Mermaid Tavern was located in Cheapside, to the east of St. Paul’s Cathedral. It had entrances from both Friday Street and Bread Street. The tavern’s sign, not surprisingly, bore a mermaid. Mermaid Tavern was the meeting place of the “Friday Street Club”, also known as the “Mermaid Club”, a literary club first begun in 1603 by Sir Walter Ralegh. Mermaid Tavern was a favorite haunt of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, John Donne, Robert Herrick, John Selden, and last, but not least, William Shakespeare.

The Mermaid Tavern, which burned down in the Great Fire of London, was memorialized in verse by Jonson in “Inviting a Friend to Supper”, by Beaumont in “Mr. Francis Beaumont’s Letter to Ben Jonson, and, two hundred years later, by Keats in “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern.”

I doubt blogs will include actual dining. New technology is often seen in terms of existing systems. Like the horseless carriage, electric pen, wireless telegraph. Blogs function somewhat like pubs, as cars transport people like horse-drawn carriages.

During the Renaissance, neoPlatonists took this concept an ran with it, calling the phenomenon “convivio.” Michel Jeanneret explores convivio is his A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance .

One of the fabled institutions of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean London was the Mermaid Club. Meeting once a week at the Mermaid Tavern, it was reputedly founded by Raleigh and Shakespeare. Whatever the case may be regarding them, Ben Johnson and John Donne definitely were members as well as a host of other poets.

Somewhat similarly, the coffeehouse culture of late 17th and early 18th century London were productive gathering places. The publications of Addison and Steele and the bull sessions of Samuel Johnson result from them. Such institutions as the stock market actually descend from them. Coffeehouses also flourished elsewhere in Europe. Much of Bach’s music, for example, results from jam sessions he conducted in a coffeehouse in Leipzig.

Note that all these involved not only talk but eating. The body as well as the mind was engaged. Blogs lack this physical aspect. Perhaps somehow they will evolve so this can be added.

We have the illusion of participation without the reality.
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Fabius Maximus replies: I agree. A powerful observation. Hopefully what we gain from blogs we put to work at home. An example of local action is community politics, another is Project White Horse.