Middle Temple Hall

Middle Temple Hall in London is a 100-foot-long Elizabethan hall built in 1562 where Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was performed in 1602. Construction began under Treasurer Edmund Plowden. The building features a double hammerbeam roof, a High Table crafted from 29-foot Windsor Park oak planks, and a table made from Sir Francis Drake's ship, the Golden Hind. After a 1940 Luftwaffe bomb shattered its Tudor screen, the hall was restored.

London · from the walk “Beneath the Bar: Lincoln's Inn & Legal London” · audio ~3 min · Generated

Middle Temple Hall, Middle Temple Lane, London EC4Y 9BT

Which Shakespeare play had a recorded performance at Middle Temple Hall in London in 1602?

You're standing before one of London's best-kept secrets... a building most people walk right past without ever knowing it exists. This is Middle Temple Hall, and behind these walls lies one of the finest Elizabethan halls to survive in the entire city.......... Construction began in fifteen sixty-two, under the direction of a remarkable man named Edmund Plowden, who was Treasurer of the Inn. Plowden was a devout Roman Catholic in Protestant England... and here's where it gets interesting. Queen Elizabeth herself reportedly offered him the Lord Chancellorship, the highest legal office in the land, on One condition: that he renounce his Catholic faith. He refused. His famous reply reminded the Queen that they had Both been raised Catholic. Despite this defiance, he was never persecuted, and his legal brilliance gave us a proverb still known today: "The case is altered, quoth Plowden."

...... Now, step inside in your imagination. The hall is one hundred feet long, spanned by a magnificent double hammerbeam roof. At the far end sits the High Table, made from three twenty-nine foot long planks of a single oak from Windsor Park, allegedly a gift from Queen Elizabeth the First, floated down the Thames and hauled in through a window Before the building was even finished!......... And beside that great table sits a smaller one, known as the cupboard. What's so special about a small table? It is reputedly made from the hatch cover of Sir Francis Drake's ship, the Golden Hind, the very vessel that circumnavigated the globe between fifteen seventy-seven and fifteen eighty. Drake himself dined here, though he was never actually a member of the Inn.......... But the Hall's most celebrated night came on the second of February, sixteen oh two... Candlemas. The Lord Chamberlain's Men crossed the river from the original Globe Playhouse to perform a brand new comedy right here. That play was Shakespeare's Twelfth Night! We know this because a young law student named John Manningham recorded it in his diary. Shakespeare himself may well have been among the actors that evening.......... And the Hall's story doesn't end with the Tudors. On the fifteenth of October, nineteen forty, a Luftwaffe bomb blew a hole in the east end, shattering the carved Tudor screen into hundreds of pieces. Later raids with incendiaries nearly finished the job entirely. Yet the great roof held... and the screen was painstakingly reassembled, fragment by fragment, after the war.......... Today, new barristers still sign their names at Drake's cupboard when they are called to the Bar. Four and a half centuries on, this hall remains exactly what Plowden built it to be... the beating heart of English law.

Nearby stories