Mermaid Tavern

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.

According to Jonson, the Tavern was situated on Bread Street ("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. 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 attacking the watch after they were challenged, began after they were ejected from the Mermaid Tavern. It resulted in a Star Chamber trial.

The building was destroyed in 1666 during the Great Fire of London.

William Gifford, Jonson's 19th-century editor, wrote that the society was founded by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1603, based on a note by John Aubrey, but Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London 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.

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