From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Farah Kareem Cooper, the Folger Director.

We're living through a time of intense precarity for the arts, and for the performing arts in particular.

We're seeing audience preferences shift and revenue models

falter. It can seem impossible for theater artists to make a living. Perhaps this has always been the

case. A new book by Daniel Swift of Northeastern University London reminds us that the same was true in Shakespeare's Day.

His new book is The Dream Factory, London's First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare.

In it, Swift tells a story of the intertwined roles of art and commerce in early modern London.

He traces Shakespeare's early career in a city where commercial theater was only just getting

started.

We're making a living, writing plays, wasn't just far-fetched, it was practically unheard of.

But Shakespeare's success was made possible by the existence of a new purpose-built venue called simply the theater.

The theater represented an audacious bet by James Burbage, a fast-talking former actor.

Burbage imagined a playhouse that would mint money from audiences hungry for theater.

That bet more than paid off, the theater made bank and changed the course of culture.

Here's Daniel Swift in conversation with Barbara Bogave.

Daniel Swift, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you here.

Thank you very much. It's lovely to be here.

I've got to say, you begin this book with some really pretty down-to-earth talk about how working and making money are at the core of your story.

And that really drew me in because full disclosure, I always secretly wonder how novelists and playwrights

today can afford their calling. And I feel a little guilty about suspecting their trust fund babies

or something. So is the economics of being an artist a preoccupation of yours, too?

...