London's First Playhouse and Shakespeare

Before Shakespeare became a literary icon, he was a working writer trying to earn a living in an emerging and often precarious new industry. In The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare, Daniel Swift explores the dream of making money from creating art—a dream shared by James Burbage, who built The Theatre, the first purpose-built commercial playhouse in London, and a young Shakespeare. Nobody had ever really done that before, with playwrights at the time notoriously poor.

Swift shows how Shakespeare’s creativity unfolded in a rapidly changing London where commercial theater was just beginning to take shape. The Theatre offered Shakespeare stability, a close team of actors and cowriters, and the professional home that he needed to develop his craft. Swift reveals a playwright who was learning on the job and on his way to becoming the Shakespeare we know today.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published November 18, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Hamish Brown in Stirling, Scotland, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Daniel Swift. Photo by Leo Roiphe.

Daniel Swift is an 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 John Berryman’s The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, New Statesman, and Harper’s.

Previous:
Mary, Queen of Scots, with Jade Scott

FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: We’re living through a time of intense precarity for the arts… and for the performing arts in particular.

We’re seeing audience preferences shift, and revenue models falter. It can seem impossible for theater artists to make a living. Perhaps this has always been the case.

A new book by Daniel Swift of Northeastern University London reminds us that the same was true in Shakespeare’s day. His new book is The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare.

In it, Swift tells a story of the intertwined roles of art and commerce in early modern London. He traces Shakespeare’s early career in a city where commercial theater was only just getting started. Where making a living writing plays wasn’t just far-fetched… it was practically unheard of.

But Shakespeare’s success was made possible by the existence of a new, purpose-built venue called simply, the Theatre.

The Theatre represented an audacious bet by James Burbage, a fast-talking former actor. Burbage imagined a playhouse that would mint money from audiences hungry for theater.

That bet more than paid off: the Theatre made bank—and changed the course of culture.

Here’s Daniel Swift, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

——————

BARBARA BOGAEV: Daniel Swift, welcome to the podcast. It’s great to have you here.

DANIEL SWIFT: Thank you very much. It’s lovely to be here.

BOGAEV: I’ve got to say, you begin this book with some really pretty down-to-earth talk about how working and making money are at the core of your story. That really drew me in because, full disclosure, I always secretly wonder how novelists and playwrights today can afford their calling, and I feel a little guilty about suspecting their trust fund babies or something. So, is the economics of being an artist a preoccupation of yours, too?

SWIFT: It has been for some time—and I have to say, I also share your suspicion. I love the idea that everyone can make a really great living in the arts, but it doesn’t seem to be much of a reality for any of us.

The way I started thinking about this book, I suppose, was that I’ve been interested for years in the strange jobs that poets do in order to make a living, you know. We know about William Carlos Williams delivering babies or Wallace Stevens working at the insurance company. William Wordsworth was a postmaster. It’s probably my favorite example. It’s always given me this sense that that was a way to really, kind of, bring down to earth, or ground, these great poets, and also, maybe a way of thinking about the creation of poetry, the creation of great works of art, as something that was taking place within the world.

That seemed to be an exciting way to approach it, I suppose, following a report I read in 2022, which was the most terrifying document maybe I’d ever read. There’s an organization called the Society of Authors here in the UK. They did a survey of how much money professional authors in the United Kingdom made. As you can probably guess, the average that they came up with was amazingly low. So, the average income for a professional author in the UK turned out to be £7,000, which is very, very difficult to, you know, build a life on that, build a life from being a professional author.

But like all people who work on Shakespeare and think about Shakespeare’s life and times, that number, 7,000, also sort of echoed, interestingly, for me because £7 was what Shakespeare, or any playwrights of his moment, would have been paid for writing a play. I like that echo between present-day struggling freelance writers. It got me thinking, you know, what about Shakespeare? Shakespeare wasn’t always Shakespeare, right? He wasn’t always this settled, confident, triumphal figure. We value the plays of Shakespeare so highly, so transcendentally highly, and yet within Shakespeare’s own time he was, for a huge stretch of his career, absolutely scraping to make a living.

BOGAEV: Great. Let’s go back to the beginning, in fact, back to your title, which is The Dream Factory. You write that James Burbage’s theater was born of a dream. So, what was that dream? What did it consist of? And why did James Burbage have this dream at this particular time in history?

SWIFT: James Burbage is the kind of, the sort of, founding father, I suppose, of my story and of the theater itself. As a young man, he trained as a joiner—so, trained in kind of woodworking, really. Then he abandoned that because it was maybe not that fun being a joiner.

He went off and became a travelling actor, which was how actors worked in those days, travelling the country, attached to sort of aristocratic households, really. That too, quite soon, turned out to not be enough for James Burbage.

What he figured out was that the way to make lots of money from working in the creative industries—what we now call the creative industries, working in the arts, working in theater—was to be the owner of a playhouse. Because then you can control what’s going on onstage, and of course, you can take all the tickets paid by people who are coming to see the plays.

BOGAEV: Owning the means of production.

SWIFT: Exactly, owning the means of production. It’s cynical of me, but I think it’s also accurate to say so. I think that urge to make money is really at the core of the story I’m telling—and I would suggest it’s at the core of the impulse to create art, too.

You know, I think it’s very tempting for us to separate the wonderful world of poetry and literature and plays and Shakespeare from the kind of grubby daily reality of wages and working and so on. But I think if you put those two things back together, different sorts of stories emerge.

The dream of my title is that: a dream of making a decent living. Not making a fortune by any means. We’re not talking about Brad Pitt. These aren’t movie stars. But making a decent living doing something like playwriting or acting or working in the theater itself.

BOGAEV: So, this really is the dawn of theater as a business. I mean Burbage must have been some salesman to get people to invest in this with him. And also, a scoundrel, right?

SWIFT: A scoundrel and a salesman both! I quite often try and think of what are the modern-day  analogies that we might choose. Is it something like The Sopranos? There’s something kind of a little bit sort of crooked about him at all times.

BOGAEV: P. T. Barnum came to mind.

SWIFT: P. T. Barnum’s another great example, right? Someone selling a bit of moonshine, I think.

BOGAEV: Right.

SWIFT: Now, what Burbage has is this extraordinary capacity to convince people of things. Usually, what he’s convincing them to do is to lend him money. Almost always, what he’s convincing them to really do is lend him money with absolutely no guarantee of any kind and that’s clearly bad behavior. That’s a terrible thing. But that’s a great gift to someone like me, a historian who comes along 400 years later. Because what Burbage does means that he gets endlessly sued by everyone he borrows money from and those court cases leave records. Therefore, we can still trace the actions of this man today.

BOGAEV: Now, the backdrop to this whole story of the theater is that these are the early days of capitalism in the theater industry in London and that Burbage’s Theatre tracks this. So, how so? Because there’s already capitalism. There’s always a market happening. There’s trade in England. But theater hadn’t been commercialized yet, right?

SWIFT: Absolutely. So, you know, when does capitalism begin? That’s a kind of impossible question for economic historians. You can find all sorts of different moments. But what lots of people seem to agree is that somewhere in the second half of the 16th century, and very possibly in London, there are these new forms of business emerging. So, we celebrate Shakespeare’s England as this moment of extraordinary artistic creativity; it’s also a moment of business creativity.

BOGAEV: Right. And so, I’m going to get to Shakespeare now—almost to Shakespeare—because this is such the early days of the theater as a craft and a business. You point out that there wasn’t even a word in English for “playwright” when Burbage was signing the lease for the Theatre’s land and Shakespeare was still just a schoolboy. So, what were people called who wrote plays?

SWIFT: It’s a really great, great question. So, the word “playwright” itself—it’s always impossible to know exactly when a word is invented, but it seems that it starts being used in the early years of the 17th century, about 30 years after what I’m talking about.

People might have been referred to as poets, possibly, interestingly enough. There’s a sense of playmaking but what really interests me about that word “playwright” is that the second half of it “wright” refers to somebody who makes something with their hands. A wheelwright is someone who makes wheels. A cartwright is someone who makes carts. So, there’s a sense here that this word is emerging to describe what is a new form of job really. Now, the eye-opening thing that I feel, you know, made me think much more clearly about this whole book was my sudden sense that really before Shakespeare nobody had really done this as a job, i.e., something which led to a stable living. People had written plays before, but it’s the idea that this is something that you would do professionally as a career. That’s the new thing, and that’s being invented in this very moment.

BOGAEV: That’s so interesting because you also talk about in this chapter how really casts would collaborate on scripts.

SWIFT: Yeah, absolutely. So, over the past 20 or 30 years or so, Shakespeare scholars have become more and more aware that many of Shakespeare’s plays are collaborative, and that seems to be a kind of widely accepted point by now amongst Shakespeare scholars.

What it seems to me is that we’re perhaps ready to accept that idea in this moment, in part because we’re living through a kind of golden age of TV, right? And the thing about the great TV shows, Succession or Breaking Bad, whatever the example might be, those tend to be written by teams of writers.

BOGAEV: The writer’s room.

SWIFT: Exactly, the writer’s room, and that’s how I see a huge amount of the playwriting going on in Shakespeare’s time.

It’s worth saying that Shakespeare collaborates early on in his career and then again at the very end of his career. But in the middle of his career, he tends not to. He tends to work as a solo author. And that might tell us all sorts of things, right? Is it because he’s learned what he’s doing in that moment? He’s moved through that process of the writer’s room and he’s figured out how to write a play? Or, is there—as ever, cynical me suggests—a kind of financial motive here. I mentioned the £7 earlier. If you’re co-writing a play, you also have to share that £7, but if you write the play yourself, all of the £7 is yours.

BOGAEV: And what’s that example in one of Shakespeare’s plays in Midsummer?

SWIFT: Yeah, there’s a great moment, which is that there’s a kind of group of actually craftsmen who are a sort of amateur acting company who want to put on a play to entertain the Duke at his wedding. And they’re terrified that something in the play will alarm the audience. So, it’s a kind of example of a sort of early modern trigger warning, I suppose. They’re putting in an extra section which explains that the lion that’s on stage isn’t really a lion. It’s just an actor in a lion costume. And they have to call in somebody to write an extra prologue for them that explains what’s going on.

[CLIP from the Folger Audio edition of  A Midsummer Night’s Dream]

BOTTOM: Write me a prologue, and let the prologue seem to
say we will do no harm with our swords and that
Pyramus is not killed indeed. And, for the more
better assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not
Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver. This will put them
out of fear.
—A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, scene 1

SWIFT: What fascinates me about this moment is we actually see a group of people working in the theater coming together to write something collaboratively, right? There’s no moment there when they say, “Oh, we need something written. Let’s get our solo author who’s off in his garret to write it for us” right? This is a team effort.

BOGAEV: I love how you bolster your depiction of Shakespeare as a working writer with examples from his plays like this. Could you give us the one from Romeo and Juliet?

SWIFT: Yeah, absolutely, one of my favorite scenes in all of Shakespeare.

Juliet is married to Romeo. They’ve married in secret. Her family doesn’t know this. So, they arrange another marriage for her to a young man called Paris. And they put together all the kind of arrangements for the wedding, including hiring a group of wedding singers to come and perform.

On the night before this other wedding is supposed to take place, Juliet takes a sleeping potion, and so, in the morning, everyone thinks that she is dead. Now, nobody thinks to tell the wedding singers that this has happened. So, they turn up—but the house is this household full of, you know, wailing grief and despair—and this group of wedding singers turn up, and they don’t really know what to do because they’ve been paid to be there.

I think they’d quite like to be paid, and the only way they’re going to be paid is if they perform some songs. But nobody in this moment wants any kind of, you know, jolly wedding songs. And they stand around making these sort of slightly awkward jokes about how musicians only pay music for money and there’s a kind of riff they get into about this line from a sort of popular song, “Music hath a silver sound.”

[Clip from the Folger Audio edition of  Romeo and Juliet]

PETER: [Sings] When griping griefs the heart doth wound
And doleful dumps the mind oppress,
Then music with her silver sound—
Why “silver sound”? Why “music with her silver
sound”? What say you, Simon Catling?

FIRST MUSICIAN:  Marry, sir, because silver hath a
sweet sound.

PETER:  Prates.—What say you, Hugh Rebeck?

SECOND MUSICIAN:  I say “silver sound” because musicians
sound for silver.

PETER:  Prates too.—What say you, James Soundpost?

THIRD MUSICIAN:  Faith, I know not what to say.

PETER:  O, I cry you mercy. You are the singer. I will say
for you. It is “music with her silver sound” because
musicians have no gold for sounding:

[Sings] Then music with her silver sound
With speedy help doth lend redress.
—Romeo and Juliet, Act IV, scene 5

SWIFT: There are jokes about how, you know, musicians sounding for silver or sounding for gold. But it’s this great moment of awkwardness that doesn’t really fit in an idea of Romeo and Juliet as this passionate love story, right? Because here we have a group of professional entertainers, worrying about their income. They’re not worrying about whether Juliet is dead or not, right? Their version of this story is, “Where are we going to make our make our sixpence from?”

BOGAEV: It’s great because you almost hear Shakespeare going, “This is what my life is like.”

SWIFT: Yeah, absolutely.

BOGAEV: “I’m writing this beautiful poetry, but this is also a job. I gotta make a dime.”

SWIFT: Yeah. And I think it’s an in-joke for the people he’s working alongside, right? They’re all amusing one another.

BOGAEV: Right, for the groundlings, too! You return often to Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer in this book, early Shakespeare plays. Why?

SWIFT: Am I allowed to say because they’re great? Is that not enough of a reason? I mean, come on.

[Both laugh.]

BOGAEV: Of course you are. You can say whatever you want, Daniel.

SWIFT: The reason I come back to those two plays is there’s several different reasons.

So, you mentioned my title, The Dream Factory. Now, Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night’s Dream are Shakespeare’s two plays which are most fixated upon dreams. Dreams occur in other plays, but they really play a central role in both of those two plays. So, that’s one nice thing for me.

Another nice thing is they’re both plays which focus upon and think about working men. Men doing their jobs. What it is to make a living. So, that’s another useful strand for me.

But the real reason I focus on those two is that they are written at the end of the, kind of, period that I’m talking about. So, I mentioned sort of young Shakespeare collaborating when he’s first starting out. That’s probably taking place in the late 1580s when he first arrives in London. We don’t know the exact dates, but that seems likely.

At least in my vision of this story, he then spends the following six or seven years honing his skills as a playwright. By the time he gets to 1594, 1595, which is when he’s writing Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night’s Dream, he’s really figured out what he’s doing.

I love being reminded of that because it gives me hope for all of us, right? That even Shakespeare needed to figure out what it was he’s doing. He’d written lots of plays by that point. But it’s at that moment, Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, when suddenly you’re like, “Okay. Wow, this is jaw-droppingly good. This is now really Shakespeare.”

BOGAEV: Right. But how did he get there? You speculate that Shakespeare’s lost years were his unofficial apprenticeship in playwriting. I want to back up a little bit because you have a whole chapter about what an apprenticeship is and this functions in a really interesting way in your story of how Shakespeare became who he is. So, what did an Elizabethan apprenticeship consist of and why was it so crucial to survival, really, at the time for commoners?

SWIFT: You know, we still have the word apprenticeship today, but we mean something, I think, a little bit vague by it. We tend to mean, you know, learning to do something while working at that thing itself.

BOGAEV: —and not getting paid much.

SWIFT: And not getting paid much, exactly. It sort of shades over into, you know, kind of, work opportunities of various different kinds.

In 16th-century England, the apprenticeship was this absolutely crucial training system and set of institutions. So, somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of the men in London in this period did apprenticeships. What happened was a young man—and I always make this point, which I think is an important one: apprenticeships don’t actually forbid women. So, you could be a girl and do an apprenticeship. It just tends to be men.

So, a young man of perhaps 16 or 17 would literally sign a contract, a kind of bond, for seven years in which he would train under a master of a particular craft or trade. You want to be a carpenter, you go and find a master carpenter and you bind yourself to that master carpenter—and you live in their household in that time. So, you’re paid perhaps nothing, perhaps very little. But what you get in return is a deep, deep training in this kind of craft. And at the end of that seven years, you have the right to join the company, the worshipful company of carpenters in this example. And there are companies of all sorts of different trades: fishmongers, barrel makers, whatever it might be, all sorts of trades.

But you earn the right to join the company. From that point onwards, your professional life is set. You really have a job for life. So, in that sense, it’s a little bit like maybe joining a union would be today, right? You join this kind of professional union, and it guarantees you a decent wage, and it gives you all sorts of worker protections.

Now there’s a sort of conflict: he’s putting it too extremely here but there’s a tension here between this system of work, of jobs, of training up to be a carpenter, and then the world of entertainment, right? The world of play is a little bit at odds with that. You can’t do an apprenticeship as a playwright or as an actor. That doesn’t exist as a system.

BOGAEV: Because the theater wasn’t a union or a company yet, or a livery.

SWIFT: Yeah, hadn’t been unionized. But it doesn’t really matter anyway, because from Shakespeare’s point of view, he could never be in an apprenticeship. He could never be an apprentice because he’d married young. You weren’t allowed to be an apprentice if you were married. So, the fact of Shakespeare marrying as a very young man bars him from this crucial way of making a living.

Now, Shakespeare’s father was a glove maker. Might Shakespeare have wanted to go into the glove-making trade? It seems unlikely, right?, from everything we know about Shakespeare’s extraordinary abilities and extraordinary ambition.

But that whole world of apprenticeships and kind of regulated trade was closed to him. So, he had to create something else. He had to invent something else. What he created for himself was a kind of, I suppose, a kind of imagined apprenticeship in playwriting.

So, what he does, he moves to London and he goes to the Theatre itself. He starts out in very menial jobs, probably. Who knows what he’s doing? He’s helping clean the stage. He’s helping with the props. He’s helping hold the horses at the theater door, whatever it might be. And fairly soon, he then starts writing with older, more successful playwrights and I see that as a kind of apprenticeship system. He is learning to be a playwright by binding himself to the people that he thought were the master playwrights of that moment.

BOGAEV: And that makes sense because this was a very early period in the commercialization of theater. It was also a real transition period, you write. So, was it a transition—and this is in the late 1580s while Shakespeare’s still coming up through the ranks, I suppose. He doesn’t write his first big success, Titus Andronicus, until 1589. So, in that period, is it a transition period just because of all that’s going on in London? Or is it because of Burbage’s Theatre, the first permanent place for theater? Or the rise of Christopher Marlowe? Or Shakespeare himself? What’s the transition from what to what?

SWIFT: All of those things. Those are all things which are changing in this moment. London in the 1570s and 1580s and 1590s is in an extraordinary moment of transformation and ferment and conflict and crisis and creativity and economic change and social change, right? It’s this crucible of invention of a whole number of different forms.

The change that we’re seeing that I’m trying to track in the book, I suppose, is really the development of the possibility of someone like Shakespeare. I do profoundly believe that Shakespeare is extraordinary and unique. But what’s key is the possibility of him having a career which allows him to write lots of plays and for those plays to survive. That’s the thing that’s being transformed.

You mentioned Christopher Marlowe, extraordinary, wonderful playwright, almost exactly Shakespeare’s contemporary, but Marlowe dies young. So, Marlowe’s career is cut very short. So, Marlowe writes, what, five or six plays? Shakespeare writes 40. And not only that, Shakespeare’s plays survive. So, he’s figuring out this crucial question, which is about creation and survival of works of art.

BOGAEV: Right. And Shakespeare himself survived his apprenticeship and his journeyman years when playwrights were just not making, as you say, much money, their £7, at the most.

There were plague years in these times as well, when the playhouses were closed. So, and now we’re getting to my favorite metaphor in your book, which is how did Shakespeare support himself in those lean times? And you say it’s because he was a script doctor.

SWIFT: Yeah, absolutely. I think, certain attributes of Shakespeare and his time become visible at different moments, right? Again, maybe this is an idea that we’re more, kind of, happy with or comfortable with now.

Clearly, what happens with lots and lots of plays is that they are written in one form and then the company need to go on tour, need to go and travel. And one of the key reasons why they might need to go on tour is because the playhouses in London closed down because of an outbreak of plague or the rumor of an outbreak of plague.

I should say this is happening all the time. This happens pretty much every summer. The playhouses are endlessly being closed down. So, it’s not just in those famous plague years. It’s a constant thing, which means that the business model is always unstable.

What happens when the playhouses close down is the company of players get together and they go on the road. They go and tour in the provinces. In order to do that, they need a shorter play, fewer props, a simpler set of stages. So, they need something that’s a bit different. It’s not easy to change one kind of play into another one. You know, people sometimes think, “Oh, I’ll take a Shakespeare play and I’ll just trim it. I’ll take this play.” It’s very, very difficult to do because those plays are put together in such carefully structured ways. So, it takes someone extremely skillful to be able to take a play, for example, designed to be performed by 20 actors and turn it into a play which can be performed by 12 actors. Now, somebody in this moment, somebody who knows an extraordinary amount about the mechanics of theater has to be doing this kind of work. And my suggestion—and this is speculation, I have no absolute proof—is that’s what Shakespeare is doing because it kind of matches his skill set perfectly.

It also tells us something else about Shakespeare. I think it’s about his deep pragmatism. I don’t think Shakespeare is precious about those plays themselves. He sees them as things that can be made and then remade and improved and changed.

BOGAEV: What plays are we talking about? Again, you said this was speculation that Shakespeare was surviving as a rewrite man, but you base it on what echoes you see in Shakespeare’s later plays?

SWIFT: So, when, in the 1580s, when Shakespeare arrives in London, the big company, the most successful company in the land are called The Queen’s Men, and they’re often performing their plays at the Theatre itself. Clearly, Shakespeare studies very carefully and thinks very carefully about those Queen’s Men plays. They are the big, you know, the big Broadway hits of the 1580s. These are the big, successful plays packing in the audiences. He thinks, “There’s something I can learn from these.”

The reason we know that is because many of Shakespeare’s plays—and this is across his whole career—take very similar plot lines or titles or elements of those old Queen’s Men plays and repurpose them into something else. So, the Queen’s Men have a Henry V play, for example. They have a play about King Lear. They spell Lear a bit differently, but it’s the same story. It’s the same reign. They have a play about King John. Shakespeare is drawing out elements of these, is turning these slightly clunky old plays into the extraordinary things that he’s creating.

You know, I think somewhere deep inside Shakespeare’s, I suppose, skill set or extraordinary capacity is an amazing, almost supernatural, sense of what it is that works and what it is that doesn’t work. And very often what he’s therefore doing is seeing in a play that is maybe mostly terrible, he’s seeing the one or two elements. And from those one or two elements, he’s conjuring a whole other extraordinary play.

BOGAEV: Yeah, the borrower of feathers aspect. But in your telling—because scholars talk about this all the time, what Shakespeare borrowed and what he learned—in your telling, you’re making the point that Shakespeare had this home at Burbage’s Theatre, and without that, he would not have had the leisure to have this apprenticeship, then be a journeyman, and do the rewriting, and do the work that made him develop, helped him develop, his craft.

And also, it’s where his money came from to be a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Is that right? That’s really where Shakespeare became Shakespeare and what led to his later prosperity.

SWIFT: Absolutely. Let’s talk about money. Let’s stop talking about poetry. Let’s talk about the real question here. So, £7 is what you make for writing a play. How do we contextualize that? It’s very difficult to translate 16th-century amounts of money into amounts of money today. There isn’t a simple formula for that. But a schoolteacher makes about £25 a year. That’s a decent annual salary. So, that’s the golden number we’re trying to reach, right?

Now, from about 1594, when Shakespeare becomes what’s called a sharer, he becomes part of the company who are profiting, therefore, from the ticket receipts at the theatre. He’s making £50 a year. So, he goes from somebody who has no real job prospects in this industry which looks like it’s impossible to make money from. Suddenly, Shakespeare has been catapulted into this world of, crucially, economic stability. That sounds really boring, right? We want to say he’s become a kind of multi-millionaire in this moment. He can buy a sports car. That’s not what happens. What he gets is he gets financial stability and he gets a home from which he can therefore continue to write those plays.

Now, I think very often about—you know, Virginia Woolf writes about A Room of One’s Own, is what a woman writer needs—I think that the best way I have to understand this is, is that what the Theatre gives Shakespeare, is that room of his own, right?

I don’t mean, again, I’d emphasize this endlessly, I don’t mean that he’s working as a solitary worker, but it gives him this settled space from which he can then create these extraordinary works of art. I don’t think that would have been possible otherwise.

BOGAEV: Well, we’ve kind of given a short shrift to the amazing story of the Theatre, James Burbage’s theater. But we have to end with the great caper, which is the end, the final chapter of the Theatre, and that’s the dismantling of it to recycle the timbers and build the Globe. But it wasn’t James Burbage’s escapade because he was already dead. So, who was behind the scheme?

SWIFT: Yeah, it’s a great anecdote and it’s where I end my book. James Burbage dies in the mid-1590s, and his two sons really take over the family business. I said before, this was a family business, and it’s crucial to keep that in mind.

His two sons were—the elder one was named Cuthbert, who was the kind of financial mastermind, and the younger one was called Richard Burbage, the great Shakespearean actor—and the two of them create this kind of, it’s almost like a prank, this, kind of, mad scheme. What they’re going to do is they’re going to dismantle the timbers of the Theatre itself, and transport those across the river, and reuse those same timbers to build the Globe.

BOGAEV: Right, because by law, they own the building, not the land. That was what all the lawsuits were about, the land.

SWIFT: Exactly. So, the land that the Theatre is originally built on is only rented. And again, it’s the one strand of humor, I think, in the story and in the book, is that their landlord really, really hates playhouses and he hates the fact that he’s got this theater built on his land. But it’s rented land. After about 20 or so years, that lease expires and the landlord doesn’t want to renew it.

But what the Burbages know is that timber is very, very, very expensive. Labor is not relatively expensive, but timber is very expensive. These are big, heavy timbers. There’s a crucial economic question here, therefore. Pragmatic financial question. That’s what the Burbage family are all about. Pragmatic financial questions.

However, there’s also an amazing gesture in this, right? Which is that they take down this permanent structure and move it to somewhere else and rebuild it. I love that because that seems to me to say so much about how Shakespeare and his company in this moment must have thought about the Theatre. It was theirs. It was their home. They certainly weren’t going to leave it behind in any way.

But it also tells me something that’s, I think, beautiful and resonant about theater as an art form itself, about plays. It’s perhaps the thing I love most about them, which is that plays are this extraordinary mixture of things which are permanent and things which are transient. Theater, you know, plays are both of those things at the same time. So, this building that can be moved and recreated somewhere else is a perfect emblem of that.

BOGAEV: Well, all of this, your book, a lot of the talk on our podcast, is about how Shakespeare’s era in London was such a turbulent time, and turbulent politically and economically and environmentally and geopolitically. And there’s immigration and colonialism and plagues and famine. It’s all this churn and that’s what your story tracks as well in the rise of theater as an industry. It seems to beg the question whether Shakespeare would have become Shakespeare if he hadn’t lived in such a volcanic transitional period.

SWIFT: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, as you were sketching, kind of, what it was like in 16th-century England, I was, of course, thinking, “Hang on, that sounds like today” right? That’s—you know, have you read the New York Times this morning?—that’s the age that we’re living in now.

BOGAEV: Yeah, it’s somewhat Shakespeare.

SWIFT: So, right, there’s a kind of deep echo. I don’t think we get to have Shakespeare without this moment of extraordinary creativity, crisis, change in all sorts of things, right?

We’ve mentioned the politics. We’ve mentioned the art. We’ve mentioned the economics and so on. Even the English language itself is in a moment of change. So, all of those elements of, kind of, change and turmoil are feeding together into those. You know, having said that, what this world gave Shakespeare was the possibility to do these extraordinary things.

So, he still needed to do them. But it meant that it was really, for the first time in human history, actually available to him to create these extraordinary plays, to ensure that they survived, to build this amazing legacy.

BOGAEV: It’s such a joy to read your book. And it’s similarly a joy to talk to you. Thank you so much.

SWIFT: Thank you very much indeed. It’s been a real pleasure for me.

————

KARIM-COOPER: That was Daniel Swift, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare is out now from FSG.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Melis Uslu in London, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

If you’re a fan of Shakespeare Unlimited, please spread the word. Tell a friend about why you love the podcast!

Shakespeare Unlimited comes to you from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Home to the world’s largest Shakespeare collection, the Folger is dedicated to advancing knowledge and the arts.

If you’re in Washington, DC, come visit the Folger on Capitol Hill. Come face to face with a Shakespeare First Folio in our exhibition halls or take in a play in our theater or enjoy our Quill & Crumb cafe. We’d love to see you. For more information visit our website, folger.edu.

Until next time, thanks for listening!