CHAPTER 47
From the evidence of the manuscript of Sir Thomas More Shakespeare wrote at extreme speed and intensity; he seems to have been able to summon up the energy and the inspiration at will, with the words and cadences emerging from some deep well of his being. He left some lines unfinished in the rapidity and restlessness of creation. In Timon of Athens the protagonist is described as begging “so many” talents; Shakespeare clearly meant to add an exact figure at a later stage. But he simply had to get on. He hardly ever punctuated, preferring to rely instead upon the roll and rush of creation. In some instances he seems to have left spaces between his words, where punctuation marks could be inserted after the fit had passed. He did not mark act or scene divisions. Ludwig Wittgenstein gained the impression that his verses were “dashed off by someone who could permit himself anything, so to speak.”1 Samuel Johnson remarked that the endings of his plays were sometimes written with undue haste, as if the exigencies of the moment forced him to hurry.
It seems likely that he wrote on loose sheets of paper, and he may have embarked upon separate scenes as his inclination took him. He might, for example, have completed the first episodes and the last episodes before turning his attention to the intervening scenes. There is a report by Ben Jonson, in his notebooks, of a contemporary writer, that may bear some relation to this. He was one who when “he hath set himself to writing he would join night and day and press upon himself without release, not minding it till he fainted.”2 If this is a description of Shakespeare, however, it is odd that Jonson does not name him.
There are of course more precise descriptions of his practice from his contemporaries. John Heminges and Henry Condell concluded, in their joint preface to the First Folio, that “His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he vttered with that easinesse, that wee haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers.” That may not be altogether true, but Heminges and Condell were concerned to emphasise the extraordinary facility of his invention. His ease or “easinesse,” too, was part of the wondrous effect; the verse flows naturally and instinctively from each character.
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. InOthelloand 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. InJulius 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.
It is sometimes suggested that his hesitations and inconsistencies are the mark of every dramatist. But that is not necessarily the case. Moliere, for example, has practically none. They are much more the token of Shakespeare’s uniquely fluid imagination and fluency of language. He was neither a cautious nor a deliberate artist. As the Poet confesses in Timon of Athens (21-5):
Our Poesie is as a Goume, which ouses
From whence ’tis nourisht: the fire i’th’Flint
Shewes not, till it be strooke: our gentle flame
Prouokes it selfe, and like the currant flyes
Each bound it chafes.
Poetry creates itself in the act of being created; it needs no external stimulus but provokes itself and streams forth with its own insistent momentum. He was always, as it were, in a state of suspenseful attention, not knowing precisely where he was going. That may help to explain his more than usually erratic spellings; in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, for example, there are five different spellings of “sheriff” in five consecutive lines. The name of “More” is spelled in three different ways in the same line. It is as if he wished his meaning to be indeterminate, to be open to any and every interpretation. This was also his professional method, leaving as much as possible to the process of rehearsal and the interpretation of the player. But the effect of course is further to heighten what has been called his “invisibility” as if the words, like the oozing gum, came from some natural source.
Yet there is an apparent paradox here. In the course of revision or rewriting, he often changes the most minute details out of some general desire to polish the verse still brighter. It may have been an instinctive, and for him a barely noticed, process; but of course there were occasions when he changed the general tenor of a scene. It has already been noticed that Shakespeare continued to revise his plays throughout his career. The new Oxford edition of his plays, for example, prints two versions of King Lear composed at different times. All the evidence suggests that some of his more accomplished dramas, such as The Taming of the Shrew and King John, are rewritten versions of his earlier originals. Othello was revised in order to augment the part of Emilia; she needed to be more sympathetic in order to avert any dissatisfaction in the audience at her giving Iago the handkerchief. Iago must be the sole architect of evil in the play. Shakespeare presumably registered the ambivalent reaction of the first audiences to her role, and changed the text accordingly. There are interpolations in many of the plays; the diversion upon the misfortunes of the players in Hamlet is one example. In Romeo and Juliet the speech beginning “The grey eyed morne smiles on the frowning night” is transferred from Romeo to Friar Lawrence in a significant change of emphasis. In Love’s Labour’s Lost Berowne gives two different versions of the same speech, one much more lyrical than the other; one was presumably added in the margin, or on a separate piece of paper, at a later date without the printer noticing that the other had been cancelled.
This is a very common phenomenon in the plays of Shakespeare. There are single lines that contain intact Shakespeare’s first and second thoughts. In the second quarto of Romeo and Juliet, for example, there exists the strange and unmetrical line “Rauenous douefeatherd rauen, woluishrauening lamb”; here the process of his thought from ravenous through dove to raven is made clear; if the editor removes the first “Rauenous,” a certain sense emerges. The ending of Troilus and Cressida has been heavily restructured, and it can in fact fairly be claimed that there are few plays in which there is no evidence of rewriting or structural revision. He often cut lines at a later date. In the two sequences of history plays, concerning Henry VI and Henry IV respectively, there is some evidence that he added speeches which would knit the plays together and thus provide a more unified structure of action. He added material for plays to be performed at court, and was sometimes obliged to rewrite existing material. Thus Oldcastle became, in a later version, Falstaff. He also changed material to accommodate the changing cast of players. This need not necessarily negate the impression given by his contemporaries that he wrote speedily and easily; it implies only his plays were always in a provisional or fluid shape. It is clear enough that at some point he generally went back over what he had written. It may have been at the moment of making a fair copy for his earliest manuscript pages; it may have been at the time he revised a play for a new season of performances.
One example may stand for many. In Hamlet his first version of the Player Queen’s speech runs:
For women feare too much, euen as they loue,
And womens feare and loue hold quantitie,
Eyther none, in neither ought, or in extremitie.
But this was too prolix and confusing, so he tightened up the verses in a succeeding version (1888-9):
For womens feare and loue, holds quantitie,
In neither ought, or in extremity.
He would have had to ensure that these changes met with the approval of the actors, who of course would have had to learn the new lines; he must also have made certain that the revisions were not so drastic that the play had to be resubmitted to the Master of Revels for approval. Within these constraints, therefore, his plays were never fixed or finished; he was continually remaking them and, to the horror of editors who would prefer a definitive text, we may fairly assume that each play was slightly different at every performance.
There were ideas and projects that he abandoned as unpromising or unworkable. And of course he changed his mind about plot and characterisation as he went along. He had already read around the subject, perhaps over a period of weeks or even months, and the principal lines of action were clear to him. It is not necessary to suppose that he kept elaborate synopses or schemes before he began composition, and it is in fact more likely that he retained the entire play in his capacious memory. The play hovered in the air, as it were, in inchoate shape. That is why he could change direction as he wrote; he could alter motive and character, create fresh scenes and provoke new debates. In his speech-prefixes stock names slowly give way to personal names as Shakespeare deepens and extends their characterisation; in All’s Well That Ends Well, for example, “Clown” becomes “Lavatch” and “Steward” becomes “Rynaldo.” They are coming to life in front of him.
He lost interest in certain plot lines after he had introduced them. Nothing, for example, is made of the Princess’s early demands for the territory of Aquitaine in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The business between Lorenzo and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice is left unresolved. In that play, too, it is clear that Shakespeare gained interest in Shylock while at the same time noticeably losing enthusiasm for Antonio. Antonio opens the play in an intriguingly melancholy style, but thereafter is never properly developed. The public context of Coriolanus is rapidly succeeded by private communings; the character of Hamlet is transformed in the last two acts of the play. Of course it could be argued that these were long-considered decisions on Shakespeare’s part, but they bear all the hallmarks of improvisation and spontaneous invention.