Daniel Swift, associate professor of English at Northeastern University in London, looks at Shakespeare’s experience at the theater in his book “The Dream Factory.”
LONDON — More than a million Shakespeare fans and tourists flock to The Globe theater every year to sample a taste of what it would have been like to see a play as the bard intended.
The rounded Tudor Revival building by the River Thames is a replica of the famous 17th-century London theater where many of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, from “Othello” to “Macbeth,” were first performed.
But, as Northeastern University’s Daniel Swift points out in a new book, there was a forerunner to The Globe — a place where he argues Shakespeare served his own form of apprenticeship.
In “The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare,” the associate professor of English notes that Shakespeare was 35 by the time The Globe opened in 1599 — he was two-thirds of the way through his life and already a famous playwright and poet.
His career had started elsewhere, at The Theatre, London’s first purpose-built commercial playhouse. It was there where he would go from working as a theater errand boy to writing celebrated works such as “Romeo and Juliet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“In his years there,” Swift writes in his introduction to the 289-page book, “the young Shakespeare was inexperienced, experimental and uncertain. The Theatre was Shakespeare’s workshop. Here he was apprenticed to older masters and learned his craft.”
“The Dream Factory,” due to be published in the U.K. by Yale University Press on April 22 and in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2026, is the result of five years of research into the businessmen, tradespeople and characters who surrounded Shakespeare during his time at The Theatre, the open air playhouse that functioned between 1576 and 1598.
Swift dug through legal documents held at the U.K.’s National Archives and The London Archives that arose out of the playhouse’s many litigious battles, and through records held by livery companies — professional associations that regulated skilled trades in London during the medieval period and beyond.
By putting Shakespeare, who lived from 1564 to 1616 and wrote 38 plays, back into his original workplace setting and rediscovering these forgotten tradesmen of Elizabethan London, Swift believes it is possible to learn more about his esteemed productions.
“We now celebrate and love Shakespeare’s plays,” the author tells Northeastern Global News, “but we pay little attention to the carpenter who built the stage on which those plays were first performed or the person who made the costumes.
“By placing Shakespeare back in that context of working men, of people working for money — jobs, trades, lives, professions — we can maybe see something a bit new about Shakespeare, which is that Shakespeare was not this poet who was floating above the daily world. He was embroiled in this world of people who were working and trying to make money. And that might tell us something about him and it might tell us something about the plays.”
The Theatre in Shoreditch was built by James Burbage, a former actor, on the site of a dissolved monastery outside the city of London, the capital’s financial center. Previously, plays and performances had been staged at inns, halls or outdoor amphitheaters but Burbage’s playhouse was the first building where its sole purpose was to charge an audience to watch a play, Swift explains.
Interest in the playhouse’s origins was revived when its foundations were unearthed in 2008 during the regeneration of east London. Having previously written a book about Shakespeare, one of the main inspirations Swift had for delving into The Theatre’s history and the English playwright’s early years spent there was to explore how creatives can make money from their work, both in the Elizabethan and the modern era.
Shakespeare, Swift says, was looking to become a playwright in an “uncertain and unsettled world,” with playhouses regularly shut down due to the threat of plague outbreaks — a crisis today’s artists are familiar with after living through the disruption of COVID-19. His chosen career would not have been a well-trodden path to riches.
Around the age of 18, Shakespeare, son of a glove-maker, would leave his Midlands home and move to London in search of better paid work. Shakespeare found himself working at The Theatre as a “hired man,” says Swift. He may have been helping with the stage props one day and playing a small acting role the next.
Surrounding him at the theater were apprentices from a wide range of trades. It would have been “extremely common” for men of Shakespeare’s social class and background to have served an apprenticeship, Swift says, adding that three-quarters of young men working in London at the time would have been enrolled in similar programs.
In what the academic describes as a “grueling system,” apprentices would have lived and worked with a master of their trade for seven years, training without pay. Swift, who teaches on Northeastern’s London campus, argues that while Shakespeare did not embark on a formal apprenticeship like some of his peers, the training he undertook was in a similar vein.
“What I suggest is that we might understand Shakespeare’s years of learning as a kind of apprenticeship,” Swift goes on. “And the reason why I think that is worth emphasizing is because it gets us away from an idea about Shakespeare as a sort of ‘genius poet.’ And I think it usefully, to my mind, gives us another idea, which is that Shakespeare is somebody who approaches playwriting as a trade or profession.”
Shakespeare graduated from an odd-jobs man to being part of a writing team, collaboratively putting plays together in much the same way as today’s blockbuster Hollywood film scripts are worked on by multiple writers. “He was young and writing with more successful older people,” Swift says. “And I’d argue that in doing that, he was learning from his superiors — he was learning from the masters of the trade.
“Shakespeare’s early plays are collaborative, co-written and often he only writes quite small amounts of them,” the researcher continues. “But as he gets better and better, as his career develops, as he moves through his apprenticeship and becomes a master of the trade, he starts writing his own plays.”
In the plays that Shakespeare wrote during his time at The Theatre, Swift says there are regular references to artists having to ply their trade for money — something that was likely firmly on the mind of the playwright, who was married with a family, while in the early stages of his career.
Swift’s position is that to disconnect Shakespeare from his day-to-day grind as a worker in a creative industry is to ignore what gave him his drive. “The plays are something which gave meaning to his life but they also were part of his job and gave him an income,” he says. “And I think that people have maybe underestimated that.”
In a show of business nous, Shakespeare would go on to buy a share in the company of actors, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later renamed The King’s Men), who he worked with. Swift says that decision meant that long after he had sold a play, Shakespeare continued to make money from performance ticket sales, giving him a “solid financial standing” for his career.
After a row over the lease, the Burbages would dismantle The Theatre and use the timbers to build The Globe on Bankside, leaving just the foundations of the Shoreditch site that were uncovered again more than 400 years later. Today, its foundations sit preserved beneath a property agent’s office and a clothing designer’s workshop.
Shakespeare and his company moved to The Globe where they put on some of the Bard of Avon’s most revered works. But as Swift puts forward, those plays may not have been written without Shakespeare’s training at a theatre 1.5 miles northeast of that famous stage.
“The Globe in a way is the sequel to The Theatre,” he says. “If you look at The Theatre, I think you see a different story; a Shakespeare who is less certain, less successful, less settled — less inevitable, in a way.”