Munro said: “I was doing research as part of a wider project and couldn’t believe it when I realised what I was looking at – the floorplan of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars house.
“It had been assumed that there wasn’t much more evidence to gather about it, so research on it has laid dormant for a while.
“These findings really help us tell the complete story of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars house, and thanks to this new discovery we now know exactly where it stood.”
One of the documents was a plan of part of the Blackfriars precinct, drawn up in 1668, two years after the Great Fire of London, which confirmed the precise location and size of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars house.
The part of the property that spanned the gate did not appear in the post-fire plan because it had no foundation.
Munro said: “This house was close to [Shakespeare’s] workplace at the Blackfriars theatre.
“We know that Shakespeare co-authored Two Noble Kinsmen with John Fletcher later in 1613, and this new evidence that the Blackfriars house was quite substantial makes it not inconceivable that some of it may have been written in this very property.”
The other two of these documents relate to the sale of the Blackfriars property by Shakespeare’s granddaughter in 1665.
The property covered what are now the eastern end of Ireland Yard, the bottom of Burgon Street and parts of the late 19th Century buildings at 5 Burgon Street and 5 St Andrew’s Hill.
