Susanna’s only child, Elizabeth, and her first husband, Thomas Nash, were supposed to inherit the Blackfriars property when Susanna died. But “in the 1640s, there [was] a big bust-up over the property,” Munro says.
When Thomas died in 1647, the family discovered that Thomas had willed the property to his cousin Edward Nash. There was one major problem: The property belonged to Susanna, who was still alive at the time. Thomas had included it in his will despite not yet taking ownership.
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This led to a protracted legal battle in which Susanna and Elizabeth asserted their family’s ownership of the property. Munro’s research shows Elizabeth appears to have secured the legal right to the Blackfriars residence after her mother’s death. In 1665, she and her second husband sold it to Edward Bagley, who may have been a distant relative. Munro says Bagley sold the property to another person after the 1666 Great Fire of London destroyed its structure.
By using archival documents to trace the property from the 1668 floorplan back to Elizabeth and her grandfather, Munro was able to solve the longstanding mystery of where Shakespeare’s London home was located. In addition, her work has highlighted a significant example of how English women fought for and claimed property rights in a legal system that favored male inheritance, says Farah Karim-Cooper, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.