The Dream Factory:
London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare
by daniel swift
farrar, straus and giroux, 320 pages, $30
Recently I checked into a pleasant, fairly sterile Marriott in Shoreditch ahead of my London debut as a playwright. Today, the streets are lined with Pret, Starbucks, and McDonalds; but as I learned from Daniel Swift’s The Dream Factory, they once ran with butcher’s blood and were—as Swift tells it—where the young William Shakespeare apprenticed as a playwright, absorbing the shapes, smells, characterological quirks, devices, games, genres, and moods of the theater. Or rather of “The Theatre,” the playhouse built by the impresario, actor, businessman, and frequent con artist James Burbage, father of the famous actor Richard. The Theater “was Shakespeare’s workshop.”
Swift’s method is squarely in the tradition of Stephen Greenblatt and James Shapiro: a historicism with a suggestive, speculative bent and an appreciation for art and artists that doesn’t reduce them to minor nodes in the grimly quantitative unfolding of history.
For Swift, The Theater is both a physical structure and a metaphorical “dream factory”: a place where material labor, risk, and improvisation generated the conditions for Shakespeare’s genius. The Dream Factory reconstructs the building of The Theater, the many financial difficulties encountered along the way, and the schemes and ruses that Burbage improvised to keep it alive. Shakespeare, who as a young man arrived in London from the countryside for reasons we don’t fully understand, is a peripheral, ghostly, suggested figure. Swift asks us to imagine what it must have been like for the young man from Stratford to land here. And as we meet the carpenters, tenants, landlords, lawyers, scriveners, government officials, clowns, and groundlings who played a role in the building and maintenance and flourishing of The Theater, the young playwright is a variable in this historicist quantum physics—a particle that must be there to explain the rest.
As other critics have noted, The Dream Factory is a strange mixture of hard fact and compelling leaps. There is a case to be made, for instance, that the theatricals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—Peter Quince, Bottom, and the gang—are drawn from Shakespeare’s youthful memories of The Theater. In this instance, the connection is compelling: The vision of the theater that comes through in Midsummer—along with Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most overtly theatrical play—is hardy, peasant, semi-literate. Theater is a working-class enterprise, and the men who build the stages might also become the men who act on them; there is a fluidity between the types of craft. The blood that ran under the doors of Shoreditch’s slaughterhouses and past The Theater is a good metaphor for the highly visceral language of Elizabethan poets and playwrights. The vivid, visual, earthy words of Titus Andronicus—
Hark, villains! I will grind your bones to dust
And with your blood and it I’ll make a paste,
And of the paste a coffin I will rear . . .
—did not body forth in a clean, sterile environment. The physical context of Shakespeare’s early career was bloody, malodorous, probably foul. You could smell and feel The Theater and its environs.
Swift’s book makes evident, as does Midsummer itself, that the high lyrical art of the theater—Shakespeare’s own art, as well as Marlowe’s and Jonson’s—was conceived of, practiced, and developed in homely, rough, dirty, unpoetic, and sometimes dangerous circumstances. The Polish Shakespeare scholar Jan Kott observed that a prince in Shakespeare always has “a foot in the mud, an eye on the stars, a dagger in his hand.” In Swift’s book, “mud” really means something more like offal, blood, sawdust, and excrement (both animal and human). Dreams emerged from the seething biological humus of early modern London and from the rickety economic engine of The Theater itself.
Early London probably best compares—of course, not in scale, but in density and rate of change—to a city like Mumbai in the early 2000s. Swift writes that the London of the 1580s was a place “of a thousand changes,” and he describes how they were made visible in Shoreditch:
The thoroughfare of Bishopsgate ran a gentle northeast past the City walls and out towards the parish of St Leonard’s, where the Holywell site was. Along the way it passed through Norton Folgate, where a dozen new tenements—three-storey, timbered, tall and narrow—lined the road by 1576. Development accelerated in the closing years of the 1570s. In March 1582 the road was re-covered in new sand. There were small houses on each side of the road, with slightly larger houses behind, and then the fields behind these. This is known as ribbon development, as it flows in long thin lines next to the main roads, but as the 1580s went on development started to creep into the surrounding fields. . . . It was common to build in wood but the big green fields that sat behind Bishopsgate—Lolesworth Field, Spital fields—were filled with brickearth. This was stripped and fired and because bricks were cheap and easily available this spurred the development further and faster.
The world of the High Elizabethan period (the late 1590s) and early Jacobean period (which encompasses Shakespeare’s work from Henry IV through Antony and Cleopatra) is comparatively stable. Swift’s hypothesis, however, is that the ramshackle, comparatively unregulated, and less imperial London of the 1580s made a deep cultural imprint on Shakespeare—and on his closest creative collaborator, the actor Richard Burbage, James Burbage’s son. Shoreditch was on the edges, but it was still a part of London: an unregulated “edge zone” ringing the city, where production and manufacturing were on the rise. There it was, able to attract audiences from the old medieval city without being under the nose of the royal authority.
As a young man, Shakespeare could apprentice at The Theater and be a part of a burgeoning London theater culture without being immediately subject to the oversight of official authorities or influential aristocracy. And though James Burbage did, in fact, eventually run into trouble with the government in 1584, The Theater’s physical distance from medieval London is probably the reason it survived. At a time of broad political instability, its position meant that Burbage could indefinitely forestall unwanted official attention.
Swift’s theory of the “edge zone,” its advantages and consequences, makes immediate sense to me, since I have staged theater underground in illegal squats or semi-legally in industrial lofts at the edge of Greenpoint. Writers like Shakespeare and Marlowe, in the 1580s and perhaps the early 1590s, incubated their theatrical talents in a wild and woolly environment in which there were few to say no to their best and worst ideas. This wouldn’t have been true by 1595, nor certainly by 1600 or 1605. The 1580s might be the best explanation for why we got Shakespeare when we did—and why no comparable writer emerged after 1600.
In highlighting the difficulty and dirtiness, the sweat equity of the environment in which Shakespeare learned his trade, Swift has designs on us: He hopes that we—writers, artists, directors, designers, lost and wandering souls of the very late rather than early modern—might be invigorated by the homology between our time and Shakespeare’s. We might see how relative chaos, uncertainty, and scarcity create opportunities for creative artists to demonstrate their anti-fragility: their capacity to thrive amid uncertainty. As Swift put it in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” interview, he wanted to examine
the history of how people made a living in the creative arts: and, specifically, one particular author, who as well as being an extraordinary poet and playwright was a very canny businessman. He is, of course, William Shakespeare, and we might see him as the patron saint of freelance writers, or a 16th century gig worker in the creative industries.
As I’ve already suggested, Swift’s suggestiveness and historical extrapolations seem sound to me. Walking to the theater for the opening night of Doomers—again, through well-capitalized, safe, affluent parts of London—with The Dream Factory in mind, I felt acutely aware of the relationship between the materials of life and the materials of imagination. The landscape of the Western world in 2025 is largely bloodless and disembodied, but that sense of unreality is nevertheless productive of dramatic reckoning and critique. Through Swift’s lens, I could see my own choice to write a play about an AI company as a simple and direct response to my own environment and the anxieties of the age. To historicize oneself is to understand why poetry is necessary at all.
The point is not that poets should become absorbed by the material constraints and determinations in their lives, but that there can be too much or too little chaos, and too much or too little institutional structure. We might think of the relative boringness and safeness of theater culture, both in New York and in London in this decade, as a result of the pricing out of edge zones and a general cultural overemphasis on safety and inclusiveness—even safety and predictability in theater education itself. Shakespeare’s theatrical education was weird, dangerous, working-class. Many of its formal qualities would be codified by both Shakespeare the playwright and Shakespeare the entrepreneur later in his life, but not before. Nobody knew better, in other words. So there was room for something new to happen.
Back in Brooklyn, where I run a rather shabby theater company out of an industrial loft beneath a rave space, we contend with noise, neighbors, high rent, bad electrical wiring, bad plumbing, local bums and eccentrics, online trolls and haters. There are many days when I can’t conceptualize why I willingly endure the stress of keeping the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research running, other than that I don’t see how to stop. Most of my energy, on a daily basis, is consumed by the business, not the art. And yet somehow, as if by magic, the art, the plays come, pushed into existence by the simple mechanism of monthly rent. There must be plays to perform, so plays are written.
I am not, as a playwright, in a position to assess Swift as a historian. It is fair to wager that, as with the works of Shapiro and Greenblatt, there are specious connections and questionable claims in The Dream Factory. But as the father of the new historicism, Michel Foucault, knew, historiographies are a covert form of myth and philosophy. And Swift, I think, in constructing a vision of The Theater beam by beam, is teaching us that the business of building a theater, or any other material space for collaboration among artists, is the greater part of what dreams may come.
