How Shakespeare became Shakespeare: a riveting tale of London's first playhouse and the people—actors, writers, builders, investors—who built the Theatre.
Between 1576 and 1598, a playhouse called the Theatre stood in the northeast suburbs of London, until it was secretly torn down and its timbers used to build the much more famous Globe. Dreamed up and run by a former actor and notorious brawler named James Burbage, the Theatre was the first purpose-built commercial playhouse in London. It was plagued by litigation, heavily in debt, and the target of endless condemnation by preachers and the Lord Mayor. It was also where the young William Shakespeare worked when he first arrived in London, and it was here that he wrote many of his early plays.
At the heart of the Theatre was the dream of making money from creating art. This was Burbage's dream, of course, but it was also Shakespeare's, who worked with a close team of actors and cowriters at the Theatre, building the foundations of his own career and devising a way to make money from writing. Nobody had ever really done this before: playwrights in his time were notoriously poor; and the idea that one might earn a living from writing remains a faint and tempting one today.
"Brilliant . . . A transfixing portrait of the theater that made Shakespeare who he was. The Dream Factory is an indispensable account of a chaotic and creative period . . . Swift pays [Shakespeare] the compliment of recognizing the Bard in exactly the way that he would have recognized himself"
