Mermaid Tavern

[3] 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.

And Hugh Holland, mentioned in Coryat's letters, composed one of the commendatory poems prefacing the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays (1623).

[7] 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’.

Jonson's Inviting a Friend to Supper refers to "A pure cup of rich Canary wine, / Which is the Mermaid's now, but shall be mine".

Beaumont, in his verse letter to Jonson, describes "things we have seen done / At the Mermaid", including,...words that have beenSo nimble, and so full of subtle flame,As if that every one from whence they came,Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest.Two hundred years later, in early February 1819, John Keats composed a poem on the legend initiated by Beaumont, Lines on the Mermaid Tavern—26 lines of verse that open and close with the following couplets:Souls of poets dead and gone,What Elysium have ye known,Happy field or mossy cavern,Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?Keats' precedent was followed by Theodore Watts-Dunton in his poem Wassail Chorus at the Mermaid Tavern, a Christmas drinking-song imagined having been sung in the tavern, in which each new verse is "composed" by one of the poet-guests, including Raleigh, Drayton, "Shakespeare's friend", Heywood and Jonson.

In his 1908 Prophets, Priests and Kings (p. 323), A. G. Gardiner turned to these "intellectual revels" at the Mermaid Tavern to express the independent genius of his friend G. K. Chesterton:Time and place are accidents: he is elemental and primitive.

Beryl Markham, in her 1942 memoir, West with the Night, remarked that "every man has his Mermaid's Tavern, every hamlet its shrine to conviviality".

Top half of the title page of Richard Braithwait 's Lawes of Drinking , William Marshall , engraver. It has been argued that the tavern sign, which reads (clockwise from top) Poets impalled wt Lawrell coranets (Poets impaled with laurel coronets), is that of the Mermaid Tavern. [ 1 ]
A fanciful 19th-century depiction of Shakespeare and his contemporaries at the Mermaid Tavern. Painting by John Faed , 1851.
An illustration depicting Shakespeare and Jonson debating at the tavern