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9 3 7 The Abbey, Its “Helpers,” and the Field of Cultural Production in 1913 l u c y m c d i a r m i d On Tuesday, 21 January 1913, the Gregory-Yeats play The Pot of Broth was performed by the Abbey players at a benefit matinee in Chicago. The purpose of the benefit was to raise funds for the Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art: at that stage in the Gallery’s history, the Dublin Corporation was promising to pay for a permanent building if funds could be raised privately to buy a site, and Lady Gregory was doing some of that fund-raising among wealthy, culture-loving Americans. The Pot of Broth was the curtain-raiser for Shaw’s Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet and Gregory’s own Hyacinth Halvey; it was more appropriate for the benefit than its audience could have guessed. The Pot of Broth is based on the familiar folk-tale known in some forms as “stone soup.” The Gregory-Yeats version (written in 1902) seems already to be an Abbey play, with a “stranger” who visits a house and disturbs the country people who live there. The stranger was originally called a “beggar” in the Abbey version but was redesignated a “tramp,” probably in response to the tramp in Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen (1903). The Gregory-Yeats stranger speaks with the aggressive seductiveness of the character Kathleen ni Houlihan (from 1902) and the rebel ballad-singer in The Rising of the Moon (1907). He’s a fast-talking rogue who persuades the Coneelys that something wonderful can be made from the magic stone he carries with him: It is a mistake you are making, ma’am, it is not asking anything I am. It is giving I am more used to. I was never in a house yet but there would be a welcome for me in it again. 94 | l u c y m c d i a r m i d And also: No one in the world but myself has one, ma’am, and no other stone in the world has the same power, for it has enchantment on it. All I’ll ask of you now, ma’am, is the loan of a pot with a drop of boiling water in it.1 He performs a miracle, charming them out of all their food to make a delicious broth that he consumes entirely by himself, before leaving the stone with the Coneelys and departing quickly. There’s a distinct resemblance between this character and Lady Gregory, as least as she functioned in Chicago in January 1913, raising funds for the Lane Gallery: she made people who were giving believe that they were receiving something; she disguised begging as a pleasant social visit; she managed her work with great charm, smiling and flattering and making nice to everyone; and she held out as a glamorous prize something wonderful that ultimately did not come to be as she had promised. And that’s why the Lady is a tramp.  The money raised during the winter and spring of 1912–13 at the Abbey’s Municipal Gallery benefit matinees in Chicago, New York, Boston, London, and Dublin became part of a notorious dispute.2 The Dublin Corporation finally voted in September 1913 (as the date of Yeats’s poem notes) not to fund the building, so the Abbey directors were left with a fund—called the Guarantee fund or sometimes the guarantors’ fund—that no longer had a purpose.3 In November the Abbey players began demanding the money for themselves. The Abbey directors, Yeats and Gregory, thought the funds (with a few reservations) should be put aside in a special trust account for a permanent site for the gallery, whenever that might be possible. Between the beginning of November 1913 and the end of January 1914, many letters on this subject went back and forth between Yeats and Gregory, Gregory and the Abbey players, Lennox Robinson and Gregory, William Bailey and Gregory, Gregory and John Quinn, and others. The dispute wasn’t settled until 2 February 1914, when an opinion of the solicitor-general of Ireland, Jonathan Pim (from an old Irish Quaker family) awarded the entire sum to the players.4 From one point of view, the argument over the guarantee funds looks like another in the series of management-labor problems that Adrian Frazier discusses in Behind the Scenes...

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