Elizabethan Club

The Elizabethan Club is a social club at Yale University named for Queen Elizabeth I and her era. Its profile and members tend toward a literary disposition, and conversation is one of the Club's chief purposes.

The Elizabethan Club's collection of 16th and 17th Century books and artifacts include Shakespearean folios and quartos, first editions of Milton's Paradise Lost, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Francis Bacon's Essayes, all locked in the Club's famous vault. The collection is only available for inspection at certain times, or to researchers upon request at Yale's Beinecke Library. Tea is served daily during the semester and members may invite guests on specified days. The Club accepts male and female undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staff.

The Club was founded in 1911 by Alexander Smith Cochran, a member of the Yale Class of 1896 and Wolf's Head Society. As an undergraduate he had regretted the lack of a congenial atmosphere in which to discuss literature and the arts with classmates and faculty. In 1910 he began to assemble a small but exceptional collection of first and early editions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean plays that he had studied with William Lyon Phelps, and in 1911 he offered the collection to Yale as the central point of interest for a club where conversation – and tea — would be available every afternoon. Mr. Cochran also provided a Clubhouse, with quarters for a resident steward, and a generous endowment of $100,000. His portrait hangs above the fireplace in the Vault Room, and his birthday (28 February) is marked by an annual Founder’s Dinner. The life portrait of the Virgine Queene in the Tea Room, attributed to Federico Zuccari, came with the founder’s original gift. Began during the literary renaissance at the university between 1909 and 1920, the club attracted such book collectors as Phelps, Chauncey Brewster Tinker, and John Berdan.

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