The Dream Factory by Daniel Swift

The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare

By Daniel Swift

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

As Daniel Swift, Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University London, notes at the beginning of his intensely good new book The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare, the predecessor to London’s famous Globe theater was for over twenty years known simply as the Theatre in Shoreditch, and only few bits of its foundation were unearthed in 2008. This is, as Swift readily admits, scanty grounding for a guess, much less a book.

Which might call for a certain reconstructional modesty, but instead Swift springs out of the starting gate with a pair of doozies. He mentions that 1536 had seen the beginning of the Crown seizing Church properties (the Theatre had been a repurposed priory), and writes that out of this change grew not only the layout of modern London but also “the shape of the modern economic world.” “Late Elizabethan London,” he claims, “was a nursery of capitalism, and capitalism was a disruptive, opportunistic child.” Which would have astounded the great banking houses of Milan and Venice, who in 1536 were fairly certain they’d been doing capitalism, through plague and war and the fall of empires, for the last thousand years.

And more centrally for the book’s structure (to say nothing of its commercial prospects), Swift immediately connects the shadowy old Theatre with William Shakespeare. “In his years there, the young Shakespeare was inexperienced, experimental, and uncertain,” he claims. “The Theatre was Shakespeare’s workshop. Here he was apprenticed to old masters and learned his craft.” Swift’s book has no bibliography, but it does sport an utterly wonderful 20-page “bibliographic essay,” and readers will search that essay in vain for any proof that Shakespeare ever apprenticed himself to old masters, was ever in any kind of workshop, real or figurative, or indeed ever set foot in the Theatre.

This, on Page 2, begins the unbroken string of guesses and suppositions about Shakespeare’s life and career that must and do fill the book. Where almost everywhere it should be questioning, it is everywhere certain, with Swift often omitting even the customary “must haves” and “very likely dids” that most other writers employ when writing about the most famous Elizabethan of them all. When Swift brings up the famous stage clown Richard Tarlton, for instance, he practically produces Polaroids: “Shakespeare was too young to have known Tarlton well,” he writes, “but he saw him on stage and in the streets of Shoreditch.”

This kind of thing is to be expected, and luckily for the reader, Swift only touches on it as often as he must in order to keep the aforementioned commercial prospects alive. When he rhapsodizes about the nuances of the Bard’s nature as both a company man and a genius loner (“His career was driven by one impulse, pushing him towards company; a second impulse pushed him to be alone,” we’re told. “These are the two halves of an artist at work”), readers can smile at the thought of it. Hey, I know somebody like that!

Fortunately for readers, there’s much more going on here. Because in addition to a Shakespeare who may have been soused on the other side of town for all Swift knows, there’s also a great brawling company of rude mechanicals that fills these pages with life and color and vindictive lawsuits. Readers meet the great ruffian actor-producer James Burbage, of course, but also the middling actors, day laborers, guildsmen, preachers and prelates (including, pricelessly, the Bishop of Vienna, Friedrich Nausea), rival companies, landlords, real estate speculators, and investors who swarmed around the London theater world.

And running after all these details (produced with appropriate theatricality), there’s that bibliographic essay at the end, where the author retraces his inquiries through the most famous earlier works on the subject, like 1923’s The Elizabethan Stage by EK Chambers, and also some unjustly overlooked, like 1913’s Burbage and Shakespeare’s Stage by Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, which Swift stoutly defends, bless him. The whole essay feels almost like the treat of finishing the book and being treated to a 20-minute chat with the author. It doesn’t and shouldn’t take the place of an actual bibliography, but it’s welcome all the same.

And then unavoidably there’s him again. “One of the many paradoxes of the Theatre is that this most uncertain of buildings gave Shakespeare solid foundations,” we’re told. “They were both financial and literary: it gave him a living and a name.”  Yes of course. As you like it.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News