Stephen Greenblatt wonders if Shakespeare ever thought twice and did drafts of his plays rather than simply write wonder and wonder without a second thought.
From a piece in the Wall Street Journal...
Shakespeare was reputed to have written with such amazing confidence—in a world of goose-quill pens and lamp-black ink—that even his first drafts were fair copies. "What he thought," the editors of the first folio wrote of him in 1621, "he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers." The praise of Shakespeare's supreme "easiness" clearly nettled his friend and rival playwright Ben Jonson, who was a compulsive reviser. "The Players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out line." "My answer hath been," Jonson tartly added, "would he had blotted a thousand."
The notion that Shakespeare rarely revised his work makes perfect sense. Here, after all, was a man who wrote, on average, two plays a year, acted in his own plays and those of others, penned sonnets, and helped to run a theater company, to say nothing of his many other business interests. The original manuscripts have all long disappeared, but biographers have endlessly repeated the claim that they were "unblotted." After all, where would Shakespeare have found the time for rewriting?
Apparently, however, he did find the time. A number of Shakespeare's plays survive in both the small quarto editions, inexpensively published during his lifetime, and in the first folio. Comparing versions of the same play, I and other scholars have concluded that many of the differences are probably due to Shakespeare's own obsessive fiddling. Not all of them, to be sure. In the so-called bad quarto, for example, we find "To be or not to be; ay, there's the point," which almost certainly was not an inept first try at Hamlet's words but the result of an actor's lousy memory.
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