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

Swift (The Bughouse), an English professor at Northeastern University London, spotlights the Theatre, the London playhouse that gave William Shakespeare his start, in this smart mix of history and literary criticism. After detailing the building of the Theatre by former actor James Burbage in 1576, Swift widens his lens, exploring how playhouses created tension with churches in Elizabethan London—preachers viewed them as a corrupting influence—and how the economics of livery companies, in which men typically spent seven years as an apprentice learning a trade from a master, shaped local culture, including the way playhouses worked. Swift suggests Shakespeare underwent a sort of writing apprenticeship at the Theatre, studying plays and collaborating with older, more accomplished playwrights, like George Peele. Two of Shakespeare’s most well-known works, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, were written during his tenure at the Theatre and contain references to trades, demonstrating the centrality of livery companies at the time, Swift posits. The author’s arguments don’t always land—his suggestion that the actor Richard Burbage named his children after Shakespeare’s characters, for instance, doesn’t completely convince—but he succeeds in elucidating the economics and culture that gave rise to a literary icon. Readers will be reminded that even a writer as highly regarded as Shakespeare once needed to learn and practice his craft. (Nov.)