The Dream Factory

London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare

By: Daniel Swift

Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies

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.

©2025 by Daniel Swift. (P)2025 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Critic reviews

“The Dream Factory brilliantly shows how Shakespeare was not merely a man of the theatre but a man of The Theatre, the playhouse where he developed the mastery of his art.”―David Scott Kastan, author of A Will to Believe

“A thrilling account . . . a story I thought I knew but didn’t. Swift brightly illuminates that raucous, scrappy, litigious world.”―Greg Doran, The Week

“The Dream Factory is one of the most exciting and original books about Shakespeare that I’ve read in years. Deeply researched, beautifully written, it brings to life how Shakespeare ‘became Shakespeare’ and created his early masterpieces at the Theatre in Shoreditch. A thrilling story, well told.”―James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare