It would seem hardly necessary further to urge such an enthusiastic lover of the tavern, but Launce thought differently.
Launce. If thou wilt go with me to the alehouse, so; if not, thou art an Hebrew, a Jew, and not worth the name of a Christian.
Speed. Why?
Launce. Because thou hast not so much charity in thee as to go to the ale with a Christian.
We are not surprised to hear the final question, “Wilt thou go?” promptly answered, “At thy service.”
Most of the tavern names Shakespeare mentions are true products of the Renaissance times when classical studies were extremely popular. “The Centaur,” “The Phenix,” “The Pomegranate,”—an ornament we find so often in the brocades of the sixteenth century,—all are signs of his own time, simply transplanted from London he knew so well to Genoa or Ephesus, places he had never put his eye on. “The Pegasus,” by the man in the street called “The Flying Horse,” decorated still in the year 1691 the house of a jeweler and banker in Lombard Street. In passing, we may remark that all the signs which to-day surprise the traveler in this busy street are more or less happy reproductions of the old signs, hung out there by the great banking firms for King Edward’s coronation.
In our wanderings through England we occasionally cross the path Shakespeare went with his company of actors. The court in the “George Inn” in Salisbury, to-day transformed into a pleasant little garden, was once the scene where the “Strolling Players” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries used to give their performances, and here Shakespeare himself acted when he visited Salisbury. A police ordinance allowed only in the “George” theatrical amusements, and demanded that all plays should be ended by seven o’clock in the evening. This George Hotel was first mentioned in 1401 as “Georgysyn.” Oliver Cromwell slept here October 17, 1645, on his way to the army. The old beams which carry the ceiling of the parlor, and which a shrewd landlord has discovered in other rooms and freed from the hiding plaster, are the delight of American travelers, who refuse to sleep in rooms without beams. In the days of Pepys it was an elegant hostelry. In his “Diary,” in which he praises Salisbury as “a very brave place,” he puts down the following remarks: “Come to the George Inn where lay in a silk bed, and very good diet.” Less pleased he was with the bill, which he thought “so exorbitant that I was mad and resolved to truble the mistress about it and get something for the poor; and came away in that humour.” The result of his protest was not great. After paying £2 5s. 6d. for the night he gains just two shillings for the poor (one for “an old woman in the street”). Similar privileges for theatrical performances had the “Red Lion” in Boston, the little English mother of her big American daughter, and the “Mayde’s Hede” in Norwich. The closed space of these old innyards, with its staircases leading to the surrounding gallery, was thoroughly fitted for the theatrical representations, and it is quite possible that this gallery of the innyard influenced the architecture of the later theaters. Few of these innyards have survived, unfortunately, but we have still a wonderful example in the charming court of the so-called “New Inn” in Gloucester. It was new in the fifteenth century. How enchanting a Shakespeare play would be in the frame of its verdure!
In the First Part of “Henry IV,” the poet himself has introduced us into such an innyard. It is very early morning and everything still dark. Carters come to look after their goods and to harness their horses, exchanging remarks in plain language: “I think this be the most villanous house in all London road for fleas”; or, “God’s body! the turkeys in my pannier are quite starved. What, ostler! A plague on thee! hast thou never an eye in thy head?”—a master scene of realistic observation in the style Lessing and Goethe admired so much, and Voltaire hated so that he proclaimed: “Shakespeare was a remarkable genius, but he had no taste, since for two hundred years he has spoiled the taste of the English nation.”
How important the spacious enclosure of the innyard was for the farmers coming to town with their loaded wagons is shown by the fact that still to-day many a hotel in Germany is simply called “Hof” (court) or “Gasthof”; as, for example: “Koelner Hof,” “Rheinischer Hof,” “Habsburger Hof,” even “Kaiserhof,” sumptuous modern structures, perhaps, which have only a narrow lighting shaft in the center of the building and nothing of the large and airy courtyards of the good old times.
Many of the tavern names Shakespeare mentions in his plays we know from other sources as signs that actually decorated the streets of London. “Leopard” and “Tiger” were infrequent, but we hear of a “Leopard Tavern” in Chancery Lane, which still existed in 1665. The popular pronunciation was “lubber,” and in this form we find the beast quoted in “Henry IV” (Part II, ii, i), where it is said of Falstaff: “He is indited to dinner to the Lubber’s-head in Lumbert street, to Master Smooth’s the silk-man.” Such curious distortions of strange words are nothing uncommon in popular language; we have only to remember how the old Yankee farmers used to call the panther by the gentle name “painter.” Another of Falstaff’s favorite resorts was “The Half-Moon,” likewise mentioned in “Henry IV” (Part I, ii, iv), where he used to consume countless “pints of bastard” and of dark Spanish wine. “The Tiger” referred to in the “Comedy of Errors” (iii, i) was, too, an actual sign of the times, as we hear of a “Golden Tiger” in Pilgrim Street, Newcastle. On the other hand, the name of the “Porcupine,” which occurs in the same play, is probably invented as a characteristic sign for a place of ill-fame.
The most renowned of all the Falstaff inns is doubtless “The Garter,” his real home, so vividly described in the “Merry Wives of Windsor”: “There’s his chamber, his house, his castle, his standing-bed and truckle-bed; ’tis painted about with the story of the Prodigal, fresh and new.” These few words give us an exact picture how a sleeping-room in an inn looked in his time. The truckle-bed, it seems, was put under the standing bed and was used by the servant, if we interpret rightly the old rhyme on a “servile tutor”:—