How did Shakespeare Write his plays? My own feeling, based on my being a bit of a playwright myself and so able to offer some insight into the practicality of doing such a thing, is from one simple established fact we can come up with a plausible, or not so plausible scenario, depending on your taste of how Shakespeare wrote his plays.

Shakespeare wrote 39 plays, 2 are lost, or if he didn’t, then it’s around that figure. And his writing career is from about 1592 to 1612 - twenty years, before he took the money he’d earned off to Stratford and retired from the theatre game.

So, during the twenty years Shakespeare’s producing on average 2 plays a year, sometimes more, sometimes less, but 2 a year on average. 6 months for each play.

I reckon he’d get the first draught down fairly quickly, say in a couple of months - three contemporary A4 hand written pages a day sounds like the tempo. When I’m going at top speed I write around that much a day. Usually I’m something off that pace, needing time for naps and such like as I do. But then again my plays are for reading rather than performing, if only because no one wants to stage them.

I imagine Shakespeare’s second draught is where the real glittering density of the phrases appear as he overwrites what he’s written without doing very much re-writing. (He wouldn’t have the time to start again.) This would probably take the same time as the first draught - about 2 months.

After that you’re into rehearsal. Present day Shakespeare play rehearsal is 6 to 8 weeks. Let’s say that hasn’t changed much in 400 years - learning the lines, and not getting in each other’s way being pretty much the same now as it was then. In rehearsal some re-writing gets done, even if it’s only to do with continuity errors, such as characters who are still speaking though they left the stage earlier on, or actors saying a line is a bit of a mouthful and asking Will to make it easier to say - that kind of thing.

And there you have it - six months - one new play ready to be released on the public. Unless of course he wrote the whole thing in two weeks, and then went down the pub until the actors came in for rehearsal. We simply don’t know.