Shakespeare, Jonson and Donne are supposed to have drunk in a tavern on Bread Street. Milton was born on it.
Burger and Lobster on Bread Street holds a 4.7 from five thousand seven hundred and thirty-eight people, which is one of the strongest numbers on a large sample in this entire survey.
And Bread Street is where the Mermaid Tavern stood.
The Mermaid
It is the most famous tavern in English literary history and we have to be careful about it, because the legend is enormous and the evidence is thin.
The claim: that there was a club – the Friday Street Club, or the Mermaid Club – which met here, and whose members included Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Walter Raleigh, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher.
That they drank, and argued, and that the wit was extraordinary.
Beaumont wrote a verse letter to Jonson recalling what was said at the Mermaid – and he describes talk so nimble and so full of subtle flame that everybody in the room felt they had emptied their whole wit into a jest.
That letter is real. That is the foundation of the entire legend.
What we can actually say
The tavern was real. Beaumont’s letter is real, and it describes drinking there with Jonson.
Shakespeare’s attendance is not documented anywhere. There is no record of him at the Mermaid. The whole picture of Shakespeare and Jonson trading wit across a table is a nineteenth-century construction, built on a real tavern, a real letter, and an enormous amount of wishing.
And we have spent four hundred and fifteen articles being exactly this careful, and it never makes us popular.
The tavern burned in 1666, like everything else.
Milton
Who is not a legend and is simply a fact.
John Milton was born on Bread Street, in 1608, at a house called the Spread Eagle – his father was a scrivener and a composer.
He went blind in his forties, and he then composed Paradise Lost entirely in his head, at night, in blocks of forty or fifty lines, and dictated them in the morning to whoever was available – his daughters, a friend, a paid amanuensis.
Ten thousand five hundred lines of blank verse, held in a dark room, in a man’s memory, and given out in the mornings.
He was born on this street. There is very little to mark it.
The restaurant
Burger, or lobster, or a lobster roll. Three things. That is the whole menu and it has been the whole menu since they opened, and a 4.7 across five and a half thousand people is a very serious number.
Short list. Do one thing. It is the finding of four hundred and fifteen articles and it works for kitchens as well as bars.
Verdict
Excellent. Go, order the lobster roll, and consider that a blind man on this street composed the greatest poem in the language without writing a word of it down.
What he was paid
Ten pounds. Five up front and five on the second edition.
That is what John Milton received for Paradise Lost, under a contract signed in 1667, and the contract survives and you can go and look at it.
Ten pounds, for the greatest poem in the English language, written blind, by a man who had been on the losing side of a civil war and had very nearly been executed for it at the Restoration.
His widow later sold all remaining rights for eight pounds.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
