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

A newly discovered 17th-century map sheds new light on the Bard’s London life, pinpointing for the first time the exact location of the only home William Shakespeare bought in the city, and where he may have worked on his final plays. (The Chandos portrait by John Taylor)

LONDON — Fans of William Shakespeare know that the great playwright came from Stratford-upon-Avon, the riverside English town where tourists still throng to see his childhood home.

But he made his name in London — though few traces of him remain in the British capital.

A newly discovered 17th-century map sheds new light on the Bard’s London life, pinpointing for the first time the exact location of the only home Shakespeare bought in the city, and where he may have worked on his final plays.

Shakespeare scholar Lucy Munro, who found the document, said that it supplies “extra bits of the jigsaw puzzle” of Shakespeare’s life. And as with so many discoveries, it was partly due to luck.

“I came across it in the London Archives when I was looking for other things,” Munro said.

New evidence of the building’s location

Historians have long known that Shakespeare bought property in 1613 near the Blackfriars Theatre, but the exact location was a mystery. A plaque on a 19th-century building records only that the playwright had lodgings “near this site.”

A plan of the Blackfriars precinct found by Munro and disclosed Thursday by King’s College London shows in detail Shakespeare’s house, a substantial L-shaped dwelling carved from a former medieval monastery, including its gatehouse.

The 13th-century Dominican friary had been redeveloped for more secular uses after the dissolution of the monasteries by King Henry VIII in the mid-16th century. The precinct included the Blackfriars playhouse, which Shakespeare part-owned.

Munro, professor of Shakespeare and early modern literature at King’s College London, said it was a desirable area moving slightly down-market – due to people like Shakespeare, who was affluent but associated with the slightly déclassé world of the stage.

“After the dissolution of the monasteries, a lot of the nobility, quite high-ranking courtiers, court officials are living in the Blackfriars,” Munro said. By the time Shakespeare bought his property, “there are still a lot of important people living there, people who make protests against the playhouses at various points, because they see the playhouses as a bit of a public nuisance.”

Shakespeare used the profits of his plays to build a fine family house, now demolished, in Stratford, about 100 miles (160 kilometres) northwest of London. He died there in 1616 at the age of 52.

It’s not certain whether Shakespeare lived in his London property or just rented it out. But Munro said that the size of the house and its location a five-minute walk from the Blackfriars Theatre suggest he may have spent more time in London toward the end of his life than is widely assumed. She said that he may have worked here on his final plays, “Henry VIII” and “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” both co-written with John Fletcher.

Will Tosh, director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe — a reconstruction of the open-air Elizabethan playhouse where many of the Bard’s plays were first performed — said that Munro’s discovery provides a “dazzling new sense of Shakespeare the London writer. She’s helped us to understand how much the city meant to our greatest ever dramatist, as a professional and personal home.”

Destroyed in the Great Fire

Shakespeare left the property to his daughter Susanna, and it remained in the family for another half-century. Munro also found two archival documents detailing its sale by the playwright’s granddaughter Elizabeth Hall Nash Barnard in 1665. A year later, the building burned to the ground in the Great Fire of London, which destroyed much of the medieval city.

Only a few remnants of Shakespeare’s London remain in the area, now part of the city’s financial district, including a fragment of wall from the medieval friary. Nearby, the name Playhouse Yard is a reminder that a theater once stood here.

And visitors can have a pint in the Cockpit pub across the street from the site of Shakespeare’s house. The 1600s map shows it as a building called the Sign of the Cock, likely a tavern. It’s not difficult to imagine Shakespeare and his colleagues carousing there.

“There are certainly complaints in the period about the playhouses leading to the opening of more and more drinking houses — ‘houses for tippling,’ as they call them in one of the documents I was looking at,” Munro said.

Jill Lawless, The Associated Press