The Dream Factory: A Conversation With Daniel Swift

**Philip Rowe** (0:10)
Welcome to the History of European Theatre podcast, and thanks for joining me on this journey through millennia of theatrical history. Episode 183, The Dream Factory, A Conversation With Daniel Swift. Today's episode is the first in a short run of guest episodes to see us through the end of the English summer. And first up, it is Daniel Swift, author of The Dream Factory, London's First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare.
Given that title, I don't think Daniel's book needs any further introduction other than to say that I found it an absolutely fascinating read and I hope this episode gives you just a taster of Daniel's work and the research that he has undertaken. Daniel Swift is Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University, London, and has written books on Shakespeare, Ezra Pound and the poetry of the Second World War and articles for The New York Times, The New Statesman and The Spectator. I spoke to Daniel over a Zoom call from London. The basis for the tale that you extrapolate in the book is the various and many records of the legal disputes between the Burbages and various other parties. So perhaps a great place to start would be if you could give us a word about where those records are and really what it's like to feel and read those documents. Must be amazing.

**Daniel Swift** (1:31)
It certainly is amazing. Yes. And thank you. And thank you for having me on the show. What I've found is that the real excitement in research is the moment when you discover something, not only that's new to you or you hope to other people, but that you actually feel in some way like you are, it sounds a bit mystical, kind of in touch with history. And legal records, the legal records that I spent a long time dealing with, look on the surface like the driest possible documents that you can find. So the great majority of the records that I was working on are these legal documents produced around a series of cases that kind of engulfed the playhouse called The Theatre during the 1570s and 1580s on into the 1590s. And the majority of those are now in the National Archives, and some are in the London Archives, what used to be called the London Metropolitan Archives. And they are, they're unwieldy documents to deal with, firstly because they are mainly on kind of parchment rolls, and then you have to deal with the terrible handwriting. Luckily, what helped me a great deal is that many of these records, not all of them, but many were transcribed in the years just before the First World War, mostly by a great kind of antiquarian scholar called William Wallace, who was an absolute kind of mountain amongst scholarly figures of this period, and he transcribed, he was claimed a million words of documents. He transcribed an enormous number of the key documents.
The first level of their, I suppose, unwieldiness is a physical one, is actually dealing with these documents themselves, actually figuring out how to read them. But then even once you transcribe them or read them, you're faced with with documents that again look on first reading like they are repetitive, often very mundane, very, very legalistic. And what you have to do, what I found is you have to spend enough time with them to start looking for coincidences, to start looking for patterns. And the magic for a scholar is the moment where you find somebody speaking in 1577 and 1582, and you can catch their words now. And that's an extraordinary sort of moment that takes place. And the useful thing for legal documents, at least for my purposes, is that they are these great kind of vats of amber in which have been preserved these traces of long ago lives. And many other scholars have looked at the particular legal records surrounding the theatre before, but they've looked within them only for mentions which are directly relevant to Shakespeare himself.

**Philip Rowe** (4:09)
Of course, yeah.

**Daniel Swift** (4:10)
And I can come on in a minute to how Shakespeare feeds into this story. But actually what that means is an enormous amount of the other stuff which I was fascinated by has been disregarded. And the kind of the crucial thing that I became interested in was that was the sort of lives and the characters and personalities of these other people who Shakespeare worked alongside, who he knew extremely well. And the other thing that's worth saying about legal records that's fun is that the format of them is worth explaining, which is that a court would be begun in one of the big courts in Chancery, say, and then a witness would be summoned to depose to a clerk of the court, and they would speak out their responses to set questions, and those would be then transcribed by the clerks themselves. And what's fun for me and what became a kind of a game I amuse myself with was when you get several different testimonies or depositions about the same event. Because then what you get is a fair degree of reliability if several different people describe the same thing as happening, you can assume that really did happen. But you also get perspective, right? And then we're getting into the wonder of drama because you get several different people's perspective on the same event. And the point I make in the book and the point I'd like to sort of emphasize is that what we celebrate of the Elizabethan age is its wonderful literature. It was a highly literary age. It was also an extremely litigious age. And that's really useful, right? Because then we have these extraordinary accounts of people squabbling and fighting and suing one another. And in doing that, revealing themselves, which to me is what the great literary works do, is that they reveal characters across great stretches of time. Yeah.