Mermaid Tavern

noun

1. an inn formerly located on Bread Street, Cheapside, in the heart of old London: a meeting place and informal club for Elizabethan playwrights and poets.

Example Sentences

Experts believe Johnson was the landlord of the Mermaid tavern which the bard and playwright Christopher Marlowe visited while the actor, also known as John Heminges, was the manager and editor of Shakespeare's first folio.

From BBC

On each side of Cheapside, narrow streets diverge into the dense mass behind—Ironmonger Lane, King Street, Milk Street, and Wood Street, on the north; and among others, Queen Street, Bread Street, where Milton was born, and where stood the famous Mermaid Tavern, where Shakespeare and Raleigh, Ben Jonson and his young friends, Beaumont and Fletcher, those twin-dramatists, loved to meet, to enjoy “the feast of reason and the flow of soul,” to say nothing of a few flagons of good Canary wine, Bow Lane, and Old ’Change, on the south. 

From Project Gutenberg

Suppose, for instance, that you were to go into the tap-room of the Mermaid Tavern some winter evening during the reign of the, so to speak, Good Queen Bess.

From Project Gutenberg

Shakespeare and Bacon and Raleigh met in the Mermaid Tavern for the purpose of turning out a few yards of Elizabethan blank verse in the post-Tennysonian style of Mr. Alfred Noyes.

From Project Gutenberg

There, under some spreading oak or beech, I shall hope to see Carlyle and Tennyson, or Lamb and Hazlitt and Coleridge, or Johnson laying down the law to Langton and Burke and Beauclerk, with Bozzy taking notes, or Ben Jonson and Shakespeare continuing those combats of the Mermaid Tavern described by Fuller—the one mighty and lumbering like a Spanish galleon, the other swift and supple of movement like an English frigate—or Chaucer and his Canterbury pilgrims still telling tales on an eternal May morning.

From Project Gutenberg