Middle Temple Hall

The halls of the Inns of Court have all been fitted-up as playhouses by professional companies and by the benchers for their own private entertainments throughout their history. However, the Middle Temple Hall is outstanding in this connection in that it hosted the earliest recorded performance of ‘Twelfth Night’ in 1602, almost certainly performed by Shakespeare’s Company. Unlike, for example, the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn halls, it is seen almost perfectly complete, as it was at that time.

The hall was completed in 1570, severely damaged in the Second World War, but carefully restored. It is a brick building with stone dressings, in five bays with a roof louvre, bay windows on either side at the west (dais) end and a porch at the north east corner entrance, which leads into the screens passage. It has a double hammerbeam roof. The hall screen is magnificent, Elizabethan, in oak with rich carving. Some alteration was made to the screen in the later seventeenth century but without damage to the total effect.