Surya Anthony talks to Professor Lucy Munro about her incredible discovery…
For centuries, historians knew roughly where William Shakespeare’s Blackfriars property stood. The playwright’s former Blackfriars residence, purchased in 1613, was one of the few documented pieces of property he owned in London. But its exact location remained uncertain.
That changed earlier this year when Professor Lucy Munro, a Shakespeare scholar at King’s College London, identified documents that helped pinpoint the property’s precise location in Blackfriars.
The discovery attracted international attention, adding a significant new piece to the puzzle of Shakespeare’s life in London. Yet when I sat down with Munro, it quickly became clear that the discovery was only part of the story.
There was no dramatic hunt for a lost house. No grand plan to solve a centuries-old mystery.
Instead, there was an archive box.
“I was actually researching something else,” Munro explains. She is currently working on a book about the Globe and Blackfriars theatres, the two playhouses in which Shakespeare held a financial stake. As part of that project, she had been combing through property records in the London Archives, trying to understand who lived around the Blackfriars district and what the area might have looked like during Shakespeare’s lifetime.
Among the documents was a property plan showing land owned by Sir Heneage Featherstone. At first, Munro assumed it would have little relevance to Shakespeare.
“My first thought was, well, it doesn’t include the theatre,” she says. “But then I thought, isn’t that where the Gatehouse was?”
The moment was exciting, but not immediately conclusive.
“Somebody must have spotted that connection before? Because I’m not the first person to look at that plan,” she remembers thinking.
Like many discoveries in historical research, the breakthrough came gradually. Another document referenced Shakespeare’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Barnard. Piece by piece, the evidence began to fit together.
Munro compares the process to assembling a jigsaw puzzle.
“A lot of what you’re doing is taking one source and putting it alongside others,” she says. “You edge forwards.”
The discovery also highlights something many people overlook about historical scholarship. Shakespeare’s life has been studied for generations by researchers painstakingly cross-referencing records, wills, legal documents and property transactions.
“You almost assume that all of the primary material that’s out there has already been located,” Munro says.
Yet even after more than four centuries, surprises remain.
Part of what fascinated Munro about the Blackfriars property was the way it revealed stories beyond Shakespeare himself.
“There’s something brilliant about the way women’s stories emerge from thinking about a canonical male author,” she says. Legal disputes involving his daughter Susanna Hall and granddaughter Elizabeth Barnard reveal the complex ways women navigated property ownership in a society where married women’s legal rights were often restricted.
The house itself may have belonged to Shakespeare, but the paper trail surrounding it tells a much wider story about family, inheritance and power in early modern England.
Despite the significance of the discovery, Munro remains remarkably grounded about her role in it.
When I ask whether it has sunk in that future researchers may now cite her as the scholar who identified Shakespeare’s exact Blackfriars address, she laughs.
“It does feel slightly weird,” she admits. “Good weird.”
There are still mysteries she would love to solve. One of the biggest concerns Shakespeare’s earliest years in London.
“We don’t know much about the precise details until around 1595,” she says. “How he gets to London in the first place, how he establishes himself, what that journey looks like — anything that illuminated that period would be really exciting.”
Then there are the legendary lost plays.
“If we could find one of those,” she says, “that would be brilliant.”
As for Shakespeare himself, what would he make of becoming perhaps the most famous writer in the English language?
Munro believes he would find it slightly baffling.
“To be a great writer, with a capital G and a capital W, in this period, you would probably write epic poetry,” she explains.
Works such as Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene or, later, John Milton’s Paradise Lost occupied the highest literary ground. Shakespeare, of course, did write poetry. During the plague closures of the early 1590s, when London’s theatres were shut, he published narrative poems including Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, later followed by his sonnets.
“He was making a literary mark for himself,” Munro says. “He wasn’t just someone who wrote plays.”
Yet it is the plays, rather than the poetry, that have endured on a global scale.
Today, Shakespeare’s works are performed, studied and adapted across the world, while many of his contemporaries remain largely unknown outside academic circles.
And while Shakespeare undoubtedly possessed confidence in his work, she believes he would find his extraordinary cultural status difficult to comprehend.
“I think he’d be surprised that the plays are so highly valued,” Munro says. “Pleased, but surprised.”
Munro has spent years untangling centuries-old documents, but some questions have simpler answers. Here are her quick-fire Shakespeare picks (the full video is on our social channels.)
Favourite play?
“King Lear. Although I also have a soft spot for Troilus and Cressida and The Winter’s Tale.”
Favourite villain?
“Iago. He’s horrible, manipulative and fascinating.” — Othello
Most overrated character?
“Romeo.” — Romeo and Juliet
Favourite Shakespeare insult?
“‘Thou whoreson zed, thou unnecessary letter.'” — King Lear
One Shakespeare quote everyone gets wrong?
“‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ People think it means ‘where are you?’ It actually means ‘why are you Romeo?'” — Romeo
One play more people should read?
“Troilus and Cressida. And The Two Noble Kinsmen.”
What remains to be discovered?
“The lost plays.”
