‘The Dream Factory’ Review: A Building and Its Bard

For admirers who like their Bard semidivine, it’s unappealing to think of him amid these grubby realities. In “The Dream Factory,” Daniel Swift takes a different view. To Mr. Swift, the new understanding of Shakespeare’s practical entanglements has been “one of the most exciting insights into his work of the past two decades.” Mr. Swift, an associate professor of English at Northeastern University London, has written a book that investigates certain aspects of what he calls Shakespeare’s “commonness,” the qualities that make him not “a minor deity but a laboring writer.” Amid the fresh scholarship of recent years—the microanalysis of quill strokes, the algorithmic scrutiny of syntax—Mr. Swift’s contribution, and it’s a valuable one, is to tell the story of a building.

“The Dream Factory” traces the slow rise and quick fall of the Theatre, London’s first purpose-built commercial playhouse. When its timbers rose in 1576, the chances of world-historical literary achievements happening there were remote. The structure—approximately circular, accommodating 1,000 or so spectators—was located in Shoreditch, a raw, raffish suburb northeast of London known primarily as a haven for rascals, beggars, immigrants and what Mr. Swift describes as “the smellier occupations.” Still, he contends, this would prove to be the classroom and first laboratory of the world’s greatest playwright.

The Theatre’s programming, like its name (a self-consciously fancy alternative to the more common “playhouse”) and its fragrant locale, were selected by James Burbage. His background as an actor and craftsman gave him practical experience, one of the qualities that prepared him for life as a producer. Others included shamelessness, stubbornness and an elastic approach to bookkeeping. But the vital factor in his success was having a rich and credulous brother-in-law. Enthralled by Burbage’s big talk, John Brayne sold his house, let his business slide and coughed up the money needed to begin construction amid the ruins of a medieval priory.

Mr. Swift’s bemused account of the Burbage-Brayne partnership is one of several aspects of the book that erase the distance between 16th-century Shoreditch and 21st-century Broadway. The conniving producers, stagestruck backers, formidable labor organizations and long hours in grim conditions show that Shakespeare really is our contemporary.

As with the theater, so with the age: Burbage was only doing what everyone else in that profit-mad era was doing. John Maynard Keynes has called it the cradle of modern capitalism. Not coincidentally, the era was also passionately and inexhaustibly litigious. Some of the richest material in Mr. Swift’s story—which he calls “a love song of litigation and art”—comes from the court documents generated when Burbage, Brayne and their associates sued and countersued each other over the Theatre’s profits or, more frequently, its lack thereof. Between recurrent bouts of plague and the even more dangerous shifts in court politics, the place was often just scraping by. But it helped to have a quality troupe to draw a crowd. In the 1580s, the Queen’s Men were widely acclaimed for putting an all-star company of England’s leading players on the Theatre’s stage. Today their chief distinction is the young man from Stratford who happened to be watching—and learning.

There’s a lot we don’t know about what Shakespeare was doing in the late 1580s, but by evoking the world in which he was doing it, Mr. Swift gives us new ways to understand him. Consider the mockery Shakespeare received from Robert Greene, a fellow playwright, who called him “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers.” We can see that Shakespeare really was an upstart compared to the Oxford and Cambridge wits, but also how he cobbled together a practical, hands-on education in Shoreditch. It makes you think of Eugene O’Neill, who said that he learned most of what he learned about the theater in his youthful days around his father’s company. (“I know more about a trap door than any son of a b— in the theater,” he liked to tell his directors.) As for other writers’ feathers (their plots, characters, styles), Mr. Swift leaves no doubt that plucking them was a deliberate strategy on Shakespeare’s part. Here the contemporary analog is Bob Dylan in his Greenwich Village days, showing an eerie ability to adopt other musicians’ sounds and then—the part of Shakespeare’s career that Greene didn’t live to see—making them transcendently his own.

On a December night in 1598, the Theatre died the way it had lived, in a legally dubious and highly entertaining escapade. Shakespeare and his colleagues in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men—the company that had become a fixture at the Theatre a few years earlier—exercised what they claimed was their contractual right to disassemble the structure and carry it away. (They waited until the landlord was out of town to do it.) The following spring, across the Thames, the theater would rise again in expanded form as the Globe. That’s where Shakespeare would write most of the plays that would elevate him to the status of an almost otherworldly genius. But after reading “The Dream Factory,” you might like him better when he still had his feet in the Shoreditch mire.

Mr. McCarter adapted and directed an audio version of “Hamlet” that had its world premiere at this year’s Tribeca Festival.