We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr

– 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 his shoulder all his life. But he was politically astute, and rose to be a key figure in the court of James I. His great comedies, Volpone and Bartholomew Fair, give us the sound and stench of Jacobean London with a specificity that goes beyond even Shakespeare. By common consent he’s a much less great playwright, whose characters can seem merely gorgeously decorated cardboard cut-outs, representative of vices and virtues, the too-obvious children of medieval drama. Still, he was a wonderful poet.

      Because we all like our history neat, it’s easy to forget that so-called periods or chapters or ages overlap and bleed into one another. Thus, in what we now call the ‘Renaissance’ or early modern period, there is plenty of medievalism still lively and present. A great example of this is the rollicking Ben Jonson poem from one of his less well-known plays, in which the devil is invited to dinner and feeds upon a well-seasoned banquet of Jonson’s contemporaries:

      His stomach was queasy (he came hither coached)

      The jogging had caused some crudities rise;

      To help it he called for a puritan poached,

      That used to turn up the eggs of his eyes.

      And so recovered unto his wish,

      He sat him down, and he fell to eat;

      Promoter in plum broth was the first dish –

      His own privy kitchen had no such meat.

      Yet though with this he much were taken,

      Upon a sudden he shifted his trencher,

      As soon as he spied the bawd and the bacon,

      By which you may note the devil’s a wencher.

      Six pickled tailors sliced and cut,

      Sempsters and tirewomen, fit for his palate;

      With feathermen and perfumers put

      Some twelve in a charger to make a great sallet.

      A rich fat usurer stewed in his marrow,

      And by him a lawyer’s head and green sauce:

      Both which his belly took up like a harrow,

      As if till then he had never seen sauce.

      Then carbonadoed and cooked with pains,

      Was brought up a cloven sergeant’s face:

      The sauce was made of his yeoman’s brains,

      That had been beaten out with his own mace.

      Two roasted sherriffs came whole to the board;

      (The feast had been nothing without ’em)

      Both living and dead they were foxed and furred,

      Their chains like sausages hung about ’em.

      The very next dish was the mayor of a town,

      With a pudding of maintenance thrust in his belly,

      Like a goose in the feathers, dressed in his gown,

      And his couple of hinch-boys boiled to a jelly.

      A London cuckold hot from the spit,

      And when the carver up had broken him,