people touching me afraid of her life Id crush her
skirt with the pleats a lot of that touching must go on in
theatres in the crush in the dark theyre always trying to
wiggle up to you that fellow in the pit at the Gaiety for
Beerbohm Tree in Trilby the last time Ill ever go there to be
squashed like that for any Trilby."
The new Royal lasted until the mid-1930s, when it was
replaced by yet another reincarnation on the same spot,
capable of seating nearly 4,000 patrons. This huge theater,
one of the largest in Europe, closed its doors in 1962 and was
demolished to make way for the twelve-story Hawkins House, a
hideous office building.
