The Mermaid Tavern was a

tavern A tavern is a place of business where people gather to drink alcoholic beverages and be served food such as different types of roast meats and cheese, and (mostly historically) where travelers would receive lodging. An inn is a tavern that ...

Cheapside Cheapside is a street in the City of London, the historic and modern financial centre of London, which forms part of the A40 London to Fishguard road. It links St. Martin's Le Grand with Poultry. Near its eastern end at Bank junction, where ...

in London during the

Elizabethan era The Elizabethan era is the epoch in the Tudor period of the history of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603). Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history. The symbol of Britannia (a female personif ...

, located east of

St. Paul's Cathedral St Paul's Cathedral is an Anglican cathedral in London and is the seat of the Bishop of London. The cathedral serves as the mother church of the Diocese of London. It is on Ludgate Hill at the highest point of the City of London and is a Grad ...

on the corner of Friday Street and Bread Street. It was the site of the so-called "Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen", a drinking club that met on the first Friday of every month that included some of the Elizabethan era's leading literary figures, among them

Ben Jonson Benjamin "Ben" Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – c. 16 August 1637) was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for t ...

John Donne John Donne ( ; 22 January 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a recusant family, who later became a cleric in the Church of England. Under royal patronage, he was made Dean of St Paul's Cathed ...

, John Fletcher and

Francis Beaumont Francis Beaumont ( ; 1584 – 6 March 1616) was a dramatist in the English Renaissance theatre, most famous for his collaborations with John Fletcher. Beaumont's life Beaumont was the son of Sir Francis Beaumont of Grace Dieu, near Thrin ...

Thomas Coryat Thomas Coryat (also Coryate) (c. 15771617) was an English traveller and writer of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean age. He is principally remembered for two volumes of writings he left regarding his travels, often on foot, through ...

John Selden John Selden (16 December 1584 – 30 November 1654) was an English jurist, a scholar of England's ancient laws and constitution and scholar of Jewish law. He was known as a polymath; John Milton hailed Selden in 1644 as "the chief of learned ...

Robert Bruce Cotton Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, 1st Baronet (22 January 1570/71 – 6 May 1631) of Conington Hall in the parish of Conington in Huntingdonshire, England,Kyle, Chris & Sgroi was a Member of Parliament and an antiquarian who founded the Cotton library. ...

, Richard Carew, Richard Martin, and

William Strachey William Strachey (4 April 1572 – buried 21 June 1621) was an English writer whose works are among the primary sources for the early history of the English colonisation of North America. He is best remembered today as the eye-witness reporter of ...

. A popular tradition has grown up that the group included

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...

, although most scholars think that was improbable.

The building

According to Jonson, the Tavern was situated on

Bread Street Bread Street is one of the 25 wards of the City of London the name deriving from its principal street, which was anciently the City's bread market; already named ''Bredstrate'' (to at least 1180) for by the records it appears as that in 1302, E ...

("At Bread Street's Mermaid, having dined and merry..."). It probably had entrances on both Bread Street and Friday Street. The location corresponds to the modern junction between Bread Street and

Cannon Street Cannon Street is a road in the City of London, the historic nucleus of London and its modern financial centre. It runs roughly parallel with the River Thames, about north of it, in the south of the City. It is the site of the ancient London ...

.Ed Glinert, ''Literary London: A Street by Street Exploration of the Capital's Literary ...Penguin UK, 2007. The tavern's landlord is named as William Johnson in a will dated, 1603. In 1600 a notable disorder, caused by some drunken members of a group known as the

Damned Crew {{Use dmy dates, date=April 2022 The Damned Crew, or Cursed Crew, was a group of young gentlemen in late 16th and early 17th century London noted for habitually swaggering drunk through the streets, assaulting passers-by and watchmen. The earlies ...

attacking the watch after they were challenged, began after they were ejected from the Mermaid Tavern. It resulted in a

Star Chamber The Star Chamber (Latin: ''Camera stellata'') was an English court that sat at the royal Palace of Westminster, from the late to the mid-17th century (c. 1641), and was composed of Privy Counsellors and common-law judges, to supplement the jud ...

trial. The building was destroyed in 1666 during the

Great Fire of London The Great Fire of London was a major conflagration that swept through central London from Sunday 2 September to Thursday 6 September 1666, gutting the medieval City of London inside the old Roman city wall, while also extending past t ...

Shakespeare and the Sireniacal gentlemen

William Gifford William Gifford (April 1756 – 31 December 1826) was an English critic, editor and poet, famous as a satirist and controversialist. Life Gifford was born in Ashburton, Devon, to Edward Gifford and Elizabeth Cain. His father, a glazier and ...

, Jonson's 19th-century editor, wrote that the society was founded by Sir

Walter Raleigh Sir Walter Raleigh (; – 29 October 1618) was an English statesman, soldier, writer and explorer. One of the most notable figures of the Elizabethan era, he played a leading part in English colonisation of North America, suppressed rebellion ...

in 1603, based on a note by

John Aubrey John Aubrey (12 March 1626 – 7 June 1697) was an English antiquary, natural philosopher and writer. He is perhaps best known as the author of the ''Brief Lives'', his collection of short biographical pieces. He was a pioneer archaeologist, ...

, but Raleigh was imprisoned in the

Tower of London The Tower of London, officially His Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London, is a historic castle on the north bank of the River Thames in central London. It lies within the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, which is separa ...

from 19 July of that year until 1616, and it is hardly likely that someone of Raleigh's status and temperament would preside over tavern meetings. Gifford also was the first to name the Mermaid as the site of Jonson and Shakespeare's battle-of-wits debates in which they discussed politics, religion, and literature. According to tradition, Shakespeare, though not as learned as Jonson, often won these debates because Jonson was more ponderous, going off on tangents that did not pertain to the topic at hand. How much of the legend is true is a matter of speculation. There is an extended reference to the Tavern and its witty conversation in ''Master Francis Beaumont's Letter to Ben Jonson.'' Coryat's letters also refer to the Tavern and mention Jonson, Donne, Cotton, Inigo Jones, and Hugh Holland – though Coryat was intimate with this group apparently from 1611 on. Shakespeare certainly had connections with some of the tavern's literary clientele, as well as with the tavern's landlord, William Johnson. When Shakespeare bought the Blackfriars gatehouse on March 10, 1613, Johnson was listed as a trustee for the mortgage. And Hugh Holland, mentioned in Coryat's letters, composed one of the

commendatory poem The epideictic oratory, also called ceremonial oratory, or praise-and-blame rhetoric, is one of the three branches, or "species" (eidē), of rhetoric as outlined in Aristotle's ''Rhetoric'', to be used to praise or blame during ceremonies. Origi ...

s prefacing the

First Folio ''Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies'' is a collection of plays by William Shakespeare, commonly referred to by modern scholars as the First Folio, published in 1623, about seven years after Shakespeare's death. It is cons ...

of Shakespeare's plays (1623). "The Sireniacal gentlemen" also met at the Mitre tavern in London, that seemed to be located nearby. The opening scene of ''Bartholomew Fair'' by Ben Jonson (1614) has one of the characters, John Littlewit, refer negatively to those "Canary-drinking" wits who keep company at the ‘Three Cranes, Mitre, and Mermaid’. Apparently they were seen as too elitist. The wine in question seems to be the same as sack.

Mermaid Tavern in literature

Shakespeare and Jonson at the Mermaid Tavern

Jonson and Beaumont both mentioned the tavern in their verse. Jonson's ''Inviting a Friend to Supper'' refers to "A pure cup of rich Canary wine, / Which is the Mermaid's now, but shall be mine". Beaumont, in his verse letter to Jonson, describes "things we have seen done / At the Mermaid", including,

...words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came,
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest.

Two hundred years later, in early February 1819,

John Keats John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculos ...

composed a poem on the legend initiated by Beaumont, ''Lines on the Mermaid Tavern''—26 lines of verse that open and close with the following couplets:

Souls of poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?

Keats' precedent was followed by

Theodore Watts-Dunton Theodore Watts-Dunton (12 October 1832 – 6 June 1914), from St Ives, Huntingdonshire, was an English poetry critic with major periodicals, and himself a poet. He is remembered particularly as the friend and minder of Algernon Charles Swinbur ...

in his poem ''Wassail Chorus at the Mermaid Tavern'', a Christmas drinking-song imagined having been sung in the tavern, in which each new verse is "composed" by one of the poet-guests, including Raleigh, Drayton, "Shakespeare's friend", Heywood and Jonson. In his 1908 ''Prophets, Priests and Kings'' (p. 323), A. G. Gardiner turned to these "intellectual revels" at the Mermaid Tavern to express the independent genius of his friend

G. K. Chesterton Gilbert Keith Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English writer, philosopher, Christian apologist, and literary and art critic. He has been referred to as the "prince of paradox". Of his writing style, ''Time'' observed: "Wh ...

Time and place are accidents: he is elemental and primitive. He is not of our time, but of all times. One imagines him wrestling with the giant Skrymir and drinking deep draughts from the horn of Thor, or exchanging jests with Falstaff at the Boar's Head in Eastcheap, or joining in the intellectual revels at the Mermaid Tavern, or meeting Johnson foot to foot and dealing blow for a mighty blow. With Rabelais he rioted, and Don Quixote and Sancho were his "vera brithers." One seems to see him coming down from the twilight of fable, through the centuries, calling wherever there is a good company, and welcome wherever he calls, for he brings no cult of the time or pedantry of the schools with him.

Canadian poets

William Wilfred Campbell William Wilfred Campbell (1 June ca. 1860 – 1 January 1918) was a Canadian poet. He is often classed as one of the country's Confederation Poets, a group that included fellow Canadians Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, a ...

Archibald Lampman Archibald Lampman (17 November 1861 – 10 February 1899) was a Canadian poetry, Canadian poet. "He has been described as 'the Canadian John Keats, Keats;' and he is perhaps the most outstanding exponent of the Canadians, Canadian school of ...

, and

Duncan Campbell Scott Duncan Campbell Scott (August 2, 1862 – December 19, 1947) was a Canadian civil servant and poet and prose writer. With Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and Archibald Lampman, he is classed as one of Canada's Confederation Poets. A caree ...

together wrote a literary column called
At the Mermaid Inn
for the ''

Toronto Globe ''The Globe'' was a newspaper in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, founded in 1844 by George Brown as a Reform voice. It merged with '' The Mail and Empire'' in 1936 to form ''The Globe and Mail''. History ''The Globe'' is pre-dated by a title of the sa ...

'' from February 1892 until July 1893. In 1913 the ballad poet

Alfred Noyes Alfred Noyes CBE (16 September 188025 June 1958) was an English poet, short-story writer and playwright. Early years Noyes was born in Wolverhampton, England the son of Alfred and Amelia Adams Noyes. When he was four, the family moved to Ab ...

published ''Tales of the Mermaid Tavern'', a long poem in a series of chapters, each dedicated to Elizabethan writers associated with the tavern. These include Jonson, Shakespeare and Marlowe.

Beryl Markham Beryl Markham (née Clutterbuck; 26 October 1902 – 3 August 1986) was a Kenyan aviator born in England (one of the first bush pilots), adventurer, racehorse trainer and author. She was the first person to fly solo, non-stop across the Atlant ...

, in her 1942 memoir, ''

West with the Night ''West with the Night'' is a 1942 memoir by Beryl Markham, chronicling her experiences growing up in Kenya (then British East Africa) in the early 1900s, leading to celebrated careers as a racehorse trainer and bush pilot there. It is considered ...

'', remarked that "every man has his Mermaid's Tavern, every hamlet its shrine to conviviality".

References

*Halliday, F. E. ''A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964.'' Baltimore, Penguin, 1964. *O'Callaghan, Michelle
"Patrons of the Mermaid tavern (act. 1611)".
''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press. Accessed 31 Jan 2011. *Palmer, Alan and Veronica, eds. ''Who's Who in Shakespeare's England.'' New York, St. Martin's Press, 1981. *Adam Smyth, ed.
''A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-century England.''
Volume 14 of Studies in Renaissance literature, DS Brewer, 2004

Notes

External links