Writer’s Desk: Shakespeare Wrote on Deadline, Too

For his essay on the somewhatnonsensical tendency for modern authors to keep reinterpreting the plays of Shakespeare, Adam Gopnik pointed outthis about the Bard:

Shakespeare grabbed his stories more or less at random from Holinshed’s history of Britain and Plutarch and old collections of Italian ribald tales. As the “ordinary poet” of a working company of players, he sought plots under deadline pressure rather than after some long, deliberate meditation on how to turn fiction into drama. “Wh...