I started Daniel Swift’s The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare on a friend’s recommendation. (In full disclosure, I’ve read/viewed few of Shakespeare’s works other than assigned scholastically.) I began to read and became immersed.
A good portion of the book’s beginning is devoted to James Burbage and his family, detailing the intricate web involving siting, leasing, erecting (in 1576), the first playhouse–ever–dedicated solely to dramatic productions. Out in the bleak suburbs, beyond walled London town, Burbage christened it the Theatre. On its heels and adjacent to it rose the Curtain, a second dramatic venue.
This may sound as dry as bones (and where, you ask, is the Bard of the title?) but before you know it, you’re drawn into the complexity of it all, and once realizing you’re not prepping for a final–no pressure to memorize the whole shebang–you allow yourself to savor the intricate pas-de-deux (-trois, -quatre and more) involved in erecting, maintaining, staffing, funding, and luring paying customers to applaud dramatic performances in muddy Shoreditch. As you progress, it dawns that you’re being ushered not only into the birth of our modern theater, but into nascent modern economics, the use of negative working capital to dance on the brink of bankruptcy, high-finagling, and many other all-too-recognizable attributes of society today.
And young Will? He was still in Stratford, married, with one child and twins on the way. Not the avenue taken by his peers, who apprenticed variously (for at least seven years during which they were forbidden to marry). But we also see that Shakespeare’s cohort underwent a more rigorous education than has been assumed, actually, Latin-laden and humanist-oriented. Young Will loved words, had no interest in becoming a glover, like his father, or any other socially acceptable and marketable trade. (“Playwright” wasn’t yet in the lexicon). A schoolroom staple was Desiderius Erasmus’s 1512 De Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style, a rhetoric textbook for expanding vocabulary and argument. One section provides nearly 200 ways to write, “Your letter pleased me greatly.” Consider; 1512 was but a tad over a half century past, while we celebrate Will still, at four centuries remove…)
De Copia: A schoolboy’s trick, or foundation for a playwright? Swift quotes Shakespeare’s 1580s tinkering on the Queen’s Men’s production of The Troublesome Reign of King John, noting he “reversed the magnetic field of the original.” Grieving the loss of her child, the mother asks, “Must Constance speak? Let tears prevent her talk,” which Shakespeare flips to, “Grief fills the room up of my absent child / Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me / Then have I reason to be fond of grief.”
Swift reminds, “Shakespeare did not generate his own raw materials. Few workers do.” Standard, strict, a workman’s progress led from: Apprentice (7-10 years, no marriage); Journeyman (day laborer); Master Craftsman (for which the applicant created and presented a final “masterpiece” to superiors). Theater not being recognized as a trade, Shakespeare nevertheless pursued a similar path, working first from others’ work, then collaborating with a senior practitioner, and finally, after a quiescent period, in 1595, offered as his “masterpiece” what Swift terms “twins in diptych”: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, each drawn from old stories told in opposite ways.
Swift adds names and personalities and physiques of numerous actual performers, for whom parts were written, stressing the important friendship/working connection between Shakespeare and Richard Burbage (son of James and a noted actor, the first Romeo, as well as debuting Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear). Many other roles were tailored to specific players whose names have appeared in other sources, but here Swift draws them into the narrative in such a fashion as to bring them alive in the reader’s mind’s eye.
“Textual history is such dry stuff until it lets us catch Shakespeare at work; writing, arranging, dreaming,” Swift writes, and his own language, while engaging and entertaining, remains grounded in meticulously researched historical material, proving it’s possible to both enlighten and entertain. The author offers legal, economic, social, psychological insights into a world more influential in our own times than I’d ever considered. I’m currently somewhere on the Late-to-the-Game-Apprentice level, piqued to learn more.
