Certain cranks are questioning the possibility that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him on the grounds that he could not have gotten the 10,000 hours of practice at his craft Malcolm Gladwell says every genius needs. What I want to know is, if Shakespeare had his ten thousand hours when he wrote the Henry VI trilogy, where does it show? There are serious scholars out there who think Heminges and Condell were lying when they said he wrote them. Many mainstream critics won’t accept that he wrote certain scenes in them.
I claim that any reasonably intelligent non-genius actor of the time could have used the historians of the time, as Shakespeare did, to have written them. Add, perhaps, a cleverness with language that some 14-year-olds have. The only way his histories improved after the trilogy was in the author’s becoming better with words, through practice, of course, but only what he would have gotten from contin- uing to write plays (and doctor plays and–most important–THINK about plays), and getting interested enough in a few of his stereotypical characters to archetize them as he did Falstaff.
It seems to me that the requirements for being a playwright are (1) a simple exposure to plays to teach one what they are; (2) the general knowledge of the world that everyone automatically gets simply by living; (3) the facility with the language that everyone gets automa- tically from simply using them all one’s life. The rank one as a playwight will depend entirely on his inborn ability to use language, and his inborn ability to empathize with others, and himself. Of course, the more plays he writes, the better playwright he’ll be, but I’m speaking of people who have chosen to make playwriting their vocation (because they were designed to do something of the sort).
I speak out of a life devoted to writing and having read biographies of dozens of writers. I would never be able to agree that I’m wrong on this.