Shakespeare and the City

Recently I checked into a pleasant, fairly sterile Marriott in Shoreditch ahead of my London debut as a playwright. Today, the streets are lined with Pret, Starbucks, and ­McDonalds; but as I learned from Daniel Swift’s The Dream Factory, they once ran with butcher’s blood and were—as Swift tells it—where the young William Shakespeare apprenticed as a playwright, absorbing the shapes, smells, characterological quirks, devices, games, genres, and moods of the theater. Or rather of “The Theatre,” the playhouse built by the impresario, actor, businessman, and frequent con artist James Burbage, father of the famous actor Richard. The Theater “was Shakespeare’s workshop.”