LONDON — Fans William Shakespeare I know that the great playwright came from Stratford-upon-Avonthe English riverside town where tourists still gather to see his childhood home.
But he made his name in London, although few traces of him remain in the British capital.
A newly discovered 17th-century map sheds new light on the Bard’s life in London, pinpointing for the first time the exact location of the only house Shakespeare bought in the city, and where he may have worked. His last plays.
Shakespeare scholar Lucy Munro, who found the document, said it provided “additional pieces of the jigsaw puzzle” of Shakespeare’s life. As with many discoveries, it was partly due to luck.
“I found it in the London archives when I was looking for other things,” Munro said.
Historians have long known that Shakespeare purchased an estate in 1613 near Blackfriars’ Theater, but the exact location has been a mystery. A plaque on a 19th-century building only records that the playwright resided “near this site.”
A map of the Blackfriars area found by Munro and unveiled by King’s College London on Thursday shows in detail Shakespeare’s House, a large L-shaped dwelling carved from a former medieval priory, including its gatehouse.
The Dominican monastery was redeveloped in the 13th century for more secular uses after the Dissolution of the Monasteries by King Henry VIII in the mid-16th century. The area included the Blackfriars Theatre, which Shakespeare partly owned.
It’s a desirable area that’s moving toward a slight decline in the market — because of people like Shakespeare, who was wealthy but connected to a theater world that was becoming less classy, said Munro, professor of Shakespeare and early modern literature at King’s College London.
“After the dissolution of the monasteries, many nobles, senior courtiers and court officials live in Blackfriars,” Munro said. By the time Shakespeare purchased his property, “there are still a lot of important people living there, people who make protests against the theaters at various points, because they see the theaters as a bit of a public nuisance.”
Shakespeare used the profits from his plays to build a magnificent family home, now demolished, in Stratford, about 100 miles (160 km) northwest of London. He died there in 1616 at the age of 52.
It is not certain whether Shakespeare lived in his house in London or whether he just rented it. But Munro said the size of the house and its location, a five-minute walk from Blackfriars Theatre, suggested he may have spent more time in London towards the end of his life than is widely believed. She said he may have worked here on his last two plays, “Henry VIII” and “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” both of which he co-wrote with John Fletcher.
Will Tosh, director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater – a reconstruction of the open-air Elizabethan theater where many of the Bard’s plays were first performed – said Munro’s discovery provides “a dazzling new sense of Shakespeare’s London writer. She has helped us understand how important the city was to our greatest playwright of all time, both as a professional and personal home.”
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 the sale of the building 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, which are now part of the city’s financial district, including part of the medieval abbey wall. Nearby, the name Playhouse Yard is a reminder that there once was a theater here.
Visitors can have a pint at the Cockpit pub across the street from the site of Shakespeare’s house. A 17th century map shows it as a building called the Rooster’s Mark, possibly a tavern. It is not difficult to imagine Shakespeare and his colleagues dancing there.
“There were certainly complaints in that period about play houses which led to the opening of more and more drinking houses – ‘drinking houses’ as they called them in one of the documents I was looking at,” Munro said.
