More about the Mermaid tavern - 2

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Two hundred years after Shakespeare (or more specifically, in early February of 1819), John Keats composed a poem on the legend, 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?

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. He is not of our time, but of all times. One imagines him wrestling with the giant Skrymir and drinking deep draughts from the horn of Thor, or exchanging jests with Falstaff at the Boar’s Head in Eastcheap, or joining in the intellectual revels at the Mermaid Tavern, or meeting Johnson foot to foot and dealing blow for mighty blow. With Rabelais he rioted, and Don Quixote and Sancho were his "vera brithers." One seems to see him coming down from the twilight of fable, through the centuries, calling wherever there is good company, and welcome wherever he calls, for he brings no cult of the time or pedantry of the schools with him.

References

* Halliday, F. E. A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964. Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
* Johnson, George William. Memoirs of John Selden and Notices of the Political Contest During His Time. London, Orr and Smith, 1835; reprint, The Lawbook Exchange, 2005.
* Palmer, Alan and Veronica, eds. Who's Who in Shakespeare's England. New York, St. Martin's Press, 1981.

External link

* Details from William Shakespeare.Org

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mermaid_Tavern"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mermaid_Tavern

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