• Sireniacal gentlemen

    From bookburn@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jan 22 22:55:39 2022
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mermaid_Tavern#Shakespeare_and_the_Sireniacal_gentlemen

    "The Sireniacal gentlemen"
    (quote)
    The Mermaid Tavern was a tavern on Cheapside in London during the Elizabethan era, located east of St. Paul's Cathedral on the corner of Friday Street and Bread Street. It was the site of the so-called "Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen", a drinking
    club that met on the first Friday of every month that included some of the Elizabethan era's leading literary figures, among them Ben Jonson, John Donne, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, Thomas Coryat, John Selden, Robert Bruce Cotton, Richard Carew,
    Richard Martin, and William Strachey. A popular tradition has grown up that the group included William Shakespeare, although most scholars think that
    was improbable.
    . . . .
    (unquote)
    Wassail Chorus at the Mermaid Tavern, a Christmas drinking-song imagined having been sung in the tavern, in which each new verse is "composed" by one of the poet-guests, including Raleigh, Drayton, "Shakespeare's friend", Heywood and Jonson.
    . . . .
    If notable scholars opine that Sir Walter Raleigh initiated it, but was too elite to hold forth with the "sireniacal gentlemen" at the Mermaid Tavern, then how likely is it that de Vere would have been the "Shakespeare" there?

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