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What happened in Shakespeare's "lost years"?
00:37:42
Daniel Swift discusses Shakespeare's arrival on the London theatre scene as a young man, and reconstructs the story of a long-lost Shoreditch playhouse
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- [00:02]
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- [02:03]
Ellie Cawthorn
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine Today. Shakespeare is a towering figure of global theatre, but in the 1590s he was just an up and coming young playwright trying to scratch out a living in Shoreditch's emerging theatre scene. Daniel Swift revisits this early stage of the Bard's career in his new book the Dream Factory, linking it with the story of a long lost Shoreditch Playhouse simply called the Theatre. I spoke to Daniel to find out more about how Shakespeare may have been inspired by a terrible play called Hamlet and what it would have been like to see one of his original productions in your book the Dream Factory you say that the Globe is Shakespeare's famous playhouse, but before it, there was another. So what was this playhouse? And why are we sat here talking about it today?
- [03:05]
Daniel Swift
Thank you, Ellie, and thank you for having me. My sort of beginning for this book was by thinking about where Shakespeare came from. And it seems to me that we have now, for very good reasons, a kind of extremely high sense of Shakespeare's value, his worth, his importance and so on. And that's a wonderful thing. And I'm not for a moment denying Shakespeare's greatness, his genius, the extraordinary work he did. But it seems to me, and it's an obvious point, and it's one that Shakespeare touches on in his plays, which is that nothing comes from nothing. Everybody has to come from somewhere. And what I became interested in when I was first thinking about this project was how did he become the person who we celebrate now? How did he become this confident, assured, settled writer? And I should say that part of my initial thinking about that is also a reflection on our own times, a kind of point of worry that we have now, which is that it's virtually impossible to make a living in being a playwright, being a poet, being a novelist in the arts. And as I read about kind of early Shakespeare, it amused me and interested me that that was true also of Shakespeare's time, too, that when Shakespeare sets out as a playwright, it's an extremely unlikely way to make a living. It was a kind of chancey, disreputable trade to go into. So I became interested in that idea of origins themselves, where things come from. And you mentioned the Globe Theatre, which is, again, for me, an extraordinary kind of symbol of Shakespeare's success and his security and his stability. But Shakespeare doesn't move to the Globe. The Globe isn't constructed until Shakespeare's 35 years old and a long way into his career. So I'm interested in everything that came before that and how he got to that point.
- [04:47]
Ellie Cawthorn
And in the book, you have this young Shakespeare that we meet arriving onto the scene, but his story is interwoven with that of this playhouse, slightly confusingly, just called the Theatre. Can we talk about the theatre first before we kind of return to Shakespeare? So what do we know about when it was built and some of the circumstances that surrounded its creation?
- [05:08]
Daniel Swift
I love that it was called the Theatre. I mean, it gets me into a tangle when writing or talking about it, because it's not clear if we're referring to a specific building or to the art form much more generally. And I think that slight tells us Something about the very early days of this in that when in 1576, a man called James Burbage decided to build a playhouse in the northeastern suburbs of London, there wasn't really such a thing in England. Performances had taken place for a long time. There's a long history of playing in this country and across Europe. But they tended to take place in the yards of inns, perhaps, or in converted buildings that were very often temporary. And what James Burbage decided to do was build something that was specifically designed for a single purpose. And that single purpose was to charge people money to go and see a play. That was its entire function. So it has a kind of business logic to it. James Burbidge is an interesting, colourful figure. He was trained as a joiner and he abandoned his trade of being a joiner and became a sort of travelling player, really linked to one of the big aristocratic companies in 1560s England. And after a certain amount of time, I think what he realised as a very pragmatic point, which is that you can't make that much money as a travelling player, that what you need is a purpose built playhouse, ideally, that you yourself can control. So in the mid-1570s, he leased a bit of land just outside the city wall, so in Shoreditch, very near Old street roundabout. Now, it wasn't Old street roundabout then, and brought on board a whole team of carpenters and bricklayers and various kinds of craftsmen that he knew, including, I make the argument his brother was a key figure in this. His brother was a carpenter and they built this structure itself. And it seemed to me that by focusing at least the beginnings of the story on the questions of literally how this thing was constructed, we begin to get into then thinking in a slightly different way about, again, the question of where Shakespeare comes from. And I certainly want to make the argument that Shakespeare is allied with, and his work is very similar to, in many ways, the work of people like carpenters or bricklayers or the person who paints the playhouse itself. Those kinds of work and labour also really important to creating the conditions which will allow Shakespeare to write the extraordinary plays that he does.
- [07:25]
Ellie Cawthorn
That's a really intriguing comparison, comparing Shakespeare's work to that of bricklayers or carpenters. I wonder if you could just unpick that a bit for us.
- [07:32]
Daniel Swift
Absolutely. There are several different ways to think about this as a kind of analogy, but the big one for me is around the idea of an apprenticeship. And apprenticeship is a term that we still use now, and we use it to mean something a little bit Vague, often someone who learns a job while actually working in that job. And there's a long, actually interesting history to apprenticeships. But in 16th century England, in Elizabethan England, the apprenticeship system was a hugely, hugely important one and it dominated the way in which young men, and it's almost always men, women, are not barred from apprenticeships, but it's almost always men who do them. It's how they enter the world of work. An apprenticeship is a long period of training. So the standard length for an apprenticeship in 16th century England is seven years. And that's even longer when I tell you that the average lifespan is about 32 or 33 years. So it's a really, really long time. And I wanted to make the argument, which is that the majority of young men of Shakespeare's social class, of his background, do these apprenticeships, so they apprentice as various different sorts of things. Shakespeare didn't ever do a formal apprenticeship. That's in part because he married very young and people who were married were barred from apprenticeships. But what I wanted to suggest was that perhaps this is a kind of idea at the back of Shakespeare's mind, at the back of everyone else's mind, that just as one would if you wanted to be a carpenter or a joiner or a bricklayer or a fishmonger or a weaver, you would do this seven year process of training. So too did Shakespeare approach this very different kind of trade, that of playwriting, of being a professional author, around a kind of idea of training, learning from your masters, learning from older people and working closely with a company of others. I wanted to emphasize the relationship between those, in part because I think it tells us something about Shakespeare and in part because, as I say, it's such a dominant idea of Shakespeare's England.
- [09:30]
Ellie Cawthorn
But do we have much source material that tells us about how Shakespeare went from, you know, the son of a glover who was married, living in Stratford on Avon, to this man at the centre of the theatrical scene in London. Do we know much about that transition?
- [09:47]
Daniel Swift
Yes and no. And almost every question to do with Shakespeare involves the answer yes and no. It drives my students insane. That's always the answer I give. What we have is we have a very long and colourful biographical history of curious anecdotes about Shakespeare that people have picked up from all sorts of strange places. And it wasn't until about 50 or 60 years after Shakespeare's death that people began assembling kind of biographical information about him. But there are sort of clues in there about the things that he might have done so that's one way that begins. There's a great story about young Shakespeare. When he first arrived in London. His first job was holding the horses at the playhouse door. I don't know if that's true or not. That story dates from the early 18th century. It's long after Shakespeare died. But it seems to me as a story to usefully illustrate something or usefully fill in a kind of gap, which is that how on earth did young Shakespeare first start working in the playhouses? He was, as you say, the son of a glover. So we have those kinds of traces and records. We have a second set of records which are a great kind of growing field in Shakespeare studies of the past 25 years, which is about co authorship. What's become increasingly obvious to serious textual scholars of Shakespeare of the past quarter century is that Shakespeare, unusually even for playwrights of his time, was a highly collaborative writer. And that as an insight, seems an obvious one. It's how Hollywood movies or TV shows are written. Now, a team of writers write these things. It's not just individual authors. But it pushes back against an idea that I think we all still have, which is that Shakespeare is this solitary, unique genius who worked on his own in his garret and never let anyone else see anything. That picture of Shakespeare is fading to be replaced by a kind of collaborative Shakespeare. And that idea of collaboration, of writing with others, and particularly early in Shakespeare's career of writing with more settled, more successful playwrights, seems to me to bring us back to this idea of what do you do if you're a young carpenter, you go and find a master carpenter and you apprentice yourself to them, you bind yourself to them so that you can learn the trade from them.
- [11:49]
Ellie Cawthorn
So when can we first place this young Shakespeare at this Shoreditch Playhouse, the theatre?
- [11:56]
Daniel Swift
That's a great question. We have to sort of work backwards. And for a long time, Shakespeare's biographers and people who studied Shakespeare have been vexed by this period of his life they call the lost years, which is a relatively undocumented period of his life in the late 1580s. So he has children in Stratford, he has a daughter and then twins, a son and a daughter who are born in February 1585. So I think we can assume that Shakespeare is in Stratford with his wife then. And then Shakespeare more or less vanishes from the records until the very early 1590s. And in about 1592, Shakespeare is mentioned as the kind of upcoming playwright of the London scene. He's actually, there's something written about him which is very mean about him. But it seems to me actually, like any writer will tell you, a negative review is as much proof of your status as a positive review, because it's a sign that he's actually made something. What I want to do is work backwards from 1592 and think, okay, by 1592, he's a sufficiently noted playwright to be worth attacking in print. Textual scholars go round and round and round with the dating of Shakespeare's plays. There will never, I think, be an absolutely secure chronology of what he wrote when. But there's kind of growing consensus that by about 1588, we have Shakespeare in London collaborating again with older authors, with older playwrights on those plays. So those are the kind of breadcrumb trail I'm trying to work with, to put together. And again, the various different kind of biographical gossip and rumors I've suggested. Place him in Shoreditch in this moment. Place him in Shoreditch in the late 1580s. And it's worth mentioning that as well as direct records, there's another set of records which I could draw on, which is kind of what everyone else did. And parallel to my story of Shakespeare is also the story of the neighbourhood of that district of London itself. And Shoreditch is exactly where you would settle if you'd arrived in London in order to pursue your trade. In particular, to pursue your trade in writing for the theatre industry that's growing in that moment. It's where playwrights, it's where actors, it's where people involved in the theatre business did settle. So I don't have an exact street address for Shakespeare in this period, but I certainly have, I think, enough information to place him there.
- [14:10]
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- [14:41]
Daniel Swift
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- [15:21]
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- [15:22]
Daniel Swift
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- [15:24]
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- [15:29]
Ellie Cawthorn
You could have really added to somebody in Shoreditch's property value if you had. But on that note of what other people were up to, I'm also intrigued by what was going on at the theatre that wasn't by Shakespeare. What other work do we know was put on there? Was it any good? And, you know, was Shakespeare drawing on this work or was he doing something totally different?
- [15:48]
Daniel Swift
It's a great question, and I'm always tempted to give a kind of facetious answer, which is that, oh, it was all terrible, right? There were these terrible plays. The Shakespeare comes along, what a relief. And he's writing brilliant plays. I don't know if that's true for several different reasons. In part because a play, as it looks on the page to us now, is very different from a play that we see on stage. So we've all had that experience reading a kind of terrible play, and suddenly you go and see it in a theatre with brilliant actors. And it's an extraordinary thing. There are two things I can mention that would have been on stage when Shakespeare arrives in London, if you will grant me my speculation that he arrives in London in the mid to late 1580s. So the first thing that's on stage at the theatre, and we know about this certainly, are dramas which have a kind of moral agenda to them, really. So they are dramas which are supposed to be instructive and very often teach quite simple lessons. Greed is bad, for example. It's a lesson that might be worked out over the course of a play. And those plays are still being staged because where English drama emerges from is a long, long history of church drama and morally instructive drama. And people are still writing those things. Now. It's worth saying that Shakespeare does the absolute opposite to that, right? What Shakespeare will do is kind of throw away the idea that a play should teach a moral lesson. But those plays are still there, and there are absolutely examples of Shakespeare drawing characters and scenes and phrases from them. He's seeing these plays and he's thinking about them, and he's thinking, what can I do better? So that's one set of plays that he's seeing and that are taking place. The other thing that he's seeing are the plays by a company called the Queensmen. And the Queen's Men are a company of players who are sponsored, as their name suggests, by the Queen. And they are the biggest and most successful company of players in the country, partly because they have royal support. And what the Queen's Men do are really big plays. And they're big in every way. They have huge casts, they have huge stories, They're a little bit melodramatic and over the top. To our modern eyes, they're very often highly nationalistic plays. And Shakespeare is watching these plays also. And what's interesting to me is, again, these plays, I think, to our modern eyes, look terrible. That's in part because our modern eyes have been taught by Shakespeare what to value in a play. But Shakespeare, throughout his career, goes back to those Queen's Men plays and rewrites them as his own. And one of the strange kind of ironies about Shakespeare is that we think of him as this extraordinary, innovative figure, and then you start looking at the sources that he's working from. So the Queen's Men, for example, have a play about Henry V, which Shakespeare rewrites as his own Henry V. The Queen's Men have a play about King Lear, slightly different spelling, but the same character that Shakespeare rewrites as his own King Lear. So Shakespeare is returning to these old dependable, successful, slightly stodgy plays and cutting them, making them quicker, making them funnier, making them kind of less nationalistic, making them less moral, sort of turning them inside, inside out. But again, to return to my kind of guiding analogy, really, is that is Shakespeare a bit like a craftsman? I think what we see Shakespeare doing with these old plays is working on raw materials that someone else has provided. They're the leather that he's making the gloves from, they're the timber that he's making the new playhouse from. So he's drawing on these old materials and turning them into something extraordinary, but still with a kind of wink back to the past.
- [19:09]
Ellie Cawthorn
Yeah. So again, it's this idea that he's not squirreled away in some remote attic somewhere doing his thing. He's very much embedded in a wider culture. Do we know, though, about which of Shakespeare's plays were staged at the theatre?
- [19:22]
Daniel Swift
We do. And in part, we know this because of an amazing amount of kind of brilliant historical research done by lots of previous historians of Shakespeare. So some of it is a little bit speculative, right. And some of it is, you know, Sherlock Holmes type deduction in that we know which playhouses are open at which moments and we know which plays were being performed at certain moments and we know which companies were in certain places. It's worth emphasising that the idea of a play being something that was printed doesn't come for quite a long time after this. And actually it's printed plays that very often give us useful information. But lots of the stuff I'm working on is before they print plays. And you don't print plays for a really good reason, which is if you print a play, somebody else can steal it and go and perform it at their own playhouse. So you keep your plays out of print as much as possible. You keep that kind of trade secret. The script itself is very valuable. So we have those sorts of evidence. My favourite example of this is something which has constantly kind of vexed literary historians, which is that there's a great account of a really terrible play called Hamlet being performed at the Theatre long, long 15 years before Shakespeare writes the play that we know as Hamlet. The text itself doesn't survive, but there are a few accounts of it that it features a ghost and there are a few people quote the scenes. But everyone, it seems to me, who quotes from it is having a laugh at it because it's terrible. The old Hamlet is terrible. So we know that's there. And I love that as an idea. You know, some people speculate, did very young Shakespeare write Hamlet and then he rewrote it later? I don't think that's necessarily the case, but is actually maybe a better story and a truer one is that we have young Shakespeare turning up, going to the theatre, seeing a play called Hamlet. It's terrible. He's thinking, actually, there's something good in that. There's something I can come back to.
- [21:03]
Ellie Cawthorn
In that I could do better.
- [21:05]
Daniel Swift
Yeah, exactly. And that I love as an idea. Because it's an idea, again, about kind of craftsmanship. But it's also an idea about somebody seeing their opportunity. This is a digression, but I think a great deal about Bob Dylan in the light of this. Right. Bob Dylan's career emerges from taking the old folk songs, the old kind of standards, and turning them inside out and making them his own. And Shakespeare's going electric at a certain moment, right. Shakespeare's doing a similar kind of thing.
- [21:28]
Ellie Cawthorn
Someone else I wanted to ask you about alongside Shakespeare is one of the Burbage family. You've mentioned them before. But Richard Burbage. So can you tell us about him and his connection to Shakespeare?
- [21:39]
Daniel Swift
Yes, absolutely. So James Burbage, I mentioned, is the man who kind of builds, founds the theatre itself. He has two sons, actually. I would love to also talk about his other son, who is my favourite of the sons of. But the younger son, Richard Burbidge, is clearly from when he's a teenager, an extraordinary and brilliant actor. And we have accounts of his acting style and people found it breathtaking. I think if we were to see him acting today, we'd find it a little bit overblown.
- [22:04]
Ellie Cawthorn
I was going to ask what made a good actor in that period.
- [22:07]
Daniel Swift
It's a really good question. So there are two kind of great actors at this moment, Richard Burbage and another actor called Alain. And there are also accounts of Alain. And Alain had a kind of big, loud style. He used to wave his arms a lot. He had a big voice, and that was considered great for certain kinds of plays. Richard Burbage had what it seems to be a slightly different set of skills. And there are accounts of his acting which always refer to him as this kind of shape shifter. He had this quality that he could fully and wholly inhabit a part. And what people seem to have thought was really sinister is that he kind of went on inhabiting it. He was a kind of early method actor. Right. He's like Daniel Day Lewis, one of the people who don't leave character. What I've had some fun with is actually their accounts in the legal records that I draw from in the book, which are accounts of what Richard Burbage was like not when he's on stage, but what he's like in normal life. And he was clearly this extraordinary kind of charismatic figure who was. It's one quality that people refer to quite often. You never knew at any moment whether he was suddenly going to turn to extreme violence or make a joke. And it was slightly threatening and it was sort of some part of his extreme control was that everybody around him, even when he's not on stage, is constantly a little bit nervous about what he's going to do next. The kind of crucial thing to know about Richard Burbage is that from, say, the early 1590s, Shakespeare starts writing characters for him. And Richard Burbage is the first Hamlet, he's the first Romeo, he's the first Richard iii, he's the first Othello, he's the first Lear. And Shakespeare is writing those plays for him because he knows Shakespeare knows that he has an actor of sufficient skill and capacity and kind of r richness that he can write these extraordinary parts. And that's incredibly unusual. And there's a reason why Shakespeare keeps on working with him, that the two men work together throughout their careers, Because Shakespeare, I think, really depends upon Richard Burbage, just as Burbage is depending upon Shakespeare to write these extraordinary roles for him. Again, collaboration, co working people working together. There are endless modern analogies of film directors who go back to the same actors again and again because they know what those actors can do. They can rely on them. They can anticipate certain stories that can be crafted around them. Shakespeare's doing exactly the same thing with Richard Burbage.
- [24:26]
Ellie Cawthorn
You mentioned earlier Richard's brother and why you wanted to bring him in. What does he add to this story?
- [24:32]
Daniel Swift
So Cuthbert Burbage was Richard's older brother, a couple of years older than him. And what he adds to the story, to my mind, is everything in that what Cuthbert Burbage represents from very, very early on in Shakespeare's career is not the Burbage brother, who is the great actor, but the other Burbage brother, who is the great businessman, who is a man who is a genius with money, with lawsuits, with litigation, with contracts, with deals, with mortgages. Now that sounds very dry. We might think, who cares about the money side of things? It's all about the exciting art. Tell me more about Hamlet or Romeo. I actually think we're looking at the wrong thing if we only look at the kind of acting brother. And I think what Cuthbert Burbage provides for Shakespeare throughout the whole of his career is the possibility of a kind of financial security and stability. Now that financial security and stability is achieved through the most extraordinarily bad behavior. And that's the other thing that Cuthbert does, is he's a great businessman because he is an unbelievable thug and manipulator. He happily lies when he needs to. He is a figure who is so profoundly interested in making deals that benefit him because he's not an actor, because he's involved with money and contracts, he's slightly in the shadows. But actually, if we look at the whole of the story of the theatre and early Shakespeare, not from the perspective necessarily of Shakespeare's great plays, as this automatically assumed thing, but actually how we got them, then Shakespeare suddenly seems much more to depend upon these kind of tricks, these kind of commercial business tricks, which is what Cuthbert is providing.
- [26:11]
Ellie Cawthorn
You've painted this great picture of the theatre as this kind of holistic beast. You know, it's got Businessmen running it, it's got carpenters building it, it's got the actors performing, it's got Shakespeare behind the scenes. If me and you were to go to Shoreditch at this time to see a play, what would that experience have been like? I mean, people might be familiar with the Globe. Would it have felt similar to that or was there quite a different vibe?
- [26:36]
Daniel Swift
It would have felt similar in many ways. So that the modern day Globe that we have now, that you can go to and that I take my students to see plays at is a pretty good replica of the building itself. There's a certain amount of health and safety stuff that's changed, but in many ways it gives us a good sense of it. And what I think it really usefully does is it gives us a sense of what it is to stand. I think it's crucial if you go to the Globe to stand rather than to sit and kind of immerse yourself in that way in the experience itself. Would it have been different to go to the theater than to go to the Globe today? Yes, because it would have been a whole lot riskier. And I mean that in several different ways. You know, there are worries certainly that you're going to get your pocket picked or you're going to get mugged, or you're going to get seduced by somebody. Right. There's all sorts of potentially bad behaviour that can take place at the theatre. And that's because of where it is. In part, the neighbourhood is a bit less reputable than the other areas of London. A bit less kind of supervised, I suppose. So a trip to the theatre might have been a kind of. A slightly more, I suppose, fun, but a slightly more risky kind of experience. Perhaps an analogy is more like going to a rave, something like that today, rather than going and seeing a Shakespeare play put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company. So there's that element of change. What we would have seen when we got there. Well, it would have been daylight for a start, which I think is a small and obvious point, but it changes almost everything. Right. The opening scene of Hamlet, the characters on stage, the opening scene of Hamlet keep on telling us it's dark. And the reason they have to keep on telling us it's dark is because if we're seeing Hamlet in its original staging, it's broad daylight, it's the middle of the afternoon. So the play itself would have begun at perhaps three o' clock, but before the play began there would have been kind of warm up entertainments, jugglers, dancers, acrobats, that kind of thing. And we would have seen the play itself and at the end. And the Globe does this, actually, it would have ended with a dance, with a jig. So there's a much more. It's a much more vibrant kind of experience. It's a much more lively kind of experience, and it's a much less sort of August, austere experience. You know, I love going to the theatre very much, but I think that the experience we have now, if we go and pay, you know, Othello on Broadway at the moment in New York, the ticket prices are $1,000 or whatever, that's not what the experience would have been at all in Shakespeare's time. And that matters because it means there's a really different kind of audience who were there. So the art form is designed for not necessarily people who have an enormous amount of money by any means. And it's perhaps even designed for people who want a bit of an adventure alongside the experience of going to the play.
- [29:04]
Ellie Cawthorn
Does anything remain, any traces remain of the theatre today?
- [29:08]
Daniel Swift
Yes, they do. And what's partly sort of interesting about this story is actually the foundations which still remain were only discovered in 2008, something like that. So it's a relatively recent sort of discovery that there is something that's left there. And what's left there is the brick foundations themselves. Shoreditch, as the name suggests, is wet, marshy neighbourhood. So it's got quite good foundations to lift the whole of the playhouse up out of the mud, out of the marsh. The timbers themselves and the playhouse would have been made of timbers are no longer there, because it's the end of my story. Those timbers were torn down from the theatre and taken across the river and used to build the Globe. So the Globe is quite literally the sequel to the theatre itself. Actually, those original timbers then subsequently burned down. So we don't still have those actual timbers themselves, but the first Globe was built from the actual structure of the theatre itself. And I like that as an idea very much. I mean, there are long, tangled reasons why they had to move the building, which seems an extraordinary thing to do. But it seems to me to gesture back to something that's really lovely, which is that. Sure, James Burbage's great original dream was to build this kind of permanent playhouse that was a solid building that itself had a place in the world. But it still gestures back to the idea of playing and theatre as this kind of transient art form, I suppose something that the building itself can quite literally be moved, can be torn down and Taken somewhere else. It's very often said, what's one of the definitions of great art is something which is timeless or permanent. I don't think that's true of theatre. If you think of an extraordinary theatrical performance, black ballet by definition does not survive. So there's something deep within this, even this building which is attempting to be permanent and is a solid thing in the world. There's also an idea about transience and change and movement and that, you know, it's a nicely Shakespearean idea. Right.
- [30:59]
Ellie Cawthorn
And do you think it's that ephemeral nature of this that can be blamed for why the theatre's been forgotten?
- [31:06]
Daniel Swift
Perhaps?
- [31:06]
Ellie Cawthorn
Or is it this idea that it has been eclipsed by the Globe?
- [31:10]
Daniel Swift
I think in part it's been eclipsed by the Globe is the sort of simple version of this, which is that the Globe is a celebration. And even that name, the Globe is so confident, right. It's of all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players. There's an idea about a sort of established art form which is even revealed in that name itself. Whereas the theatre is a slightly sort of less self confident name for something. So it suggests something which is perhaps not quite sure of its place in the world quite yet. So I think that's the main reason, I think the other reason, and this sounds silly, but Shakespeare looks different and Shakespeare's time looks different. It's true of all of history. It's one of the great recurring themes of your podcast. History looks different depending on where you are in the moment when you're looking at it. So my vision of Shakespeare and my vision of the theatre and the importance of the theatre is also a vision from this moment right now. I began writing this book during a pandemic and so I was very aware that pandemics, outbreaks of the plague were something which endlessly kind of shut down the theatre. And actually it was one of the major reasons why a permanent playhouse was a terrible business idea, because it was constantly being shut down by outbreaks of the plague. So I was kind of aware of that. And what all of that has meant is that I think for a long time this chancey sort of ephemeral story didn't really match up with the story of the Shakespeare we wanted, right. At certain moments in British history, we've wanted to look back at our past and find things which were secur and glorious and wonderful and settled and uncomplicated. And Shakespeare's long provided that for us. I think maybe at this particular moment, we're actually reflecting in a slightly different way on our own history. And therefore, the things that we see in the past look a bit different because they chime a bit differently with our present moment.
- [33:01]
Ellie Cawthorn
And finally, Daniel, to end on a bit of a light note, if you could head to Shoreditch, jump in a time machine conveniently placed there, and go back to the theatre in its heyday, what performance would you really want to see most?
- [33:16]
Daniel Swift
I would love to have seen Romeo and Juliet. I mean, it's a kind of obvious point, but it seems to me such an extraordinary play, first of all, and also to see it in the original place it was written to be performed. What I became kind of moved by in the book was the extent to which Romeo and Juliet is deeply a play that's about certain times of day. That sounds an obvious point, but it's a play which very famously talks about dawn, and it talks about certain kind of moments in the day, partly because the amount of time these two young lovers have is so brief. It's a moment that they have together. And I suppose it would very much please the kind of deep romantic in me to think about that moment as taking place in a very certain specific moment in a particular place. Romeo and Juliet from the opening line onwards tells us that it's taking place in Italy. It's not London at all, they say again and again. In fair Verona we lay our scene. But it was a play that was written to be performed in this particular location during a day. During a particular day, probably in the summer. And I think there would have been an extraordinary sense in that play of both the kind of wonder of the words, the extraordinary poetry of the words, but also the incredible fragility. Everything in Romeo and Juliet is just about to be taken away from them. And that's what I think might have been conjured in an amazing way if you were to see the first performance of Romeo and Juliet rather than, as is also a wonderful thing, seeing the 10 millionth performance of it. And we know there are going to be 10 million more.
- [34:50]
Ellie Cawthorn
That was Daniel Swift speaking to me. Ellie Cawthorn. Daniel is Associate professor in English at Northeastern University, London, and his book on this subject is called the Dream Factory, London's First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.
- [35:17]
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