A fortuitous discovery in a London archive allowed a researcher to identify, for the first time, the exact location of the house by William Shakespeare in London.
It had long been known that the playwright owned a house in Blackfriars, a 13th-century Dominican convent, and was believed to be located near the gatehouse.
But the new discovery means we now know its exact location, size and layout, as well as what type of it, Lucy Munro, professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at King’s College London, England, told CNN.
“It was a very pleasant surprise,” she said, explaining that the information came to light when she found a plan of the neighborhood, dated 1668, during research for a project on local theaters at the London Archives.
After comparing the plan with descriptions of the house in existing studies, Munro realized he had found definitive proof of its location and plan.
“It would be kind of L-shaped, with part of it going over the guardhouse,” Munro said, adding that the plan shows the property sitting on top of the guardhouse, as well as neighboring buildings such as the Sign of the Cock Tavern.
“It’s not huge, but it’s relatively big,” he added. “It was big enough to be subdivided into two houses at some point.”
When Shakespeare bought the house in 1613, Blackfriars was a prestigious area, Munro said, although it became increasingly socially diverse over time.
“There are many members of the landed gentry in the region, but there are also a growing number of merchants living here,” she said.
The discovery also sheds new light on Shakespeare’s later life, in the years before his death in 1616 at age 52, Munro said.
Questions the widely held belief that he retired in his after the Globe theater, where most of his plays were first performed, burned down in June 1613.
“Sometimes it’s speculated that he kind of walked away when the Globe burned, but we know that he continued writing plays in the period after the fire,” Munro said, referring to his collaboration with up-and-coming playwright John Fletcher on a play called “The Two Noble Kinsmen.”
Munro also questions the thesis that Shakespeare purchased the Blackfriars estate for financial gain.
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“If he was just buying the property as an investment, there were plenty of other parts of London where he could have bought it,” she said.
“The fact that he bought it in Blackfriars, which is less than a five-minute walk from the Globe Playhouse, suggests that there was still some involvement with his working life in London in 1613,” Munro said.
“He’s not the isolated genius sitting in an attic. He’s someone who collaborates with . He is someone who owns shares in theaters. He’s someone who buys property in Blackfriars,” she added. “So yes, I think that gives us a slightly different perspective to perhaps the more common one.”
More broadly, Munro believes the discovery demonstrates that there is still much to learn about Britain’s most famous playwright.
“I think there is sometimes an assumption, in relation to Shakespeare biographical matters, that everything has already been analyzed to death and there is nothing left to discover, when in fact there are still some pieces of that puzzle 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 sits on the site of the historic theater, said Munro had made a “fantastic discovery.”
“Our reward for your hard work is a dazzling new understanding of Shakespeare, the London writer,” he said in a statement published by King’s College London.
“She helped us understand how much the city meant to our greatest playwright of all time, as a professional and personal home.”
