THE ELIZABETHAN TAVERNS
The London taverns were the clubs of London's literary men, and in
Shakespeare's time the most famous houses were "The Mermaid" in Bread
Street, "The Boar's Head" in Eastcheap, "The Devil" at Temple Bar, "The
Falcon," "The Tabard," "The George," and some few others, situated on
the south side of the river. In the days when he lived by the river-side
at Southwark, Shakespeare would have counted among the members of his
tavern club Edmund Spenser, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Ben Jonson, "rare
Ben Jonson," who wrote of his great rival, "I loved the man, and do
honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any"; tribute over
which the mind loves to linger. Fuller tells of the contests of wit that
used to ensue when Shakespeare and Ben Jonson met, "which two I beheld
like a great Spanish galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson,
like the former, was built far higher in learning, solid, but slow in
his performances; Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in
bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and
take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention."
We see in this simile that the lesson of the Spanish Armada had not been
forgotten, and that its appearance was still vividly present in men's
minds.
Although the taverns were open to all comers, it was easy for small
companies of men, banded together by common interests and devoted to
similar aims, to keep aloof from casual patrons. Strangers who had no
literary interests would not find any excuse for intrusion, and the
landlord, proud of the special patronage of those who claimed respect
outside the tavern, would doubtless grant them such privileges as the
house afforded. At a time when the news of the day was brought to the
taverns, while men of affairs and those who had some _locus standi_ at
Court did not disdain the attractions of a favoured house, there must
have been a certain high standard of conversation, and many a friendly
battle of wits. The ready tongue and fluent pen might make a mark in the
tavern and all London hear of it. Ben Jonson established the Apollo room
at the "Devil Tavern" by Temple Bar and drew up his famous "Convivial
Laws," which, while granting admittance to "learned, urbane merry
goodfellows" and "choice women," forbade horseplay, and concluded "focus
perennis esto."
Sir Walter Raleigh founded a club at the "Mermaid Tavern," where, in
addition to Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, together
with many other dramatists of note, spent their leisure hours. In
Southwark the "Tabard Inn" enjoyed the fame conferred upon it by
Geoffrey Chaucer, as well as the additional honour of his patronage,
before Shakespeare arrived. "The Bell," "The George," and "The White
Hart" were among the "Tabard's" leading competitors; it is likely that
the poet knew them all. We have no record that he spent too much time in
taverns, as poor Ben Jonson did; but he knew them well enough to enter
into the spirit of those who served and those who gave orders, those who
paid promptly, and those who could say with Ancient Pistol, "Base is the
slave that pays."
Some of Shakespeare's biographers, who, because of their own virtues,
would abolish cakes and ale and forbid ginger to be hot in the mouth,
resent the mere suggestion that Shakespeare used the taverns as his
contemporaries did. There is no reason to suppose that he misused them
after the fashion of Robert Greene, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson, but at the
same time the temperance advocate will need to go very carefully through
plays and poems if he is searching for praise of water as opposed to
wine. The power of the Puritan was rising in Shakespeare's time, but the
Puritans did not number the poet among their supporters. A certain
spirit of conviviality marked the Elizabethan age, which enjoyed, among
other advantages, the benefit of wine and spirits that had not been
systematically adulterated. Then again, no playwright could remain
wholly indifferent to the taverns, for it was in the yards of the inns
that the drama was first nourished. The inn yard was to some extent the
forerunner of the theatre. When the companies left London in the summer
and went on tour, they found no small part of their audience in the
country hostelries. The place of the tavern in literary history has not
yet been written. From the "Tabard" of Chaucer to the "Mermaid" of
Shakespeare, through the coffee-houses of a later date, to the "Bohemia"
of Soho, where the free-lances of literature meet to-day, there is a
thread of connection well worth examining.
Our ubiquitous press tends to restrict the feast of reason and the flow
of soul; men do not care to express themselves too freely, or the
cleverest may wake one morning to find he has made some silent auditor
famous. A very notorious case of this kind occurred in the last decade
of the nineteenth century. But in Shakespeare's time wit seemed to
receive its guinea stamp from the tavern, and we have the records of
many men to show that when Shakespeare was one of the company the
audience had good reason to be content. There are many tributes to the
standard of the conversation. Beaumont, the dramatist, Francis Meres,
the clergyman schoolmaster, Richard Barnfield, the poet, Michael
Drayton, the intimate friend, all testify on behalf of Shakespeare; and
there are many others who must have seen and heard him. The attraction
of the tavern must have been increased to a great extent when their
patrons stood a chance of catching the crumbs that fell from the wit's
table. "To give you total reckoning of it," says Erle, "it is the busy
man's recreation, the idle man's business, the melancholy man's
sanctuary, the stranger's welcome, the inns a court man's entertainment,
the scholar's kindness, and the citizen's courtesy. It is the study
of sparkling wits, and a cup of canary their book, whence we leave
them."
=INTERIOR OF ST. SAVIOUR'S AT SOUTHWARK
(Edmund Shakespeare's Burial-place)=
All have passed--the spacious taverns, those who served, and those who
patronised them have gone, never to return. Where great writers and
poets assembled and marked the arrival of travellers from the country,
and listened to stories of "nine men in buckram," where the horseman saw
to the ease of his weary nag before his own, we see crowded
thoroughfares in which the pulse of traffic beats furiously for six long
days out of seven. Of the many changes London has known in the three
centuries that have passed since Shakespeare's time few have been more
drastic. Perhaps the Great Fire destroyed many of the taverns; the
growth of commerce and the coming of new means of locomotion did the
rest. Only in old prints may we find some pleasing recollection of
red-tiled or thatched houses with half timber and half plaster walls,
their ingle nooks, dormer windows, or many gables. Here the men to whom
we still pay tribute spent their hours of ease, unconscious that their
lightest words would be sought for eagerly in generations to come--and
be sought in vain. But the knowledge that the old houses had their
being, and that the great poets of the Elizabethan era frequented them,
hallows many a dusty, dingy street in the city's by-ways now given over
to feverish activity from dawn to dusk, and to silence from dusk to
dawn.