Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Shakespeare was known to have lived for a time in Blackfriars, London, but the location of his home was a matter of speculation until now.
• Analysis of maps from the time showed that the property at 5 St. Andrew’s Hill was large enough to accommodate two houses, one of which was likely Shakespeare’s.
• Two of Shakespeare’s plays may have been written in that house, since he lived there near the end of his career as a playwright.

This story is a collaboration with Biography.com

In the southwest end of central London, near St. Paul’s Cathedral and the moody waters of the Thames, Blackfriars hums with tourists making pilgrimages to William Shakespeare’s familiar haunts. Though the Bard was born and buried in Stratford-Upon-Avon, he was known to stage plays at the Blackfriars theater and he owned a property somewhere in the district. A plaque immortalizing the poet and playwright’s sometime lodgings states that a property was purchased by Shakespeare in March of 1613, but despite the importance of such a legendary association, the home’s exact location remained unknown—until now.

Lucy Munro, a professor at King’s College London and a Shakespeare expert, decided to find out exactly where his London property was. The plaque at 5 St. Andrew’s Hill taunts passersby by claiming that Shakespeare’s home was “located near this site,” but “near” has long been the operative word. The plaque once hung over the entrance to a 13th-century Dominican friary that was reduced to ash, along with much of the rest of the city, during the Great Fire of London in 1666. Though the friary still stands, evidence of exactly where Shakespeare laid his head was thought to have been lost forever. That is, until Munro carefully analyzed two documents from the London Archives and another from the National Archives that revealed its exact location.

“This discovery throws into question the narrative that Shakespeare simply retired to Stratford and spent no more time in the city,” said Munro, who specializes in both Shakespearean and Early Modern literature, ad been doing broader research when she made the discovery. “It has sometimes been thought that he bought his Blackfriars property merely as an investment, but we don’t know that this is true, or that he never used it for himself.”

As it turns out, the building that had long been vaguely marked by the plaque stands directly over the site of Shakespeare’s home away from home after he retired from his theatre career. While he spent most of his retirement in Stratford-Upon-Avon, one of the documents that Munro analyzed from the London Archives was a plan that had been drawn up when renovations on a London property were underway two years after the fire. The plan doesn’t actually show anything built across the friary gate (which would have had no foundations), but it did illustrate that the property’s dimensions would have been sufficient to accommodate two houses back in the mid-1600s. This suggests that Shakespeare spent more time in London than scholars had previously assumed.

During Shakespeare’s time, the property that included his lodgings sprawled over the end of Burgon Street and the eastern stretch of Ireland Yard, as well as an area on Burgon Street and St. Andrew’s Hill (which would eventually be built over). It was also just a few strides from the Blackfriars theatre. Shakespeare and fellow Elizabethan playwright John Fletcher—who collaborated on a number of plays, including the 1613 productions of Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen—may have worked on either one (or possibly both) of those plays from Shakespeare’s Blackfriars residence.

“We also know that Shakespeare was visiting London in November 1614,” Munro, whose research was recently published in the print edition of the Times Literary Supplement, said. “Is it not likely that he stayed in his own house?”

Thespians, poets, history buffs, theatre enthusiasts, and dreamers rejoice. Your pilgrimages can now be complete.