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? 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 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 time, to 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

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