Chapter XVI: Introduction: To Lines on the Mermaid Tavern

The Mermaid Tavern was an old inn in Bread Street, Cheapside. Tradition says that the literary club there was established by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1603. In any case it was, in Shakespeare's time, frequented by the chief writers of the day, amongst them Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Selden, Carew, Donne, and Shakespeare himself. Beaumont, in a poetical epistle to Ben Jonson, writes:

What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
As if that any one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And has resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life.

NOTES ON LINES ON THE MERMAID TAVERN.

PAGE 131. l. 10. _bold Robin Hood._ Cf. _Robin Hood_, p. 133.

l. 12. _bowse_, drink.

PAGE 132. ll. 16-17. _an astrologer's . . . story._ The astrologer would record, on parchment, what he had seen in the heavens.

l. 22. _The Mermaid . . . Zodiac._ The zodiac was an imaginary belt across the heavens within which the sun and planets were supposed to move. It was divided into twelve parts corresponding to the twelve months of the year, according to the position of the moon when full. Each of these parts had a sign by which it was known, and the sign of the tenth was a fish-tailed goat, to which Keats refers as the Mermaid. The word _zodiac_ comes from the Greek +zôdion+, meaning a little animal, since originally all the signs were animals.