Shakespeare – the bard unmasked

29 May 2025, The Tablet

Shakespeare, aged 12, as imagined from the frontispiece of an 1897 book, Shakespeare The Boy

Project Gutenberg

Book review by Mark Lawson. The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare – Yale University Press

In a remarkable book of Poirot-like detective scholarship, London academic Daniel Swift pursues the unknown but famous dramatist through the records of a long series of court cases – in the litigious Elizabethan age, it was hard not to leave legal fingerprints somewhere – relating to theatres in which Shakespeare had his creative education.

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