Mermaid Tavern

For similarly named taverns and inns, see The Mermaid Inn (disambiguation).

Top half of the title page of Richard Braithwait's Lawes of Drinking, William Marshall, engraver. It has been argued that the tavern sign, which reads (clockwise from top) Poets impalled wt Lawrell coranets (Poets impaled with laurel coronets), is that of the Mermaid Tavern.[1]

The Mermaid Tavern was a tavern on Cheapside in London during the Elizabethan era, located east of St. Paul's Cathedral 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, John Donne, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, Thomas Coryat, John Selden, Robert Bruce Cotton, Richard Carew, Richard Martin, and William Strachey. A popular tradition has grown up that the group included William Shakespeare, although most scholars think that was improbable.

  1. ^ O'Callaghan, Michelle. (2006) The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-86084-0. p. 195.