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

 The discovery also sheds new light on Shakespeare’s later life, in the years prior to his death in 1616 at age 52, Munro said.

Shakespeare chose to buy a house close to the Globe playhouse, where his works were performed. 

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It questions the widely held belief that he retired to his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon after the Globe playhouse, where most of his plays were performed for the first time, burned down in June 1613.

“It’s sometimes been conjectured that he kind of backs out at the point when the Globe burns down, but then we know that he’s still writing plays in the period following the Globe fire,” said Munro, referencing his collaboration with up-and-coming playwright John Fletcher on a play named “The Two Noble Kinsmen.”
Munro also questions the thesis that Shakespeare bought the Blackfriars property for financial gain.

“If he was just buying the property as an investment, there were lots of parts of London where he could have bought it,” she said.

“The fact that he buys it in the Blackfriars, which is less than five minutes’ walk from the (Globe) Playhouse, suggests to me that there’s a level of engagement with his professional life in London still in 1613,” said Munro.

“He’s not the isolated genius sitting in an attic. He’s somebody who’s collaborating with other playwrights. He’s somebody who owns shares in playhouses. He’s somebody who’s buying property in the Blackfriars,” she added. “So yeah, I think it gives us a slightly different picture to maybe the more standard one.”

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More widely, Munro believes the find shows that there is still much to learn about Britain’s most famous playwright.

“I think there’s sometimes an assumption with things relating to Shakespeare biography that everything’s been gone over again and again, and there isn’t really anything left to find, when actually there are still some bits of the jigsaw puzzle kind of still out there,” said Munro, whose research will be published in the Times Literary Supplement on April 17.

Will Tosh, Director of Education at Shakespeare’s Globe, the modern theater and education center that stands on the site of the historic playhouse, said Munro had made a “fantastic discovery.”

“Our reward for her hard work is a dazzling new sense of Shakespeare the London writer,” he said in a statement published by King’s College London.

“She’s helped us to understand how much the city meant to our greatest ever dramatist, as a professional and personal home.”