Hola, ye pampered jades of Asia

What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?

– finds its way into Henry IV, Part 2 as

And hollow pampered jades of Asia

Which cannot go but thirty miles a day.

Shakespeare at his worst borrowed “almost mechanically,” in the words of Stanley Wells, who cites a passage in Henry V in which the youthful king (and, more important, the audience) is given a refresher course in French history that is taken more or less verbatim from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles. Coriolanus, in the First Folio, contains two lines that make no sense until one goes back to Sir Thomas North’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans and finds the same lines and the line immediately preceding, which Shakespeare (or more probably a subsequent scribe or compositor) inadvertently left out. Again, however, such borrowing had ample precedent. Marlowe in his turn took several lines from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and dropped them almost unchanged into Tamburlaine. The Faerie Queene, meanwhile, contains passages lifted whole (albeit in translation) from a work by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto.

In the rush to entertain masses of people repeatedly, the rules of presentation became exceedingly elastic. In classical drama plays were strictly either comedies or tragedies. Elizabethan playwrights refused to be bound by such rigidities and put comic scenes in the darkest tragedies-the porter answering a late knock in Macbeth, for instance. In so doing they invented comic relief. In classical drama only three performers were permitted to speak in a given scene, and no character was allowed to talk to himself or the audience-so there were no soliloquies and no asides. These are features without which Shakespeare could never have become Shakespeare. Above all, plays before Shakespeare’s day were traditionally governed by what were known as “the unities”-the three principles of dramatic presentation derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, which demanded that dramas should take place in one day, in one place, and have a single plot. Shakespeare was happy enough to observe this restriction when it suited him (as in The Comedy of Errors), but he could never have written Hamlet or Macbeth or any of his other greatest works if he had felt strictly bound by it.

Other theatrical conventions were unformed or just emerging. The division of plays into acts and scenes-something else strictly regulated in classical drama-was yet unsettled in England. Ben Jonson inserted a new scene and scene number each time an additional character stepped onstage, however briefly or inconsequentially, but others did not use scene divisions at all. For the audience it mattered little, since action was continuous. The practice of pausing between acts didn’t begin until plays moved indoors, late in Shakespeare’s career, and it became necessary to break from time to time to trim the lights.

Almost the only “rule” in London theater that was still faithfully followed was the one we now call, for convenience, the law of reentry, which stated that a character couldn’t exit from one scene and reappear immediately in the next. He had rather to go away for a while. Thus, in Richard II, John of Gaunt makes an abrupt and awkward departure purely to be able to take part in a vital scene that follows. Why this rule out of all the many was faithfully observed has never, as far as I can make out, been satisfactorily explained.

But even by the very relaxed standards of the day, Shakespeare was invigoratingly wayward. He could, as in Julius Caesar, kill off the title character with the play not half done (though Caesar does come back later, briefly, as a ghost). He could write a play like Hamlet, where the main character speaks 1,495 lines (nearly as many as the number spoken by all the characters combined in The Comedy of Errors) but disappears for unnervingly long stretches-for nearly half an hour at one point. He constantly teased reality, reminding the audience that they were not in the real world but in a theater, as when he asked in Henry V, “Can this cockpit hold the vastie fields of France?” or implored the audience in Henry VI, Part 3 to “eke out our performance with your mind.”

His plays were marvelously variable, with the number of scenes ranging from seven to forty-seven, and with the number of speaking parts ranging from fourteen to more than fifty. The average play of the day ran to about 2,700 lines, giving a performance time of two and a half hours. Shakespeare’s plays ranged from fewer than 1,800 lines (for Comedy of Errors) to more than 4,000 (for Hamlet, which could take nearly five hours to play, though possibly no audience of his day ever saw it in full). On average his plays were made up of about 70 percent blank verse, 5 percent rhymed verse, and 25 percent prose, but he changed the proportions happily to suit his purpose. His history plays aside, he set two plays, The Merry Wives of Windsor and King Lear, firmly in England; he set none at all in London; and he never used a plot from his own times.

Shakespeare was not a particularly prolific writer. Thomas Heywood wrote or cowrote more than two hundred plays, five times the number Shakespeare produced in a career of similar length. Even so, signs of haste abound in Shakespeare’s work, even in the greatest of his plays. Hamlet is a student at the beginning of the play and thirty years old by its end, even though nothing like enough time has passed in the story. The Duke in The Two Gentlemen of Verona puts himself in Verona when in fact he can only mean Milan. Measure for Measure is set in Vienna, and yet the characters nearly all have Italian names.

Shakespeare may be the English language’s presiding genius, but that isn’t to say he was without flaws. A certain messy exuberance marked much of what he did. Sometimes it is just not possible to know quite what he meant. Jonathan Bate, writing in The Genius of Shakespeare, notes that a glancing six-word compliment to the queen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“fair vestal enthroned by the west”) is so productive of possible interpretation that it spawned twenty pages of discussion in a variorum edition* of Shakespeare’s works. Nearly every play has at least one or two lines that defeat interpretation, like these from Love’s Labour’s Lost:

O paradox! black is the badge of hell,

The hue of dungeons and the school of night.

What exactly he meant by “the school of night” is really anyone’s guess. Similarly uncertain is a reference early in The Merchant of Venice to “my wealthy Andrew docked in sand,” which could refer to a ship but possibly to a person. The most ambiguous example of all, however, is surely the line in King Lear that appeared originally (in the Quarto edition of 1608) as “swithald footed thrice the old, a nellthu night more and her nine fold.” Though the sentence has appeared in many versions in the four centuries since, no one has ever got it close to making convincing sense.

“Shakespeare was capable of prolixity, unnecessary obscurity, awkwardness of expression, pedestrian versifying and verbal inelegance,” writes Stanley Wells. “Even in his greatest plays we sometimes sense him struggling with plot at the expense of language, or allowing his pen to run away with him in speeches of greater length than the situation warrants.” Or as Charles Lamb put it much earlier, Shakespeare “runs line into line, embarrasses sentences and metaphors; before one idea has burst its shell, another is hatched out and clamorous for disclosure.”

Shakespeare was celebrated among his contemporaries for the speed with which he wrote and the cleanness of his copy, or so his colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell would have us believe. “His mind and hand went together,” they wrote in the introduction to the First Folio, “and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” To which Ben Jonson famously replied in exasperation: “Would he had blotted a thousand!”