Geoffrey Marsh, a British historian, claims he has revealed the exact place where William Shakespeare, perhaps the greatest dramatist of all time, lived and wrote his plays. The director of the Victoria & Albert Museum Department of Theatre and Performance has spent about a decade trying to pinpoint the exact location of Shakespeare’s address. What does it matter? A lot, Marsh argues.
If his calculations, which he arrived at by analyzing official records from the time, are correct, then Shakespeare lived at 35 Great Helen’s, or at least the building that used to stand there at the turn of the 16th and 17th century. According to Marsh, this would have been home to a group of powerful merchants, doctors, and artists, in one of London’s wealthiest parishes.
How did he arrive at this finding?
Marsh noticed Shakespeare’s name was listed in an old tax record, next to the names of Jonathan Prymme and John Robinson. Marsh also found (elsewhere) that Prymme and Robinson appeared as tenants of the Leathersellers Company, who owned property in Bishopsgate. He then concluded that these tax records must have been ordered geographically and thus, Shakespeare must have lived in the same place. His conjecture is not at all far-fetched but, sadly, there is no more evidence to actually support this.
@ricardoiii.teatro
Where did he mess up?
Mr. Marsh is no Shakespeare specialist, yet he claims his plays must have been inspired by his neighbors, and names plays such as Macbeth, King Lear and As You Like It. Marsh speculates that, being neighbors with powerful merchants, Shakespeare must have heard conversations and, considering there “were no newspapers at the time, and books were unusual,” it’s how Shakespeare would have been able to set most of his plays in foreign cities he would have never been able to travel to. Unlike many conspiracy theorists, Geoffrey Marsh knows that you need evidence in order to prove or disprove a new hypothesis. That doesn’t mean, however, that he’s entirely correct.
What Marsh wishes to prove is that Shakespeare got ideas for his plays from his neighbors, but, first of all, there were plenty of publications, pamphlets, and books available at the time and there is plenty of textual evidence that Shakespeare read and based his plays on several different books. Sometimes he follows the source material so closely that some lines end up being very similar, in such a way that there is little speculation to be made about whether he read these sources or not.
Perhaps Marsh should have asked someone who knew better.
@fikriyanus
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