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 it unlikely.

Read more about Mermaid Tavern:  The Building, Shakespeare and The Sireniacal Gentlemen, Mermaid Tavern in Literature

Famous quotes containing the word tavern:

    Rude poets of the tavern hearth,
    squandering your unquoted mirth,
    which keeps the ground, and never soars,
    while jake retorts, and reuben roars;
    tough and screaming, as birch-bark,
    goes like bullet to its mark;
    while the solid curse and jeer
    never balk the waiting ear.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)