Shakespeare's Dream Factory

The dream factory of the title refers to a playhouse called The Theatre, which was constructed on the grounds of a former priory in Shoreditch, just to the north-east of the City of London, in 1576. The Theatre was London’s first purpose-built commercial playhouse, or at least the first that we can describe with any confidence: this is because a surprisingly large number of surprisingly evocative records about it survive. The Theatre was founded by a former joiner and traveling player named James Burbage, with capital borrowed from his brother-in-law, and Burbage was a quarrelsome, slippery, hard-nosed businessman. He was constantly being sued; the litigation left archival traces. The Theatre was designed for making two things: money and plays. Both were of interest to William Shakespeare, who was only a boy when the Theatre was constructed, but whose career intersected with this playhouse and the Burbage family in profound and formative ways.

In April 1576, as James Burbage was settling the lease, a boy just shy of his twelfth birthday in the Midlands market town of Stratford upon Avon was dreaming of something more than his raftered upstairs schoolroom and his exercises in Latin imitation and his father’s trade of glove-making. We must suppose that William Shakespeare was a brilliant and occasionally diffident student. At this moment there was not an obvious future for him, or at least not one that he wished. His talent was inevitable; what might not be so easy was an opportunity for it to lead to a living. There was not yet in the English language a word for what he will become: a playwright.

Seeing Shakespeare among the Burbages is to see him less as the aloof genius celebrated by romantic poets since the 19th century and instead as a cannier figure who belonged within and emerged from the restlessness of his age. His life and career were structured by the regulations and expectations of late Elizabethan London and yet freed by its energies. This was his dream: a life spent creating literature which can be both transportingly, timelessly great and yet also profitable, not as a sideline or a hobby, but a job. The Burbages remind us to put money at the heart of art and if this seems disenchanted, even hollow, it might usefully return us to some characteristics of Shakespeare’s thinking which otherwise are lost.

Shakespeare knew this: that one strand of the struggle to make art is the hustle to earn a living. A small scene catches it. It is the morning of Juliet’s wedding to Paris, the young man her parents wish her to marry, and the young bride-to-be is discovered dead in her bed. We know more: that she is already married to Romeo, that she has taken a potion which has caused her to fall into a sleep so deep that it looks like death. But the other characters on stage, her parents, her nurse, do not, and their grief is reaching a holy pitch when a troupe of minor characters enter. They are musicians, here to entertain the guests at the wedding, and while they have been asked to come it is the perfectly wrong moment for them. “Tis no time to play now” the first musician says, but they do not leave. Instead, they start to josh a little, some back and forth with the household servants.

What follows is pure Shakespeare: a simple, humane insight, tightly packaged. Juliet’s is not their tragedy for these are working men, caught by chance in the roil of the plot, and they linger because they have been paid to be here. While they are reluctant to strike up with their instruments Peter, one of the Capulet servants, teases them by launching into a popular song. As he reaches the phrase “the music with her silver sound” he breaks off. “Why silver sound?” he taunts them: “what say you?” The first musician replies feebly—“because silver hath a sweet sound”—but the banter has begun. The second musician jumps in with the punchline that has been waiting. “I say ‘silver sound’ because musicians sound for silver” he retorts, and this in turn sparks another come-back from Peter: “because musicians have no gold for sounding.”

This little knockabout was probably designed as an opportunity for some improvisation by the skilled clown Will Kemp, who first played the role of Peter. It lands badly in the hands of actors who take Shakespeare more seriously, and modern productions tend to cut this scene. But there is a point to it. For these musicians, their work is to perform. They may create beauty and bring consolation, may mark a festivity, but they do so as a job. Sometimes it is hard to keep this balance in mind. Sometimes it is easier to treat art made for money as a category error or a joke.

The promise of a fee paid for playing, and then the fear of its disappearance, stands behind a matching scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Another group of entertainers gather for a performance: the “rude mechanicals,” a troupe of working men who wish to be actors and whom we watch rehearse a play which they plan to perform at the wedding of the Duke. In a panic just before their big day one of their number, a bellows-mender named Francis Flute, worries that if their show is not a success they will have “lost sixpence a day during his life.” He repeats: “sixpence a day for playing.” The sum is not princely but it is honest; perhaps it is not enough. Two sixpences made a shilling in Elizabethan London, and a 1576 statute set the wage for a London craftsman—a carpenter, a skinner—at 3 shillings 4 pence a week, with food and drink included. This was just over sixpence a day. Flute dreams of being paid at the rate of a working man.

Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespearean scholars have long observed that these plays are twins. Each tells of young lovers who run away from forbidding parents; each features a potion, a wall, a suicide, and a dream of fairies. Written in 1594 and 1595, and drawing from Shakespeare’s early, learning years at the Theatre in Shoreditch, they are also the two plays which most directly address the conjoined questions of how to make art and how to make money. This is no surprise, for in the years immediately before writing these plays Shakespeare was hard at work at learning how to write and how to earn his living from it. These were not the only two plays he wrote at the Theatre. But they were the perfect products of its dream factory, arising directly from and expressing still its deep contradictions and its rich promise.

About the author

Daniel Swift is associate professor of English at Northeastern University London. He is the author of books on Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare, and the poetry of the Second World War, and editor of the poems of John Berryman. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, New Statesman, and Harper’s.