Shakespeare owned a house in London. We finally know where it was

By Jack Guy, CNN

London (CNN) — A chance find in a London archive has allowed a researcher to pinpoint the exact location of William Shakespeare’s London home for the first time.

It had long been known that the playwright owned a house in the Blackfriars, a 13th-century Dominican friary, and it was thought to have been located near the gatehouse.

But the new discovery means we now know its exact location, size and layout, as well as what kind of buildings would have surrounded it, Lucy Munro, Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at King’s College London, England, told CNN on Tuesday.

“It was a really pleasant surprise,” she said, explaining that the information came to light when she found a plan of the district, dating from 1668, during research for a project on local playhouses at the London Archives.

After checking the plan against descriptions of the house featured in the existing scholarship, Munro realized that she had stumbled across definitive proof of its location and layout.

“It would have been sort of L-shaped, with part of it going over the gatehouse,” said Munro, who added that the plan shows the property sitting on top of the gatehouse, as well as neighboring buildings, such as the Sign of the Cock Tavern.

“It’s not huge, but it’s relatively substantial,” she added. “It was large enough to be subdivided into two houses at some point.”

When Shakespeare bought the house in 1613, Blackfriars would have been a prestigious area, said Munro, although it became increasingly socially mixed over time.

“There are lots of gentry in the area, but there are also increasingly tradespeople living in the area,” she said.

The discovery also sheds new light on Shakespeare’s later life, in the years prior to his death in 1616 at age 52, Munro said.

It questions the widely held belief that he retired to his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon after the Globe playhouse, where most of his plays were performed for the first time, burned down in June 1613.

“It’s sometimes been conjectured that he kind of backs out at the point when the Globe burns down, but then we know that he’s still writing plays in the period following the Globe fire,” said Munro, referencing his collaboration with up-and-coming playwright John Fletcher on a play named “The Two Noble Kinsmen.”

Munro also questions the thesis that Shakespeare bought the Blackfriars property for financial gain.

“If he was just buying the property as an investment, there were lots of parts of London where he could have bought it,” she said.

“The fact that he buys it in the Blackfriars, which is less than five minutes’ walk from the (Globe) Playhouse, suggests to me that there’s a level of engagement with his professional life in London still in 1613,” said Munro.

“He’s not the isolated genius sitting in an attic. He’s somebody who’s collaborating with other playwrights. He’s somebody who owns shares in playhouses. He’s somebody who’s buying property in the Blackfriars,” she added. “So yeah, I think it gives us a slightly different picture to maybe the more standard one.”

More widely, Munro believes the find shows that there is still much to learn about Britain’s most famous playwright.

“I think there’s sometimes an assumption with things relating to Shakespeare biography that everything’s been gone over again and again, and there isn’t really anything left to find, when actually there are still some bits of the jigsaw puzzle kind of still out there,” said Munro, whose research will be published in the Times Literary Supplement on April 17.

Will Tosh, Director of Education at Shakespeare’s Globe, the modern theater and education center that stands on the site of the historic playhouse, said Munro had made a “fantastic discovery.”

“Our reward for her hard work is a dazzling new sense of Shakespeare the London writer,” he said in a statement published by King’s College London.

“She’s helped us to understand how much the city meant to our greatest ever dramatist, as a professional and personal home.”

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