A previously overlooked city plan has allowed researchers to pinpoint, for the first time, the exact location of William Shakespeare’s only London property, tucked away in a quiet corner of Blackfriars precinct.
The discovery was made by Professor Lucy Munro, a Shakespeare expert at King's College London, using three previously unknown documents from the London and National Archives.
“I was doing research as part of a wider project and couldn’t believe it when I realised what I was looking at, the floorplan of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars house,” Munro said. “It had been assumed that there wasn't much more evidence to gather about it, so research on it has laid dormant for a while.”
“These findings really help us tell the complete story of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars house, and thanks to this new discovery, we now know exactly where it stood.”
One of those, found by Munro in The London Archives, is a plan of part of the Blackfriars precinct, drawn up in 1668 following the Great Fire of London. The plan confirmed not only the precise location, but also the size of Shakespeare’s home.
Since the 18th century, scholars have known that Shakespeare owned a property in London, believed to be part of "the Great Gate" at the entrance to the Blackfriars precinct, a major 13th-century Dominican friary.
For years, a dark-blue City of London plaque has sat on a nineteenth-century building at 5 St Andrew's Hill, noting that “on 10th March 1613 William Shakespeare purchased lodgings in the Blackfriars Gatehouse located near this site.”
According to Munro’s research, the cautious qualifier can now be dropped, as the property covered what are now the eastern end of Ireland Yard, the bottom of Burgon Street, and parts of the buildings at 5 Burgon Street and 5 St Andrew's Hill. Meaning that the plaque doesn’t just sit near the property but was unknowingly placed at the site of the house itself.
Part of the property, extending beyond the gate, does not appear on the post-fire plan because it had no foundation. But the rest of it, according to the floor plan, measured about 45 feet from east to west and between 13 and 15 feet from north to south.
The plan does not show the internal layout of the home or its rooms, but it does show that it was large enough to have been divided into two houses by 1645.
Find sheds light on Shakespeare's later life
Munro’s find is historically significant, painting a very different picture of where Shakespeare may have spent his later years than was originally thought.
Traditionally, it was assumed that Shakespeare had retired to Stratford-upon-Avon after purchasing his Blackfriars home and returning from his London theater career.
However, “this discovery throws into question the narrative that Shakespeare simply retired to Stratford and spent no more time in the city," Munro said. "It has sometimes been thought that he bought his Blackfriars property merely as an investment, but we don’t know that this is true, or that he never used it for himself."
"After all, he could have bought an investment property anywhere in London, but this house was close to his workplace at the Blackfriars theater.”
Further, Munto said that the discovery suggests that Shakespeare and John Fletcher may have written “Two Noble Kinsmen” at the home in 1613.
“We also know that Shakespeare was visiting London in November 1614,” she said, “is it not likely that he stayed in his own house?"
The other two documents Munro found are of the sale of the property by Elizabeth Hall Nash Barnard, Shakespeare’s granddaughter. Barnard sold the property in 1665, a year before it was destroyed in the Great Fire of London.
"Professor Munro’s fantastic discovery proves there’s no replacement for human graft in the archive, and our reward for her hard work is a dazzling new sense of Shakespeare the London writer,” said Dr. Will Tosh, Education Director at Shakespeare's Globe. “She’s helped us to understand how much the city meant to our greatest ever dramatist, as a professional and personal home.”
“We at Shakespeare’s Globe are thrilled for Professor Munro, and very proud of our connection with King’s College London through the Shakespeare Centre London, which was established specifically to support and champion these new stories about Shakespeare and his world."
The find was announced on April 16 by King's College London, and was published in the Times Literary Supplement.