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

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

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. 

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

"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."

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. 

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."

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!"

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."