SLHS Theatre3 - Tercentenary Pavilion

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Southern Lane (where The Other Place now is) April 1864

Edward Fordham Flower’s grand idea..

A magnificent wooden Pavilion was built on a paddock in Southern Lane. It was a twelve-sided building, containing a pit area, two tiers of boxes, and a stage to one end while an orchestra area was at the other. The stage was 74 feet wide by 56 feet deep, large enough to receive scenery brought from London for the planned performances of Shakespeare’s plays. The orchestra was similarly generous, holding 530 performers. Apparently the acoustics were excellent and the whole building was designed to be flexible with a maximum audience capacity of 5000.

“the substantial object for which the pecuniary results of the festival will be devoted” would be “the erection of a National Monument to Shakespeare in the town of his birth”. The week-long festival, housed in an even larger rotunda, in a paddock near the church, included the familiar balls, banquets and concerts, but it opened with an intriguing firework display.

The programme excitingly lists flights of tourbillons, shells of fanfaronades, sunflower wheels and peacock’s plume rockets. The grand concluding piece “made especially for the occasion” was called “The Vision of Shakespeare: formed of many thousand lights …forming a bouquet of the most beautiful fires known in the pyrotechnic art”. Quite how this conjured a vision of Shakespeare is, at this distance, a little unclear, but certainly the latest technology was being employed in the service of the celebration of the great national bard.

On the very first day at 3pm there was a banquet: the high table stood on the orchestra area and the pit and stage held 700 diners in all. Sitting in the boxes were “spectators, who looked on with all the gratification that is to be derived from witnessing enjoyments which one is not permitted to share”. They paid 5s to watch, 21s to eat. The celebrations continued for a week, and performances in the Pavilion included a musical concert of The Messiah with 500 participants, performances of Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It, and a grand fancy dress ball.

One of the main events was a performance of Twelfth Night, the first time one of Shakespeare's plays had been performed on his birthday.

Many events attracted capacity audiences and the popularity of the Shakespeare plays undoubtedly planted the idea in the mind of chief organiser, the local brewer Edward Flower, that a permanent theatre to stage regular performances of Shakespeare might be a success.

Richard Foulkes, in his definitive book The Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1864, suggests that the celebration was a success because it “was the creation of Stratfordians themselves”. The adaptable large Pavilion was the key. Yet the irony is that by the end of May it was no more. Everything was sold off in an auction that made back only a fraction of the cost of building it.

Charles Edward Flower, donated the river side site and raised so much of the money himself he became known as “self-raising Flower”

Construction Of The Tercentenary Pavilion 1864

Location Of Pavilion