The Life of the William Shakespeare

David Scott Kastan
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University

Of course we don't know very much specifically about how Shakespeare wrote; most has to be inferred backwards from the plays themselves. No manuscripts have survived in his hand (with the possible exception of 147 lines sometimes thought to be in his handwriting of a manuscript of a play called Sir Thomas More). I don't think the romantic view of the tortured artist living in a garret, writing in anguished isolation is correct. My sense of Shakespeare is that above all else he was a man committed to the theater; most of his adult life he spent in London connected to one or another of the major acting companies of the period; he wrote regularly for his company, sharing in its profits, often, it seems to me, very prudently responding to fashions set by other writers for rival companies. (The Shakespeare of Shakespeare in Love seems remarkably close to the mark to my mind.) He is amazingly alert to the world he lived in, both to the theatrical world and to the social world around him. I think of him as a great listener, responsive to the vitality of the language around him as much as to the concerns of the people he mingled with in the London streets and pubs. He isn't an intellectual; he has read a few books but read them very well. Probably the most important source for Shakespeare is, in fact, his own work—he returns to scenes, characters, situations over and over again (think of Much Ado, Othello, and Winter's Tale—different versions of the "slandered wife" story with remarkably different endings).

I don't think he cared enormously about the publication of his plays; he was writing for playgoers not readers. But interestingly he does increasingly write plays that are too long to perform. He had mastered the 2,500-or-so-line play (about the maximum length that could be performed on an English day in the fading light of fall or winter); but Hamlet, for example, is so much longer and would have to be cut for performance. He doesn't do this, I think, with an eye set upon potential readers but for himself. He writes it to its length and conclusion, fascinated by his own story, knowing he will have to cut it for performance but too interested in what he has set in motion to stop.