ABSTRACT
What does Starbucks coffee have to do with the main focus of this chapter, that is to say with the theatrical virtuosa of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a figure with a role to play in waterborne as well as land-based pageantry? The brief answer is: a shared and ambivalent iconography. A capsule history of the Starbucks logo from the 1970s to the present, featuring an ambiguously-mutating mermaid, would reveal a shift over time towards a politically-correct ‘G-rating’, first by way of covering the female figure’s breasts, then with the editing out of her open ‘legs’, or rather, fish-tails. Although she is yet to be given a bikini top, à la Disney’s Little Mermaid, pointed stars have been added, her smile has become more direct and prominent and little remains of the original image, itself based on a fifteenth-century engraving of the legendary, shape-changing Mélusine.1
