Shakespeare is the black box of the English language and English identity from his age to ours. Because American political culture is founded on words, Shakespeare is, as the academics say, inscribed there too. The world’s largest collection of Shakespeareana is not at Stratford-upon-Avon but in the Folger Shakespeare Library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. A similar imperial translation deposited Shakespeare at the foundations of modern India, where English is the common language. In the 1965 film Shakespeare Wallah, the Kendals, a family of strolling English players performing Shakespeare across India, are eclipsed by the rise of a Hindi-language film industry. By the early twenty-first century, Bollywood’s output included Vishal Bhardwaj’s trilogy, which Indianized Macbeth as Maqbool in the Mumbai underworld; Othello as Omkara, which moved the Moor from the Venetian court to a country village; and Hamlet as Haider, where something is rotten in the state of Kashmir.

When Shakespeare’s friend John Florio published the first Italian–English dictionary in 1598, he called it A World of Words. This is what Shakespeare created, and how we prefer him. The modern paradigm of Shakespeare as a generous genius is Tom Stoppard’s script for the 1998 movie Shakespeare in Love. At the time, Stoppard was in a relationship with Felicity Kendal, who had been both subject and performer in Shakespeare Wallah. Will’s world of warm wordplay is all-encompassing, but its foundations were in the material world of show business, where the circumstances of parentage and birth often remain obscure.

Florio’s translation of the Essais of Montaigne, published in 1603, was also the first in English. No Shakespeare play is more attuned to Montaigne’s suffering skepticism than Hamlet. Montaigne retreated to his tower to invent the essai as an “attempt” to get at the truth by, as Virginia Woolf put it, “talking of oneself.” Hamlet returns to a castle and performs Montaigne’s enquiries by talking to himself and us “trippingly on the tongue,” with the clarity and naturalness that he seeks from his traveling players. Yet Hamlet was performed before Florio’s translation appeared.

Nietzsche rightly called Shakespeare “Montaigne’s best reader,” but we do not know how and when Shakespeare read Montaigne. The Folgerpedia, the Fol­ger Library’s gateway to the Shakespeare labyrinth, says that Hamlet was first performed between 1599 and 1601. That is two to four years before Florio’s translation of the Essais was published. A short and corrupt “First Quarto” containing stage directions was printed in 1603, the year of Florio’s Montaigne, followed by the “true and perfect Coppie” that we call the Second Quarto (a.k.a. the “good quarto”) in 1604. We are forced to hypothesize how Montaigne’s best reader read him. Did Shakespeare read Montaigne in the French original? Did he read Florio’s own copy, which Florio, we can assume, would have annotated as he worked on his translations? Or did Shakespeare read Florio’s translations in draft, one by one? In which case, did Shakespeare tune up Florio’s language? Or was it the other way around?

In his introduction to Shakespeare’s Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays (2014), Stephen Greenblatt writes that Shakespeare had “some degree of acquaintance” with French culture and language but argues that “close attention to the allusions in The Tempest and elsewhere makes clear” that Shakespeare read Montaigne in Florio’s “handsome folio edition.” The Tempest was first performed in November 1611, so it is not hard to imagine Shakespeare reaching for his well-thumbed Florio translation of Montaigne’s “On Cannibals,” not least because he was now shuttling between London and Stratford and had The Winter’s Tale on the blocks. It is also reasonable to infer that Florio’s translation might have prompted the reference to “anthropophagi” in Othello, which was first performed in November 1604. And it is not unreasonable to speculate whether Cassio in Othello, a courtier on the fashionable Florentine model, might be modeled after Florio, the London-born humanist and son of Tuscan immigrants.

None of this explains how Montaigne got into Shakespeare’s hands and Hamlet’s head. No secondary document supports or disproves Greenblatt’s contention that Shakespeare knew some, or any, French. Centuries of French influence meant that Elizabethan English was full of French borrowings. A scene in Henry V (1599) between Princess Katherine of France and Alice her gentlewoman is largely in French—and Henry V is the only surviving Elizabethan play to have such a scene. But Elizabethan London was an international port. Shakespeare could have consulted a French speaker for this scene just as he could have consulted Florio the Italian speaker for Montaigne, and just as modern moviemakers consult historians for period color. There is little of French culture in that scene from Henry V, either. It is a lesson in English culture which takes Katherine’s comedy accent as a pretext for groundling puns on English homonyms. Katherine says “chin” as “sin,” and “neck” as “nick” (lost English slang for the female genitalia, derived from the still-current French nique), and, for the more educated punters in the gallery, “foot” as the all-purpose curse word “foutre,” which means another f-word.

The attempt to reverse engineer Shakespeare’s biography from his world of words always makes for a speculative and rickety construction. It also places the theatrical cart before the historical horse. If the historian must present the past, in Otto von Ranke’s words, wie es eigent­lich gewesen (as it truly was), then the poetic productions are preceded by more prosaic literary constructions. In documentary terms, the bard truth of the matter is contained in legal documents, not playscripts. The only surviving record of Shakespeare’s speech is preserved in a 1612 deposition in which he gave evidence in a suit against his former landlord, Christopher Mountjoy, brought by Mountjoy’s son-in-law Stephen Belott. Three of Shakespeare’s surviving six signatures are on Will’s will, which was probably drafted in 1613 and amended shortly before his death in 1616. The other two signatures are on a property deed and a mortgage. While Shakespeare was present at the creation of the English language as we still know it, he was also a businessman, present at the creation of show business.

Daniel Swift’s Dream Factory is the story of how that business created the theatres at which Shakespeare’s masterpieces were first performed. To us, Swift writes, a masterpiece is “a work created by an established artist at the height of his or her powers.” But to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, a masterpiece was “the work created at the end of a period of training”: a proof that an apprentice was ready to become a master and launch his own workshop. The Dream Factory finds Shakespeare in the world of matter rather than the world of words. Before the plays were written by poets, the theaters were built by speculators and carpenters, loans and contracts, handshakes and lies. The court in this phase of Shakespeare’s life is not the queen’s home in Whitehall but a place where the investors stage revenge tragedies of their own.

Swift is alive to the dirty realities of life in a society in religious, economic, social, and linguistic transition—the historical black box that made Shakespeare—and to how the reality of this netherworld of words may have shaped Shakespeare’s treatment of the “conjoined questions of how to make art and how to make money” in Romeo and Juliet. The materials are non-literary: the records of the medieval guilds known as livery companies and the court cases that follow successful artistic ventures like gulls after a trawler.

On December 28, 1598, a gang of carpenters gathered at The Theatre in Shoreditch, just east of the city of London. It was the time of the Christmas revels, and Elizabethan winters were colder than ours: a good time to work unobserved. But as they tore off The Theatre’s thatched roof and started to pull apart the timbers of its three-story frame, two of their tenants on the neighboring properties noticed. The carpenters told them they were performing repair work, but the neighbors alerted their landlord, Giles Allen. He was probably spending the Christmas break out at his home in Hadleigh, Essex. The carpenters worked on. They reduced The Theatre to its rubble and brick foundations, piled its timber onto carts, and drove it to a warehouse in the city. In the spring, they moved the wood across the Thames to a site by the river at Bankside in Southwark. There, they recycled The Theatre’s frame into a new playhouse called the Globe.

The Theatre was not quite England’s first purpose-built, permanent playhouse, but it is the first to have mattered since Roman times. The near-circular polygon of the Globe is the “wooden O” in the prologue to Henry V, which may have been the first play performed at the theater when it opened in 1599, but The Theatre is where Shakespeare became Shakespeare. It was at The Theatre that James Burbage, a carpenter turned actor and impresario, assembled the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company synonymous with Shakespeare’s career, in 1594. It was at The Theatre that A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1594), The Merchant of Venice (ca. 1598), and Romeo and Juliet (ca. 1597) debuted.

In 1576, Burbage persuaded his brother-in-law John Brayne, a member of the Company of Grocers, to invest in a theater. Burbage arranged a twenty-one-year lease on a “muddy half-acre” at Shoreditch, twenty pounds down and fourteen pounds per annum after that. Before the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the plot had formed part of an Augustinian nunnery, the priory of Holywell. Allen was one of many speculators who made money by snapping up lands formerly owned by the Church, “knocking together tenements” and renting them out. The plot’s biggest structure was a large but ramshackle barn that served as a slaughterhouse for Mr. Stoughton the butcher, a storeroom for Richard the innkeeper, and a refuge for “rogues and beggars.”

Burbage had to build his theater outside the city of London. In 1572, the city authorities banned the public performance of plays inside city limits due to the threat of plague. In the same year, the Crown revived an old act that defined “all Fencers, Bearwards [the managers of bear-baiting], Common Players in Interludes & Minstrels” who did not belong to “any Baron of this Realm or towards any other honourable Personage of greater Degree” as no different from able-bodied beggars and vagrants. In 1575, the city expelled the players entirely. But in 1574, Elizabeth I granted letters patent to her favorite, the Earl of Leicester, for a private theater company. The Earl of Leicester’s Men were allowed to perform any­where in the city and beyond so long as the Master of the Revels approved of the script.

Burbage had worked in Leicester’s troupe earlier in the decade. He had toured the provinces too, sleeping in barns and playing in the yards of inns; the young Shakespeare may have seen him when the company stopped at Stratford. Burbage understood the public’s appetite for theater and the state’s growing tolerance for it. A big business was being born. Building costs exceeded Burbage’s estimate of two hundred pounds. Brayne had spent more than six hundred pounds, and sold his house and grocer’s scales, before Burbage opened the partially completed theater and, as one of the carpenters said in a 1592 deposition, funded the rest “with the help of the profits that grew by plays.”

Burbage omitted the name of his partner, funder, and brother-in-law Brayne from the lease. Two years later, in 1578, Brayne and Burbage came to fisticuffs. In 1579, Burbage mortgaged the theater lease for a year to another grocer, John Hyde, then failed to repay. In 1582, Hyde had Burbage arrested for debt and tried to squeeze out Brayne entirely.

“No business, no show,” goes the adage. Brayne is one of the first of a recognizable type, the investor who loses his shirt. Burbage was to Elizabethan England what Max Bialystock is to the New York City of The Producers. Brayne did not live up to his name. In 1567, he had paid for the construction of a stage and scaffolds for seating in a field next to a farmhouse in the outlying village of Stepney, a couple miles further east, and called it the Red Lion Theatre. It is not clear whether a performance was mounted; we only know about the Red Lion because Brayne sued the carpenters who built the scaffolds for their shoddy work. He should have known better.

The cast in The Dream Factory are guild carpenters and also money men, bound apprentices and would-be masters of their own destiny. The fallout from The Theatre’s construction shows how the medieval economy of livery company monopolies was competing with the new capitalism of private speculators. The brotherhood of the guild was a high-trust network with a social safety net. The market was a low-trust flux of floating partnerships held together by contracts and the law, not fraternity and handshakes. The market and the city throw together Antonio and Shylock, Romeo and Juliet, Brayne and Burbage.

The timber for The Theatre came from west of London and was imported via the Thames. On the shore, donkeys drew the timbers to a saw yard for trimming. On site, carpenters marked the beams for assembly with a numbering system based on Roman numerals, then bashed them together with each mortise and tenon topped by a peg. The gaps in the frame were paneled with lathes, plastered with “lime, sand, and hair from the local tanners,” and painted white. The finished playhouse was about thirty-five feet high, the stage three feet off the floor. The master, Brian Ellam of the Worshipful Company of Carpenters, received forty shillings from Brayne. Toward the end of the work, Brayne and his wife were reduced to working on the site to save paying two laborers.

Burbage’s instincts were correct. The theater business boomed. Around the time that The Theatre was being raised, a theater was operating south of the river at Newington Butts in Southwark. In 1577, one of Burbage’s associates launched the Curtain on a plot adjoining The Theatre. In 1587, another impresario, Philip Henslowe, partnered with another businessman, an out-of-town tanner and member of the Worshipful Company of Grocers named John Cholmley. With Cholmley’s money, Henslowe launched the Rose amid the brothels, boozers, and bear-baiters in the Liberty of the Clink at Southwark. Cholmley, of whom little else is known, obliged his partner by dying in 1589.

The Rose’s master carpenter, John Griggs, had learned on the job as one of the carpenters at The Theatre. The records of the Rose, Swift writes, show that Henslowe was “considering the example of the Burbages and the Theatre and doing it better,” with “greater efficiency and greater order.” In 1595, another theater opened at Bankside, the Swan, in a building that had once belonged to a monastery. In 1596, Burbage opened the first indoor theater, the Blackfriars, built on the land of an old Dominican priory. London now had two theater districts and six theaters. It had Burbage’s sons Richard, who was the first to play Romeo and Hamlet, and Cuthbert, who managed the money side. It had Henslowe’s partner, star turn, and son-in-law Ned Alleyn. It had steady companies—the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the Lord Admiral’s Men, Leicester’s Men, Lord Strange’s Men—competing with each other and trading key players like sports teams. And, emerging from this matrix of building and business, it had William Shakespeare—who, as the son of a glover and an urban speculator, came from the old economy and thrived in the new.

Brayne did not live to see it. In 1580, while he and Burbage were being pressured by Hyde, Brayne had leased a cluster of tenements and the George Inn in Whitechapel, where he lived. Again, he worked on a handshake with an old friend, this time a goldsmith named Robert Miles. A goldsmith, Swift notes, was often an Elizabethan euphemism for a moneylender, and as there is no record of Miles taking on apprentices, he probably was a full-time shark. Again, Brayne fell out with his partner and saw no return on his investment. He sold his share in the Whitechapel properties to Miles, and died in June 1586, allegedly due to injuries inflicted by Miles. As Miles held Brayne’s share in the Whitechapel properties, Miles also had a claim on Brayne’s share in The Theatre. Burbage, by paying Brayne’s widow Margaret a share of the proceeds, appears to have admitted as much.

At first, Miles tried to force Margaret Brayne out of the Whitechapel properties. But in the summer of 1588, she and Miles joined forces and sued Burbage to recover a half-interest in the lease of The Theatre, which still belonged to Hyde, and the profits, which belonged to the Burbages in the sense that they took the money at the gate. The legal suits went back and forth for a decade. Though not all of that little world of words survives, and some of it was nibbled by mice, we can read enough of it to elucidate what Swift calls “the Burbage way.”

First, Cuthbert Burbage convinced Hyde’s employer, the upright Sir Walter Cope, to suggest that the queen’s first minister, Lord Burghley, might do Hyde a favor if he returned his interest in the lease to Cuthbert. When Hyde surrendered the lease, Margaret Brayne and Miles countered by sequestering The Theatre until their case was heard. Cuthbert Burbage parried by securing a stay on the order of sequestration.

Why did Margaret Brayne work with the man who was rumored to have fatally injured her husband? Why did Miles not expel her from the Whitechapel properties? The answer may lie in the paternity of Margaret’s daughter Katherine, who was born in late 1586 or early 1587. In one of the “interrogatories” (depositions) in a 1592 suit, the witnesses were asked, “And how often to your knowledge is the said Robert Miles indicted for common Imbarracie [embracery, or corrupting a judge or jury] & Adultery?” and also whether Miles had been “called before the Coroner’s Inquest for the death of Brayne.” The implication was that Miles was Katherine’s real father and that the brawl that killed John Brayne was not just about money.

One day in mid-November 1590, Margaret Brayne and Miles, accompanied by Miles’s son Ralph and a friend named Nicholas Bishop, appeared at The Theatre, where the Admiral’s Men were appearing, and tried to take half of that day’s profits by installing Bishop at the entrance to the gallery as a “gatherer.” The Burbages rushed to the scene, and a fight started in front of the audience. Burbage called Margaret Brayne a whore and Miles a scoundrel. When John Alleyn, the manager of the Admiral’s Men, tried to intercede before the takings went down any further, Burbage said that next time, he and his sons would shoot them in the legs. Richard Burbage waved a broomstick in Bishop’s face, then tweaked Bishop’s nose.

After the fight, Alleyn’s brother Ned decided to withdraw from acting at The Theatre. The Admiral’s Men took their business across the river to Henslowe’s Rose. There, Ned Alleyn starred in the title roles of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta, confirming himself as the greatest actor of the age. Theatrical history was made.