MERMAID TAVERN

famous London meeting place of the Friday Street Club, of which William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Donne, and Ben Jonson were notable members. It stood to the east of St. Paul's Cathedral, with entrances in Bread Street and Friday Street. The Mermaid Tavern has intrigued scholars interested in Shakespeare's personality and in those of other great men of Elizabethan and Jacobean letters, mainly because of a passage in a poem, Letter of Ben Jonson (1640), by the playwright Francis Beaumont (also a member of the club): What things we have seen Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been So 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, And had resolved to live a fool the rest Of his dull life.