How fast did shakespeare write

This authorship debate has raged since the 19th Century when clergyman James Wilmot set out to write a biography on the bard. This is substantiated by scholars who argue there is no real evidence to suggest otherwise.

Fellow writers, such as Christopher Marlowe and Ben Johnson, came from similar backgrounds to Shakespeare, so it seems entirely plausible that the son of a simple glove maker could be equally capable of high literary prowess.

Well, Anti-Stratfordians argue that, whilst genius is not dependent on social rank, access to knowledge and experience is. With a limited education, how does the boy from Stratford create works demonstrating an innate understanding of the royal courts, the geography of countries ranging from Scotland to Italy, politics and the law; not to mention a vast knowledge of classical literature?

Where would he get access to this information? Theories abound that this is when he accumulated the vast knowledge required to fill the plays with such minute detail.

Was he a soldier, a spy? Was he serving at court or simply trudging the country as a teacher or an actor? Or, is it more plausible that Shakespeare was someone else? Someone of higher rank who had access to the courts, travel and a higher level of education? Perhaps we will never know. In the meantime, just like a theatrical who-done-it, here are the top three un usual suspects who just may have written the plays:. Add in the high education, court position and penchant for travel and you have a hot prospect.

The theory was first proposed in by a Mr. T Looney yes, really and even garnered support from Sigmund Freud. A playwright, spy and contemporary of Shakespeare.

However, he was stabbed in the eye in , dying long before Shakespeare ceased to write. A point Marlovians are quick to overlook, believing that he faked his own death. See more by Fay Barrett. Shakespeare must have been a familiar figure at the royal court. Some of his plays, such as Macbeth , with its egregious flattery of King James I, bear obvious witness to the importance to the company of court patronage.

And the wide range of dramatic styles that Shakespeare adopted, the fact that he composed an average of around two plays a year, and that he moved freely among the dramatic genres, all indicate his sensitivity to the needs of his company.

The author is not as humble as he pretends to be — he keeps his options open. In this he differs greatly from, for instance, John Lyly, or even Ben Jonson, whose plays are more restricted in range. And though he knew that he had to please, he was willing, especially as he grew older - more confident of himself, less dependent on popular success - to push the boundaries, sometimes seeming almost to be writing for himself rather than for the populace.

Troilus and Cressida and Cymbeline , for example, are stylistically challenging; we have little evidence as to how these and some other plays fared with audiences. But it is clear from numerous references to Hamlet soon after composition that, for all its exceptional length, it, at least, was well received — which says a lot for the often under-rated audiences of the time.

Before Shakespeare even started to write a play he had to choose or to invent a story that was suitable for dramatization. Almost all his plays are based to some degree or other on one or more pre-existing narratives, some historical in origin, others fictional, some already in dramatic form. And he consulted some of these stories, especially the historical ones, in multiple versions. All this means that Shakespeare had to do a lot of preliminary spadework before he even began to invent a structure for his play.

He needed, and the company must have allowed him, time for reading. I find it irresistible to conjecture that they made it possible for him to move away from his London lodgings from time to time to the relative peace and quiet of a study — which we know existed - in New Place.

Some of the books Shakespeare had read at school clearly gave him material for both the stories and for details of his plays and poems. And it is clear that throughout his working life Shakespeare was an assiduous reader — and not only for professional reasons. All this shows that he was not just a jobbing playwright but a highly cultivated man of letters.

And he had to do all this in ways that would fit the physical structures of the theatres of his time and the strengths and limitations of the acting company at his disposal. He knew that the theatrical conventions of his time required plays to be of a certain length, though the limits were flexible. It is difficult for us to estimate how long the plays would have lasted in contemporary performance, but the fact that they vary in line length from around lines for The Comedy of Errors to about 4, for Hamlet shows that though there may have been minimum expectations there were no fixed limits.

Shakespeare may have wished to make changes between first having a manuscript transcribed for his actors and their putting it into production.

Play-texts had to be supple to local requirements. Shakespeare had models which he could observe, follow, modify, or reject. He knew about the traditional genres of tragedy and comedy, though he conspicuously refused to be constrained by them throughout his career. He wrote his plays as continuous structures, flowing smoothly from beginning to end.

He knew of the five-act structure favoured by Roman dramatists such as Plautus and Terence, and imitated by some of his English predecessors. But Shakespeare refused to be bound by the practice of his predecessors.

Sadly, little of the music composed for these purposes — or indeed for the plays in general - has survived. The printed texts contain music cues, but I suspect that they give an inadequate impression of the amount of music that would have been played in early performance. Most importantly, he would have to think about how his narrative material related to conventions of dramatic form and to expectations of genre, whether he could best relate it to conventions of comedy or of tragedy, or indeed whether it fell outside formal expectations of genre.

He would have needed to devise climactic scenes, and to think about how to bring it all to a satisfyingly dramatic conclusion. The ground plans for some of his plays are more schematically worked out than others. Other plays, however, such as The Comedy of Errors , Romeo and Juliet , and The Tempest , are elaborately and neatly plotted as if, like an architect designing a great cathedral, Shakespeare had created his overall design before going back to fill in the details.

And there is no way in which the intricacies of the virtuosically designed final scene of Cymbeline , with its multiple denouements, can have been improvised on the spur of the moment. Its composition required the same kind of intellectual effort as a contrapuntal masterpiece by Bach. And the conventions of comedy encouraged the inclusion of dances, of music and song.

Here he would have required the collaboration of composers, instrumentalists, and singing actors. For a tragedy Shakespeare would have wanted especially to give his actors the chance to portray passion, as Hamlet does, for example when he upbraids his mother, or Lear on the heath, or Othello in his jealous rage with Desdemona, or Coriolanus in his diatribes against the common people. But Shakespeare was not bound by convention, and his range and technique developed as he gained experience.

He broadened generic expectations. He would need constantly to remember how many actors he had available to him, and he would have to tailor the plot accordingly. Most of his plays can be performed by a company of 14 actors if, as was customary, some of them take more than one role each.

This seems sometimes to have placed strains upon his ingenuity. Alas, my liege, my wife is dead tonight. Shakespeare would want to write starring roles for the leading actors, and in doing so both to cater for their strengths and to remember their limitations. To say that Shakespeare would have to do all this is not, of course, to suggest that the writing of a play for the theatre of his time was any more difficult for him than for any of his fellow playwrights.

He was driven by internal compulsions, by changing and developing creative urges as well as by practical considerations. How fluent was Shakespeare? No working papers for any of the canonical plays survive.

Still, what they say is consonant with the evidence provided by his only surviving literary manuscript, the or so lines that he is believed to have added to the multi-authored play of Sir Thomas More after it had been subjected, at an uncertain date, to censorship by the Master of the Revels, Sir Thomas Buc. This is the only literary manuscript — indeed the only example of his handwriting except for a few signatures on legal documents - to have survived.

In it there is scarcely any punctuation, as if his ideas were flowing with such facility that he had no time to bother about details. Words are often abbreviated, to save time.

This is a man in a hurry, writing probably to commission to patch up a manuscript play after the Master of the Revels had demanded extensive change for political reasons. It is also possible to catch glimpses of Shakespeare at work in the printed texts of a few of his plays.