The Dream Factory: London's First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare

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.

Daniel Swift's The Dream Factory is a story about art and money, creativity and craft, literary inspiration and the profit motive. The Theatre was a controversial, highly commercial factory for great and challenging art; into the dream factory walked the son of a Stratford tradesman, and out emerged the greatest writer in English.

Author: Daniel Swift
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 11/11/2025
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.14lbs
Size: 8.90h x 9.13w x 1.12d
ISBN: 9780374601270


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 09/29/2025
Booklist 10/01/2025

About the Author
Daniel Swift teaches at the New College of the Humanities in London. His first book, Bomber County, was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, and his essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, New Statesman, and Harper's Magazine.