law it is contention:
And as they do reply,
So give them still the lie.
Tell fortune of her blindness;
Tell nature of decay;
Tell friendship of unkindness;
Tell justice of delay:
And if they will reply,
Then give them all the lie.
Tell arts they have no soundness,
But vary by esteeming;
Tell schools they want profoundness,
And stand too much on seeming:
If arts and schools reply,
Give arts and schools the lie.
Tell faith it’s fled the city;
Tell how the country erreth;
Tell manhood shakes off pity
And virtue least preferreth:
And if they do reply,
Spare not to give the lie.
So when thou hast, as I
Commanded thee, done blabbing –
Although to give the lie
Deserves no less than stabbing –
Stab at thee he that will,
No stab the soul can kill.
It’s the kind of poem one can imagine being roared in a tavern by a group of Renaissance wits. And indeed, there is a legend that it was Sir Walter Raleigh himself who founded the famous drinking club at the Mermaid Tavern in London’s Cheapside, where most of the key dramatists of the Jacobean period gathered – though perhaps not Shakespeare himself. There is a roughness to the Raleigh poem, a crudeness which these days we associate more with the Restoration, but which was certainly part of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean world of poetry. You can find it in many of the dramatists, but also in the verses of the first working-class London poet we remember. John Taylor was a ‘waterman’ who ferried all classes up and down the River Thames, and across it to see plays at Southwark. He was the nearest thing Renaissance London had to a cabbie. His verses aren’t exactly sophisticated, but if you want to know what London sounded like in the early 1600s, they are essential. He knew all too well the seedier side of life, and was scathing about his fares:
Look how yon lecher’s legs are worn away
With haunting of the whore house every day:
He knows more greasy panders, bawds, and drabs,
And eats more lobsters, artichokes, and crabs,
Blue roasted eggs, potatoes muscadine,
Oysters, and pith that grows i’th’ ox’s chine,
With many drugs, compounds, and simples store;
Which makes him have a stomach to a whore.
But one day he’ll give o’er when ’tis too late,
When he stands begging through an iron grate.
Similarly, some of the serving wenches we glimpse in the background of Shakespeare’s tavern scenes are well known to the water poet:
A lusty wench as nimble as an eel
Would give a gallant leave to kiss and feel;
His itching humour straightway was in hope
To toy, to wanton, tally, buss and grope.
‘Hold sir,’ quoth she, ‘My word I will not fail,
For you shall feel my hand and kiss my tail.’
Bad behaviour in Jacobean times led not only to begging but to hanging, and the monthly executions at Tyburn provided Taylor with another subject:
I have heard sundry men oft times dispute
Of trees, that in one year will twice bear fruit.
But if a man note Tyburn, ’twill appear,
That that’s a tree that bears twelve times a year.
I muse it should so fruitful be, for why
I understand the root of it is dry,
It bears no leaf, no bloom, or no bud,
The rain that makes it fructify is blood.
I further note, the fruit which it produces,
Doth seldom serve for profitable uses:
Except the skillful Surgeons industry
Do make Dissection of Anatomy.
It blooms, buds, and bears, all three together,
And in one hour, doth live, and die, and wither.
Like Sodom Apples, they are in conceit,
For touched, they turn to dust and ashes straight.
Besides I find this tree hath never been
Like other fruit trees, walled or hedged in,
But in the highway standing many a year,
It never yet was robbed, as I could hear.
The reason is apparent to our eyes,
That what it bears, are dead commodities:
And yet sometimes (such grace to it is given)
The dying fruit is well prepared for heaven,
And many times a man may gather thence
Remorse, devotion, and true penitence.
And from that tree, I think more fools ascend
To that Celestial joy, which shall never end.
Among the Mermaid drinkers, and Taylor’s clients, were Ben Jonson and John Donne, both of them very different men from Raleigh, and poets who – unlike the loquacious cabbie – were important public figures.
Jonson was no more nobly born than Shakespeare. He was a native Londoner, whose father-in-law had been a brickmaker, and while formidably intelligent and well educated, he seems to have had a thick brick chip on
