Warwick Pageant (1906) - Parker Biography

Parker Biography

Louis Napoleon Parker was born in Calvados, France, of American parents in 1852. At the age of 17, he entered the Royal Academy of Music in London and was Director of Music at Sherborne School, Dorset from 1874 to 1892. His first Pageant was held in the grounds of Sherborne Castle, in 1905, to celebrate “1,200 years of the town, the bishopric and the school”, followed by Warwick in 1906 and Bury St Edmunds in 1907. 1908 saw him in Dover, and in 1909 Colchester and York. He announced in 1911 that more than 15,000 performers had gone through his hands, and audiences had reached a quarter of a million – and $75,000 had gone to charities… After developing this hugely successful genre from nothing, he let others take over – indeed “Pageantitis” had swept over Britain, and rivals started their own shows, starting at Oxford in 1907. After about 1910 Louis N. Parker concentrated once more on being a playwright. In 1913 Emma Angeline Armstrong, a playwright from Minneapolis, brought a plagiarism charge in Federal Court against Parker, claiming that his pageant play Joseph and His Brethren was stolen from her play At the Foot of the Throne. He died in 1944, in Devon.