Daniel Swift

English lecturer Professor Daniel Swift tells the story of London’s first purpose-built playhouse and how it was the place that first made Shakespeare.

The theatre was built in Shoreditch by James Burbage at a time when playgoing was held to be close to a sin. Swift explains how it offered London’s players the opportunity to control what they staged for the first time. It became Shakespeare’s first theatre and was where he learned his trade before moving to the Globe. Swift looks at how the early Elizabethan stage began to flourish, at the actors who performed, the businessmen who created it, the carpenters that built it and the preachers who hated it.

‘One of the most exciting and original books about Shakespeare that I’ve read in years’ James Shapiro

Swift is associate professor in English at Northeastern University London and author of The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics and Madness of Ezra Pound, Shakespeare’s Common Prayers and Bomber County.