Yesterday, the BBC reported a William Shakespeare expert’s research into unrelated materials uncovered the lost address of a home owned by the Bard in Central London. Ironically, the very spot the researcher, Professor Lucy Munro of King’s College, identified is presently marked by a blue plaque—a marker system used in the UK to identify sites tied to historic people and events—stating he bought lodgings “in the area” of the site. The article included an image published by King’s College, which depicts the area around the gated entry to Blackfriars shortly after the Great Fire destroyed the area.
In my years of genealogy research, I have come across and used and even handled, documents from the period. I can assure you sometimes, like in this case, the handwriting is very neat and easy to read. Other times…not so much. Nonetheless, when I zoomed in as far as I could zoom I could not make out a property description saying ”William Shakespeare lived here”.
Turns out, there are reasons for that.
One, we do not know for certain whether he actually lived in the house he owned. But Prof. Munro makes a compelling argument he could have. In general, however, Shakespeare is thought to have returned to Stratford-upon-Avon by this point in his life.
More importantly, this map comes from after the Great Fire, which occurred shortly after Shakespeare’s daughter sold the property—to whom I have not yet seen reference. Naturally, the new owner’s name would be the one listed here. And not knowing the name, not surprisingly, I could not find the property myself.
A bit of digging took me to King’s College’s news of the discovery before its publishing in print today in the Times Literary Supplement. And the King’s College article described the property as 45′ long by 13′ wide in the west and 15′ wide in the east. Using that description, I could finally find the property precisely on the map.
And of course, I wanted to make a version easier for the rest of my readers to find the house’s location.
I did not do much other than make the rest of the map lighter compared to Bill’s pad. This is just one of a number of ways one could edit the photograph to make finding the property easier for the reader. We will (probably) look at something similar on Monday given some space news I came across this morning. (But because Billy Boy the Bard was a writer, he would have called that foreshadowing.)
So there you have it this Friday morning—where Shakespeare may have in fact lived for periods of time later in his life.
Personally, I love this kind of stuff. We all have to live somewhere, whether it be a palace, a London dwelling, or a Philadelphia flat. The things artists and writers create are created in physical places and the ability to connect works of art to that place at that time, for me at least, grounds the work in our shared space of this little rock we call Earth.
Happy Friday, all.
Credit for the original goes to the anonymous 17th cartographer who drew the map.
Credit for the photograph goes to (presumably) Lucy Munro.
Credit for the edit is mine.