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Jennifer Richards, Health, Intoxication, and Civil Conversation in Renaissance England , Past & Present, Volume 222, Issue suppl_9, 2014, Pages 168–186, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtt034
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‘He kept bottles of wine at his lodgeing, and many times he would drinke liberally by himselfe to refreshe his spirits, and exalt his muse.’ 1 So records John Aubrey in his brief biography of the poet Andrew Marvell. The idea that alcohol lubricates the imagination is entrenched in Renaissance culture, and with good reason. As Shakespeare’s figure of excess John Falstaff reliably explains, wine ‘ascends me into the brain, dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes, which delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit.’ 2
Literary scholars have long recognized the good as well as bad effects of intoxication on the tongue and on wit; there are plenty of textual examples to attest to both. Recently, though, it has been the beneficial effects of hard drinking on voluble male communities that has caught our attention. 3 Michelle O’Callaghan reminds us that The Mermaid and The Mitre taverns were home to several convivial societies, the drinking activities of which helped to ‘open an extemporised space for exploring the dimensions of laughter and pleasure’, which in turn inspired literary composition, especially modes of ‘ “uninhibited discourse,” from fantastical linguistic play to satires on the Church and State’. 4 Adam Smyth recalls that against a tide of moralizing, anti-drinking literature, John Cotgrave’s Wit’s Interpreter (1655, 1662, 1671) ‘constructs a drunkard’s discourse that is lexically rich’. 5 This literary intoxication not only lubricated the imagination but also freed the drinker to speak his mind. As Ben Jonson writes in ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’: ‘No simple word / That shall be uttered at our mirthful board / Shall make us sad next morning, or affright / The liberty that we’ll enjoy to-night’. 6
