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 suburbs of London, until it was secretly torn down and its timbers were 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 the city, 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, but it was also that of Shakespeare, who worked with a close team of actors and cowriters, laying the foundation of his own career and devising a way to earn a living from writing.

Through the life of this little-known playhouse, Daniel Swift tells the story of how Shakespeare became Shakespeare, and of how the Elizabethan stage began to flourish. Introducing us to the businessmen who thought up the Theatre, the carpenters who built it, the preachers who hated it, and the actors who performed upon its small stage, The Dream Factory re-creates the world that produced Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream—and the audiences who first saw them. The Theatre was a controversial, highly commercial workshop for great and challenging art. Into this dream factory walked the son of a Stratford glovemaker, and from it emerged the greatest writer in the English language.