page_title: Mermaid Tavern
section_title: Shakespeare and the Sireniacal gentlemen
hierarchical_section_title: Mermaid Tavern / Shakespeare and the Sireniacal gentlemen
caption_attribution_description: English: Also known as "Shakespeare and His Friends at the Mermaid Tavern". The painting depicts (from left in back) Joshua Sylvester, John Selden, Francis Beaumont, (seated at table from left) William Camden, Thomas Sackville, John Fletcher, Sir Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Samuel Daniel, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Earl of Southampton, Sir Robert Cotton, and Thomas Dekker.
context_page_description: 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.
context_section_description: 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.
  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 poems prefacing the First Folio 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.
caption: A fanciful 19th-century depiction of Shakespeare and his contemporaries at the Mermaid Tavern. Painting by John Faed, 1851.
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