AILSA CHANG, HOST:
More than 400 years after his death, new details have surfaced about the life of William Shakespeare. An old map gives us new insight into where the playwright owned property in London. We're going to bring in now Lucy Munro. She's a professor of Shakespeare and early modern literature in King's College, London. Welcome.
LUCY MUNRO: Hello.
CHANG: Hello. So just start us off by walking us through how you first came across this map. I heard it was an accident?
MUNRO: That's right, yes, so I'm writing a book about the Globe and the Blackfriars playhouses, which are the two theaters that Shakespeare had a financial stake in. And as part of that, I've been trying to get a sense of the - really the urban fabric that surrounded those two playhouses. And as part of that, I was at the London Archives last summer, really ordering up anything that the library catalog said involved property holding and the Blackfriars.
CHANG: Sure.
MUNRO: And so I was working through a couple of boxes of documents and found this map.
CHANG: I mean, there's so much that's known about Shakespeare's life in Stratford-upon-Avon. But tell us, what is the significance of this discovery, this property in London? What does it suggest to you?
MUNRO: Well, we know, obviously, that he spent a lot of time in London. So he was an actor in plays in London. He was writing plays in London. He lodged in various parts of London, and we knew that he'd owned this Blackfriars property.
So what I think it does is it encourages us to think again about the last bit of Shakespeare's life and career and about his ongoing relationship with London because we know that, in addition to buying this property in March 1613, he also wrote two plays in that year with a younger upcoming dramatist called John Fletcher, "Henry VIII" - or "All Is True" - and "The Two Noble Kinsmen."
So it really does encourage us to look again at that year and to think, well, you know, we know that Shakespeare died in 1616, but Shakespeare didn't know that in 1613. So is he still actually very engaged with his professional life in London at that point in time?
CHANG: Yeah. And describe the particular location of this property in London. Like, what does that spot tell us or give us clues about when it comes to Shakespeare's life at the time?
MUNRO: So it's on the eastern side of the Blackfriars Precinct, and the Blackfriars Precinct was formerly a friary. So it was part of a religious house that was dissolved in the 1530s under Henry eighth, and a lot of it was converted into housing.
So it was a kind of interesting district. It's quite a multicultural district in that period. There are lots of people from France and the Netherlands, many of them having fled from war or religious persecution. There are various kind of entertainment venues, things like bowling alleys, tennis courts and obviously playhouses as well.
So when he buys in the Blackfriars, he's buying into an area that has a really pronounced identity and kind of cultural life, but he's also buying property that's less-than-5-minutes walk (ph) from the place where he was, you know, writing plays and his plays were being performed.
CHANG: So to put this discovery into perspective, do you think it could change at least the way some people examine or study Shakespeare's life and work in his final years?
MUNRO: Yes, I think it really encourages us to think about the end of Shakespeare's career and to think about the reasons why he seems to have retired. So we don't have any plays that we can date to 1614 or 1615, but we do have this quite vigorous activity in 1613.
It also gives us a chance to do some more detailed work on the urban environment that this house was in. So the plan gives us the names of all of the tenants and a lot of the people who owned property in that part of the Blackfriars in 1660, and that then enables you to kind of track things back.
CHANG: Right.
MUNRO: So it's possible that we might be able to work out who Shakespeare's neighbors were, for example, in 1613.
CHANG: How fascinating. Professor Lucy Munro of King's College, London, thank you so much for joining us today.
MUNRO: Thank you very much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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