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In Elizabethan England on the corner of Friday Street and Bread Street was a fine dining and drinking establishment called the Mermaid Tavern. The building itself burned down in the Great Fire of London in 1666, but the legend of this storied tavern lives on through the records of people like Ben Jonson and 17th century travel writer Thomas Coryat, who wrote about the Mermaid Tavern in the early 1600s, when Shakespeare was in his late 40s to early 50s, describing it as the meeting place of Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen, a drinking club that met on the first Friday of the month and is thought to have included famous members, most with very close ties to Shakespeare. Men like Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, and Francis Beaumont, were thought to have been members and there are a few scholars who think that William Shakespeare might have been among the members of this club as well. Our guest this week, Michelle O’Callaghan, is a historical researcher into the history of English taverns, and the author of the article Patrons of the Mermaid Tavern. She joins us today to share the story of the Mermaid Tavern, what we can know about the Fraternity of Gentlemen who met there, and what her research concludes about whether Shakespeare might have attended.
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In this episode, I’ll be asking Michelle O’Callaghan about:
- The Mermaid Tavern was patronized by the Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen including Ben Jonson, but the landlord is listed as a man named William Williamson. Michele, was Ben Jonson part owner of the Mermaid Tavern?
- For modern ears, the phrase “Drinking club” sounds analogous to the concept of a “drinking game”, and is hardly something you might consider fitting for the upper echelons of Elizabethan society. Michelle, when you write that the Mermaid Tavern “was a fashionable venue for guild banquets and for informal dining and drinking societies from at least the late sixteenth century” explain for us what kind of meeting was going on here the first Friday of the month when the Fraternitie of Sireniacal Gentlemen were meeting.
- Why was this group called the Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen?
….and more!
Michelle O’Callaghan is a Professor of Early Modern Literature and currently Head of the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading. She has published extensively on early modern literature and culture, from the Inns of Court and tavern societies to women’s engagement in literary cultures. Her major books are The ‘shepheards nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and early Stuart political culture, 1612-1625 (Oxford, 2000), The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007), Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist (Edinburgh, 2009), and, most recently, Crafting Poetry Anthologies in Renaissance England: Early Modern Cultures of Recreation, which was published by Cambridge University Press in December, 2020.
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Here’s what’s available for this episode:
- An engraving depicting the top half of the title page of Richard Braithwaite’s, Lawes of Drinking
- 19th-century painting of Shakespeare and his friends at the Mermaid Tavern
- 19th century drawing of Norse gods participating in a poetry contest
- 19th century illustration of Ben Johnson and William Shakespeare debating at the Mermaid Tavern
Resources Michelle O’Callaghan Recommends:
Mark Bland, ‘Francis Beaumont’s Verse Letters to Ben Jonson and the “Mermaid Club”, English Manuscript Studies, 12, (2005), 139-79. Read it online here.
Online versions of the other books available in part here:
Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Adam Smyth, ed., A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2004)
Lauren Working, The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
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