The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare by Daniel Swift; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 320 pp., $30
The problem has stumped many would-be biographers of Shakespeare: The Bard was born in 1564, but no one mentions him before 1592. Jorge Luis Borges’s solution? Invent Shakespeare’s inner life. Here is Borges on the so-called lost years—from around 1585, when most biographers believe Shakespeare came to London, to roughly 1592, soon after which he wrote Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
In his twenties he went to London. He had become instinctively adept at pretending to be somebody, so that no one would suspect he was in fact nobody. In London he discovered the profession for which he was destined, that of the actor who stands on a stage and pretends to be someone else in front of a group of people who pretend to take him for that other person. Theatrical work brought him rare happiness, possibly the first he had ever known—but when the last line had been applauded and the last corpse removed from the stage, the odious shadow of unreality fell over him again: he ceased being Ferrex or Tamburlaine and went back to being nobody.
Daniel Swift’s The Dream Factory invents the lost years, too, but not by conjuring Shakespeare’s inner life. Swift centers his narrative on the Theatre (1576–1598), regarded as the first public London playhouse. By telling the story of Shakespeare’s life through the Theatre’s rise—and the carpenters, preachers, landlords, and actors who shaped it—he attempts to avoid the missteps that have dragged down many scholars in recent years.
The Dream Factory appears at a strange moment. The Bard’s plays remain popular, but much recent scholarship has focused on their racist and misogynistic elements or has alleged, aided by stylometric digital tools supposedly able to discern writers’ signatures, that Shakespeare’s contemporaries wrote or cowrote more of the work attributed to him than was previously thought.
Instead of committing to either of those propositions, which can sound like they are trying to denigrate Shakespeare, Swift focuses on deftly weaving together close readings, scholarship, archival research, and literary, legal, and economic history (his bibliographic essays should be their own book). He swoops from capsule accounts of Elizabethan acting companies to mini-essays on the birth of capitalism. And, drawing from the idea of historian Johannes Huizinga, he provides insight about why theater matters: “Play moves within an enchanted zone.” All along he supplies a feast of granular detail. The Theatre, Swift recounts, was a 14-sided, semi-open-air venue constructed of green, unseasoned timber that donkeys dragged from Reading in carts, a process that took months. For one Candlemas dinner, carpenters working on the Theatre ordered “thirteen joints of mutton, one and a half lambs, twenty-four hens, three capons; butter, candles, salt, parsley, pepper, oranges, [and] vinegar and verjuice.” Once the theater was operational, admission cost a penny, the same as a loaf of bread or six eggs. Around 20 years later, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet premiered there.
Besides showing the marvels of the Theatre, Swift stresses that Shakespeare’s environs—if not the poet himself—were communitarian, which strikes this reader as odd, since it is well-known that the Bard’s plays, and the audiences that saw them, comprised people of various classes. But at moments, Swift delivers a more radical read of the situation, suggesting that he would prefer Shakespeare’s plays to be even more of the people than they are. “You are as likely to be a poet as a weaver or carpenter,” he complains, in a section where he crunches how many kings and servants and dukes Shakespeare wrote. Would Hamlet be a better play if Hamlet were a weaver?
Swift speculates that when Shakespeare first showed up in London, he worked as an apprentice playwright—apprenticeship being an entrance to early modern society for many young men streaming into the capital. In this scenario, Swift imagines that the collaborative training Shakespeare undertook with other writers might provide a key to his work. But although Swift points out similarities between the didactic plays Shakespeare might have seen and the works he wrote, he asserts that Shakespeare was sui generis.
Okay. But so much of Swift’s detective work leads to evidence that merely evokes. His analysis of Shakespeare’s relationship with the actor Richard Burbage, the first to play Hamlet, for example, rests on Shakespeare’s use of the word fellow to describe Burbage in his will, as the word contained the meaning of friendship, and on Burbage’s naming his daughter Julia or Juliet.
The story ends with the dismantling of the Theatre in 1598, 18 years before Shakespeare died. The playhouse ended as suddenly and as inevitably as it began. A team of workers demolished it and repurposed the timber, possibly for the Globe.
Ultimately, Swift wants to have it both ways. Acknowledging that Shakespeare was “exceptional,” he goes on to caution, “If we begin by seeing him as exceptional we can only end with an enigma and he can only be an isolated figure.” I don’t know whether you can have it both ways. And I don’t know what’s wrong with being an exceptional figure so long as you write great plays.
