Shakespeare's missing London home pinpointed after centuries-long mystery, researcher says

A researcher has pinpointed the exact location of William Shakespeare's missing London home - a mystery that has puzzled historians for centuries.

The property lies in London's Blackfriars district, near the River Thames, according to a recent press release from King's College London (KCL).

The property covered what is now Ireland Yard and parts of Burgon Street, including the area around 5 St. Andrew's Hill in Blackfriars.

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Professor Lucy Munro, a professor of Shakespeare and early modern literature at KCL, identified the location by uncovering a previously overlooked 1668 map.

From there, Munro linked it to a chain of property records tracing ownership back to Shakespeare.

The professor told KCL, "I was doing research as part of a wider project and couldn't believe it when I realized what I was looking at - the floorplan of Shakespeare's Blackfriars house."

The property's exact location "has puzzled academics since the 18th century," though scholars have long known that Shakespeare owned property in Blackfriars later in life, the university said. 

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"It has long been thought that Shakespeare retired from his London theater career not long after he purchased the Blackfriars house in 1613, returning to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he had a comfortable life as a gentleman," KCL's release stated.

"However, this discovery could indicate that Shakespeare spent more time in London in his later years than has been thought."

Speaking to Fox News Digital, Munro said she's "confident" that her discovery marks the exact location of Shakespeare's property.

The professor said a "continuous paper trail" from 1613 to 1667 confirms the property's exact location, backed by indentures, lease records and a map drafted shortly after the Great Fire of London in 1666.

The documents also shed some light on how Shakespeare may have used the property, though it's not entirely clear.

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"I think that the 1668 plan encourages us to reassess how he might have used it, as it gives us a much clearer idea of what it might have been like," she said.

"It shows that the house was L-shaped, with a section to the north of the gate that stretched back from St Andrew's Hill. That section is about 58 square meters [624 square feet], and it probably had two stories, as part of it was erected over the gate."

She added the evidence suggests Shakespeare may have intended to use the London property himself, not just as an investment - though the property "clearly had the potential for subdivision."

Said Munro, "We know from his will that he had rented it out by 1616, as he mentions his tenant, John Robinson, but when Shakespeare bought the house he seems to have gone to some lengths to get it with vacant possession," meaning there were no sitting tenants. 

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She added, "A sitting tenant is mentioned in one copy of the sale document, but that clause is crossed out and deleted, and it doesn't appear in the other copy. … So Shakespeare may well have bought the house with the intention of living there, or of renting part of it and using the other part for himself."

The house is also less than a five-minute walk from the Blackfriars playhouse, where Shakespeare was working and co-authoring plays, which Munro says "suggests that we need to reappraise what he was doing in 1613."

She said that year is "generally treated in the scholarship as a kind of phased retirement to Stratford, but I think that this view is conditioned in part by the fact that we know that he died in 1616 - he obviously did not know that!"

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So "the purchase of a substantial house in the Blackfriars precinct complicates things, as it argues that he had an ongoing professional and substantial investment in London."

Munro said future excavations at the site are "unlikely at this stage," noting a previous investigation there did not uncover any archaeological remains - but that doesn't mean that research won't continue.

"I'd like to know more about Shakespeare's intentions when he bought it, and whether his daughter and granddaughter ever stayed there, but these things are very difficult to recover from the kinds of documentation that mostly survive, such as property transactions," Munro added - noting there's still some potential to find out who Shakespeare's neighbors were in 1613.

"It's exciting to realize that there are still new things to find out about Shakespeare's life and career, despite the work of many brilliant biographers, archaeologists, social historians and others, over more than two centuries."