Andromache Among the Ambassadors: Ambrose Philips’s <i>The Distrest Mother</i> (1712)

Abstract Now a relatively obscure figure, the Trojan woman Andromache had a lively afterlife in the long eighteenth century. A central text for her English reception in this period was Ambrose Philips’s The Distrest Mother (1712). An adaptation of Jean Racine’s breakthrough success, Andromaque (1667), Philips’s play became a staple of the stage and helped to confirm Andromache’s status as a paradigmatic wife, widow and mother within emerging cultures of sensibility and bourgeois constrictions on motherhood. Yet ‘domestic virtue concerns all the world’, as Richard Steele wrote of Andromache, and there is far more of the world at stake in Philips’s play than a tale of purely private femininity would suggest. By examining Philips’s interventions in Racine, his friendship networks and early career, especially in diplomacy, this essay situates The Distrest Mother at the intersection of home affairs and international relations. Shaped by party politics in the late years of Queen Anne’s reign, and by the contested end to the War of the Spanish Succession, Philips’s Andromache emerges as a mixed figure, involved at once in discourses of ideal domesticity, patriotism, international intervention, asylum seeking, cosmopolitanism, and the law of nations.