At the Mitre: The Convivium Philosophicum

The Convivium Philosophicum, or “Philosophical Banquet,” at the Mitre Tavern offers a tantalizing insight into Henry Neville’s social and literary life. The gathering is usually dated to 2 September 1611, the year Thomas Coryate’s Crudities was published.¹

Henry Neville appears to have attended alongside the poet Hugh Holland, whose tribute to Shakespeare would appear in the First Folio, as well as John Donne, the architect Inigo Jones, and the poets and parliamentarians John Hoskyns and Christopher Brooke.²

Zachary Lesser identifies this Neville as the Billingbear diplomat, “Neville the parliamentary undertaker,” and calls the evidence for the alternative identification “scanty.” He points to Neville’s close parliamentary associations with other attendees.³

The company at the Mitre

A comic Latin poem accompanied the gathering, naming its company through a series of learned puns and presenting the dinner as a mock summons. Its opening promises food and jokes. In the contemporary English version printed by Andrew Clark, it begins:

Whosoever is contented
That a number be convented
Enough but not too many;
The Miter is the place decreed,
For witty jests and cleanly feed,
The betterest of any.⁴

The mock ceremony continues through the roll call. Christopher Brooke becomes a torrent, John Donne “John Made,” and Henry Goodyere a good year. Inigo Jones appears as an architect; the English version turns him into an “Ionicke-piller.” A man who fails to appear is threatened with a fine of forty pence. The joke assumes a company that will recognize its members from these transformations of their names.

The State Papers copy has an appended list headed Conuiua. Normalizing the names, the thirteen men listed are:

Coryate supplies the fourteenth figure in the poem, although he is not included in this appended list. The verse says the entertainment will be incomplete without him. The appended list identifies the company behind the poem’s jokes.²

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The list places poets beside men occupied with law, government and business. That mixture is central to the occasion. A Latin joke could be shared by people whose daily work lay in Parliament or commerce as readily as in writing verse. Richard Martin, Hoskyns and Brooke were lawyers as well as literary men; Jones brought the arts of architecture and court entertainment into the same company.⁵

Billingbear Neville shared parliamentary as well as literary connections with this company. Martin and Hoskyns, for example, had both sat with him in the Parliament of 1604. On 14 May 1610, Richard Martin moved to add him to a Commons committee concerning ambassadors’ children. The parliamentary record thus puts the two men into a specific piece of business before the probable date of the dinner.⁶

A learned joke with a political edge

Most copies attribute the poem to “Doctore Rudolpho Colfabio” of Brasenose College, an otherwise unidentified figure. One early copy used by Clark names John Hoskyns, to whom the poem is traditionally attributed. Its mock Latin repeatedly admits English words and invented formations. Coryate is imagined making all Europe into a Fleet Street, and his travels invite jokes about the same shoes and shirt lasting throughout. Learning supplies the means of laughter rather than a solemn academic programme.⁴

Neville’s place in the roll call is particularly suggestive:

Robertus Equorum amicus,
Ne vile aestimet Henricus
Dignabitur adesse,

The English version renders the middle line “Ne let Sir Henry count it vile.” The surname is broken into Ne-vile, while aestimet introduces the act of esteeming. Clark identifies the joke as an allusion to the family motto, “Ne vile velis.” Chapter 41 examines the conjunction with Sonnet 121’s “vile esteemed.” Here the joke also shows how a member’s family name could become a miniature performance for the company.⁴

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The latter part ranges over the king, princes, ministers, clergy, merchants and other estates of society. Drinking and fellowship sit beside political observation. The poem’s transmission also suggests collaborative wit: a manuscript discussed by Julian Neuhauser attributes a later portion to “Whittakers,” whom he identifies as almost certainly Laurence Whitaker. Hoskyns’s name need not imply that every surviving stanza came from one author.⁵

Neuhauser places such exchanges within an overlapping world of convivial associations, including Coryate’s “Sireniacal Gentlemen.” Coryate’s later letter describes their monthly meetings at the Mermaid in Bread Street. The Mitre dinner belongs to the same wider culture of learned sociability, but the two taverns and their particular records should remain distinct. Neither Shakespeare nor Jonson occurs in the Mitre poem’s named company.⁵

Hugh Holland: from convivial verse to the First Folio

Holland makes the connection with Shakespeare’s publication especially concrete. He was not merely an unidentified name on a dining list. Jonson contributed an ode to Holland’s Pancharis in 1603; Holland in turn supplied verse for Jonson’s Sejanus in 1605. He also contributed to the verses surrounding Coryate’s Crudities in 1611. His poetry participated in the public presentation of other writers’ books.⁷

The manuscript names him plainly, while the Latin calls him Hugo Inferior-Germanus, playing on Holland as the Low Countries. He appears immediately before Inigo Jones. The poet who would help introduce the First Folio was therefore already a recognizable figure in this company’s exchanges of wit.

His literary friendships also continued beyond the occasion. An engraved memorial portrait of Richard Martin, dated 1620, carries a joint dedication by Christopher Brooke, John Hoskyns and Hugh Holland to Lionel Cranfield. Holland supplied verses mourning Martin and arranged for the engraving. Five names from the Convivium recur here: Martin himself, Brooke, Hoskyns, Holland and Cranfield.⁸

In the First Folio of 1623, Holland’s signed poem is headed “Upon the Lines and Life of the Famous Scenicke Poet, Master William Shakespeare.” Its opening turns the audience’s applause into mourning:

Those hands, which you so clapped, go now, and wring,
You Britains brave; for done are Shakespeare’s days:
His days are done, that made the dainty plays,
Which made the Globe of heaven and earth to ring.⁹

The closing couplet promises survival through writing:

For though his line of life went soon about,
The life yet of his lines shall never out.⁹

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Holland’s tribute joins theatrical performance to the printed book that will preserve it. His presence in both the Convivium and the Folio is a documented connection between a particular literary company and Shakespeare’s posthumous publication. With Lesser’s identification of Neville, the dinner places the Billingbear diplomat in that company.