Inside the elite London neighborhood where Shakespeare owned a home

Scholars have long known that William Shakespeare bought a home in London’s Blackfriars precinct in 1613, three years before his death. Now we finally know exactly where it was: about a five-minute walk from St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Lucy Munro, a professor of Shakespeare and early modern literature at King’s College London, published an article about her discovery in the Times Literary Supplement on April 17.

Munro tells National Geographic she was combing through the London Archives when she found a floorplan of Blackfriars residences from 1668. The floorplan documented who had been living in each property when the Great Fire of London struck two years earlier.

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Using two other documents from the London Archives and the United Kingdom’s National Archives, Munro was able to identify Shakespeare’s home on the floorplan near the intersection of three streets—Ireland Yard, Burgon Street, and St. Andrew’s Hill. Two other scholars National Geographic spoke to agree with Munro’s conclusion.

Her discovery provides a new peek into Shakespeare’s time in London toward the end of his life, as well as insight into how women inherited and made claims to property in 17th-century England.

Get thee to a friary

Shakespeare’s London home was part of a redeveloped 13th-century friary (essentially a monastery for friars). All the men who lived there wore black cloaks, which is how the friary became known as “Blackfriars.”

The friary had closed in the 1530s when King Henry VIII formally split from the Catholic Church so he could annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. In the process of establishing the Church of England, Henry disbanded all of the country’s religious convents and seized their properties. He later sold parts of Blackfriars to courtiers and other high-status Londoners, who made their homes there.

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“Blackfriars was sold off in the 1540s to about 20 different people who bought up little chunks of the estate,” says Nick Holder, a historian at English Heritage and author of The Friaries of Medieval London: From Foundation to Dissolution. Existing buildings were divided into separate properties, and new houses were built on the friary’s former gardens and green areas.

By the time Shakespeare bought a home in Blackfriars in 1613, it was still a fairly elite neighborhood, and Munro says his purchase reflected his financial and social success.

Over the previous two decades, Shakespeare had split his time between London and his birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon, where he also owned a home. In 1599, he and his acting company had built the Globe Theatre in London’s Southwark district as a venue for his plays. There, they staged productions of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Henry VIII. (A cannon mishap during a 1613 performance of Henry VIII caused the Globe to burn down, but the company rebuilt it and reopened the next year.)

In addition to being an elite neighborhood, Blackfriars was also a growing entertainment hub—to the dismay of its residents. In the late 16th century, Munro says locals complained about bowling alleys opening in Blackfriars. In 1596, neighbors signed a petition opposing the opening of a playhouse, arguing that it would be too noisy and draw “all manner of vagrant and lewde persons.” Despite the petition, the Blackfriars Theatre opened—and in 1608, Shakespeare’s acting company began performing there.

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The Blackfriars property that Shakespeare bought was just a short walk from the Blackfriars Theatre, making it a convenient home for someone who staged plays there.

Even so, we don’t know for sure whether Shakespeare lived in his Blackfriars residence or rented it out. Scholars have assumed he retired after he wrote his last known play, The Two Noble Kinsmen, with John Fletcher around the same year he bought the property. Yet this new finding raises questions that perhaps at the time he bought his London home, he may have envisioned having a longer theater career.

It wasn’t to be. In 1616, Shakespeare died of unknown causes in Stratford-upon-Avon at age 52.

Shakespearean drama over who would inherit the property

In Shakespeare’s will, he left the Blackfriars property to his oldest daughter, Susanna, and her heirs. If Susanna had no more heirs, the property would go to his youngest daughter, Judith, and her heirs.

Susanna’s only child, Elizabeth, and her first husband, Thomas Nash, were supposed to inherit the Blackfriars property when Susanna died. But “in the 1640s, there [was] a big bust-up over the property,” Munro says.

When Thomas died in 1647, the family discovered that Thomas had willed the property to his cousin Edward Nash. There was one major problem: The property belonged to Susanna, who was still alive at the time. Thomas had included it in his will despite not yet taking ownership.

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This led to a protracted legal battle in which Susanna and Elizabeth asserted their family’s ownership of the property. Munro’s research shows Elizabeth appears to have secured the legal right to the Blackfriars residence after her mother’s death. In 1665, she and her second husband sold it to Edward Bagley, who may have been a distant relative. Munro says Bagley sold the property to another person after the 1666 Great Fire of London destroyed its structure.

By using archival documents to trace the property from the 1668 floorplan back to Elizabeth and her grandfather, Munro was able to solve the longstanding mystery of where Shakespeare’s London home was located. In addition, her work has highlighted a significant example of how English women fought for and claimed property rights in a legal system that favored male inheritance, says Farah Karim-Cooper, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

“What Lucy has achieved is an incredible unearthing of women’s history as much as it is a history of Shakespeare,” she says.