Shakespeare’s Blackfriars home may finally have a precise address — and a new meaning
A long-standing question about William Shakespeare’s London life has gained an unusually concrete answer. Lucy Munro of King’s College London has identified the likely location of the playwright’s Blackfriars residence by combining 17th-century property records with a 1668 plan of the precinct drawn after the Great Fire of London.
The site sat on the grounds of a converted priory, opposite the Sign of the Cock, a tavern that survives today as The Cockpit. Although the post-fire map does not show the full footprint of the house, it does indicate a property substantial enough to have been divided into two homes by 1645. That detail matters: it suggests the building was not a modest lodging, but a significant urban property in one of London’s most theatrical districts.
Shakespeare bought the Blackfriars house in 1613, only three years before his death in 1616. He willed it to his eldest daughter, Susanna, and Munro also uncovered documents connected to the 1665 sale of his granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall Nash Barnard. Taken together, the records complicate the familiar story that Shakespeare simply retired to Stratford and treated the London property as a passive investment.
Munro argues that the house’s proximity to the Blackfriars Theatre points to a more practical purpose. “He could have bought an investment property anywhere in London,” she said. “But this house was close to his workplace at the Blackfriars theater.” That proximity raises the possibility that Shakespeare continued to work in London after 1613, perhaps even writing his last two plays, Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII, from the Blackfriars home.
The discovery also has a small but pointed consequence for the city’s commemorative landscape. The blue plaque on St. Andrew’s Hill, which states that Shakespeare purchased lodgings “On 10th March 1613,” may need revision. If Munro is right, the wording should begin simply with “On.” In Shakespeare studies, even a single preposition can change the story.
