The Shaftesbury Theatre was the last theatre to be built on Shaftesbury Avenue which was originally named The Princes Theatre. To its initial owners, Walter and Frederick Melville, it stood as a vision to host fashionable melodrama, much like their other theatre, The Lyceum. Designed by Bertie Crewe, the talented Victorian architect responsible for some of the country's finest theatres, it was considered a flamboyant masterpiece in the early 1900's from the life-size groups of statuary representing Comedy, Tragedy, Poetry and Music that still adorn the tops of the boxes, as well as the restoration of original artwork that exists in paintings above the boxes.