Although the institution of the "music hall" is explicitly
mentioned only a few times in Ulysses, many of the
songs included in the novel were performed in these British
entertainment venues, which dominated popular culture in the
later 19th century and the first half of the 20th, until
competition from jazz, television, and rock and roll pushed
them to the margins.
One particular Dublin music hall appears as part of the
Dublin street furniture in Wandering Rocks: "They
passed Dan Lowry's musichall where Marie
Kendall, charming soubrette, smiled on them from a poster a
dauby smile. / Going down the path of Sycamore street beside
the Empire musichall Lenehan showed M'Coy
how the whole thing was." This passage makes it sound as if
Lenehan and M'Coy are passing by two music halls in quick
succession, but in fact they were different names for the same
establishment. Dan Lowrey's Star of Erin Music Hall was
renamed the Empire Theatre of Varieties in 1897. Today the
building on Sycamore Street, just off of Dame Street in the
vicinity of The Temple Bar, houses the Olympia Theatre, which
still books many musical acts.
Early London music halls evolved from public houses that
offered live entertainment. Paying customers could sit at
tables eating food, drinking alcohol, and smoking tobacco
while the performances went on. By the end of the 19th century
the halls became more like traditional theaters, and eating,
drinking, and smoking were no longer part of the picture.
Music halls featured various kinds of popular music, including
folk songs and ballads, light opera, and American minstrel
routines, as well as theatrical fare including comic skits,
recitations, melodramas, acrobatic displays, ventriloquists,
drag acts, mimes, and more. In this respect establisments like
the Empire cannot be easily distinguished from mainline
theaters like the Gaiety,
the Queen's, and the Royal, which mingled
purely dramatic productions with similar crowd-pleasing
displays.
But the halls' bread and butter was performance of
professional composers' fresh, contemporary songs. Most of
these songs had catchy refrains, and audiences would often
join in on the choruses. The subject matter appealed to
working-class concerns and sensibilities. Many songs from the
music hall repertoire are still familiar today, such as It's
a Long Way to Tipperary, Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow Wow,
I'm Henery the Eighth I Am, and Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay.
Bloom encounters one of these mega-hits, Has Anybody Here
Seen Kelly?, being performed on the streets as the
carriage rolls along in Hades: "As they turned into
Berkeley street a streetorgan near the Basin sent over and
after them a rollicking rattling song of the halls.
Has anybody here seen Kelly? Kay ee double ell wy.
. . . He's as bad as old Antonio. He left me on my
ownio." Other popular songs mentioned in Ulysses,
such as Love's Old Sweet
Song, Those Lovely
Seaside Girls, and Woodman, Spare That Tree,
would have appeared on music hall programs.
In Scylla and Charybdis A.E. contrasts the
artificiality of music hall songs with the natural
expressiveness of folk songs: "—People do not know how
dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of Russell warned
occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the world
are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on
the hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground
but the living mother. The rarefied air of the
academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the
musichall song. France produces the finest flower
of corruption in Mallarmé but the desirable life is revealed
only to the poor of heart, the life of Homer's Phæacians."
In Calypso Bloom thinks of the wages that his
daughter is earning in the photographer's shop in Mullingar
and contemplates other employment possibilities for a spirited
young woman: "Twelve and six a week. Not much. Still,
she might do worse. Music hall stage." Gifford
comments that this alternative employment would be "Not very
well paid and possibly morally compromising, since music-hall
artistes were regarded as living on the permissive
fringes of middle-class society."
