Ben Jonson was less sanguine about his fluency. In Timber, or Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter he wrote that
I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn’d) hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted.
He goes on to conclude that “hee flow’d with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop’d; Sufflaminandus erat; as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his owne power; would the rule of it have beene so too.” Shakespeare may not have been the most prolific of his contemporaries — Thomas Heywood seems to have written wholly or in part some 220 plays — but it is clear enough that he had a reputation for rapid and inspired composition.
So we may plausibly see him at work, sitting in a standard panel-backed chair at his table. If he had a study, it was one that he had fitted up for himself in the sequence of London lodgings that he rented. It is sometimes suggested that he returned to his house in Stratford in order to compose without noise or disturbance, but this seems most unlikely. He wrote where he was, close to the theatre and close to the actors. It is doubtful if, in the furia of composition, noise or circumstance affected him. It is likely in any case that, as a result of his various employments in the theatre, he was obliged to write at night; there are various references in the plays to “oil-dried lamps,” to candles, and to “the smoakie light” that is “fed with stinking Tallow”(Cymbeline, 632–3).
He would have possessed a small “desk box” together with pen-case, pen-knife and inkwell; he is also likely to have owned a book-chest and a book-rest for the proper perusal of the bulky histories and anthologies from which he gathered his material. He may also have made notes in what were known as “table-books” or bound notebooks; Hamlet calls for “my tables” to “set it downe”(725). He could have jotted down notes or passages that occurred to him in the course of the day; other writers have found that walking through the busy streets can materially aid inspiration.
When he sat down at his desk he wrote on thick, coarse paper with sharpened pens or pencils; he used the conventional quill of goose-feathers, firm and reliable. He wrote on both sides of the folio-sized paper — paper was expensive — with approximately fifty lines on each side; in the left margin were the speech-prefixes and, in the right margin, the hasty stage-directions. He would often omit the name of the speaker, in his rush to go on, and only add it at a later stage.
Time is a fluid and capacious medium in his plays. He shortened or lengthened it at will so that it would fit the scale of his plots. He was so enveloped in the medium of the play that he created his own time within it; there is “stage time” and “real time” which only occasionally correspond. In Julius Caesar the passage of a month, between the Night of Lupercal and the eve of the Ides of March, takes place within one impassioned night. This is not Newtonian time but medieval time, shaped by sacred meaning. In Othello and Romeo and Juliet there is the presence of what has become known as “double time,” accommodating both the swift passage of event and the slow growth of feeling; the success of the device is manifest in the fact that no audience seems to notice it.
He was, as we have seen, generally in a hurry to complete a play. But this emphasis upon his fluency and facility must be tempered by his evident hesitations and revisions. He often seems to pause in mid-verse, as it were, pen held over paper, ready to strike out a word or improve it with a better one. There are occasions when he loses his way with a speech or passage of verse, and so returns to the beginning and tries all over again. It is a question of mustering the right impetus and fury. In his earliest plays there is at times evidence of “padding,” when he runs out of inspiration or energy; but these longueurs occur far less frequently in the plays of his maturity. More often than not he works at white heat. There are moments when he does not know whether he was writing prose or verse. In the second part of Henry IV, for example, Falstaff delivers some lines that could be printed in either mode. In Timon of Athens some of the original prose actually rhymed. His phrases are filled with the natural cadence of the English pentameter and the discrimination between poetry and prose might have seemed to him unimportant. There are occasions in which he runs verse lines together in order to save space; the lines of songs are joined together for the same reason. In the manuscript of Sir Thomas More he compresses three and half lines of verse into two lines of prose, just so that he can finish a speech at the end of the page. Again the formal difference between prose and poetry melts away in his compulsion to set it all down. It could in fact be argued that his texts were always in a fluid and incomplete state, waiting for the actors to lend them emphasis and meaning.
There are, as a result, confusions. He sometimes muddled names, or gave characters different names in the course of the same play. Characters are also given different descriptions or professions; in Coriolanus Cominius is at one moment a consul and at the next a general. There are often loose ends, when a plot line is begun but never completed. There are inconsistencies of time and place. The space of nineteen years is suddenly contracted to fourteen years in succeeding scenes of Measure for Measure, suggesting that he did not necessarily write scenes consecutively; otherwise he would have remembered the span of time from one scene to the next. A character suddenly “forgets” information that he or she has just imparted, or asks the same question on separate occasions. In Julius Caesar Brutus receives the first news of Portia’s death having just announced the same fact to Cassius; he also gives inconsistent answers to the same question. Shakespeare was in the process of creating Brutus’s character, and may inadvertently have left both first and second thoughts upon the page. At the close of Timon of Athens Timon’s epitaph says in one line, “Seek not my name” and in the next line continues “Here lie I, Timon.” Again it is an example of Shakespeare trying out two versions, both of which somehow survived for the printer to translate into type and therefore to posterity. When in his famous soliloquy at the beginning of the third act Hamlet (1617-18) describes death as
The vndiscouer’d country, from whose borne
No trauiler returnes …
he seems to have forgotten that he has already seen his father’s ghost. The speech “To be, or not to be” is probably an interpolation within the text. It may have been a speech that Shakespeare composed for an earlier version of Hamlet or for another play altogether; it may have been a speech he jotted down in a table-book for unspecified later use. It was in any case too good to abandon, and so he placed it in this version of Hamlet.
His stage-directions are a good indication of his method. Sometimes they are misplaced. He abbreviates or omits them in a haphazard manner, as if the speed and urgency of his composition drove all before them. The fact that he did not write coherent notes or systematic directions is a sure sign that he knew he would be engaged in the rehearsals at some later time. All would then be made clear. He forgets to “exit” some characters, an omission that would of course have been picked up at just such a rehearsal. Sometimes he hopelessly confuses the speech-prefixes of minor characters, so that it becomes difficult to tell who is addressing whom. In King John the French king is sometimes known as Philip and sometimes Lewis. Shakespeare introduces characters who never speak at all; he may have intended them to play a part but in the quick working of his invention forgot about them entirely. In Much Ado About Nothing Leonato apparently has a wife called Innogen, but she never makes an appearance. The name reappears in Cymbeline. Sometimes he will add the stage-direction “with others,” and only gradually will the members of this unknown assembly reveal themselves in individual parts. Some of his plays seem too long for conventional or average performance. It has been suggested that these are reading versions of his dramas, but it is more probable that they are examples of allowing his invention to advance unimpeded. He had in any case no need to curb his flowing pen; he knew that cuts could be made in rehearsal. As an epistle at the beginning of Beaumont and Fletcher’s published works testifies in 1647, “When these comedies and tragedies were presented on the stage, the actors omitted some scenes and passages, with the authors’ consent, as occasion led them.” There is no reason to believe that Shakespeare reacted any differently.