Writing Tool:..Quill dipped in ink. A quill was the hollow, rigid shaft of a bird’s feather. The word “pen” is derived from the Latin name for “feather”—“penna.” Shakespeare and other writers of his day used a variety of quills that they dipped in an ink container (inkwell) on a stand (standish) that held all the writing materials. If a writer’s pocket lacked jingle, he invested in a goose quill. If he could afford something better, he invested in a swan quill. Writers or artists who needed quills to produce fine lines purchased crow quills. Quills from ducks, eagles, turkeys, hawks and owls also served as “word processors,” producing plays, poems, and sometimes revolution. Quills were the writing instruments of choice between 500 A.D. and 1850 A.D. (In the ancient world, writers used a variety of other instruments to write history, literature, announcements, bureaucratic records, and so on. These instruments included shaped twigs or branches that impressed words into clay, mallet-driven chisels that etched words in stone, brushes that wrote on pottery and other smooth surfaces (such as plaster and animal skins), sharpened bone or metal that inscribed words on wax surfaces, and sharpened reed stems dipped in ink that wrote on papyrus, an Egyptian water plant whose pith (the soft center of a stem) was dried and pressed to make thin sheets suitable for receiving impressions. The introduction of the quill in the 500's (an event recorded by St. Isidore, a Spanish theologian) greatly eased the task of writers, much as personal computers did when they replaced typewriters in the last half of the 20th Century.)  

Whenever place or time mattered [in a Shakespeare play], some references to them could be introduced into the dialogue, and if special atmospheric or dramatic effects were needed, they could be created by the poet's pen. Hence, it is to the Elizabethan stage that we are indebted in great measure for the exquisite descriptive poetry of Shakespeare. Such conditions, moreover, encouraged a greater imaginative cooperation on the part of the audience in the production of a play, and this active participation was further increased by the informality of the platform stage. With such intimacy, soliloquies, asides, and long set speeches are natural and not absurd as they are in modern theatre.–Watt, Homer A., and Karl J. Holzknecht. Outlines of Shakespeare's Plays. New York: Barnes, 1947 (Page 8).

At a time of unrest, when the Earl of Essex was challenging the Queen's [Elizabeth's] authority and armed bands terrorized the streets of London, the Chamberlain's Men [Shakespeare's company] were forbidden to perform Richard II, a play already licensed and performed, because it contains a scene in which a king is compelled to renounce his crown; in 1601, the queen's counsellors believed that this might encourage her enemies and spark off a revolution. The theatre was taken very seriously by the authorities and was allowed to deal with political issues only if they did not refer too obviously to current affairs or seditious ideas, but were set, safely, in an earlier century or, better still, in ancient Rome or foreign countries.

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No Shakespeare manuscript is in existence. This is not surprising: they were not collectors' items. Printers would have thrown them away after setting type from them; almost twenty years passed in the Commonwealth with no public performances of plays, and the manuscripts of the disbanded theatrical companies were completely dispersed; the Great Fire of London must have destroyed some. Indeed, only a relative handful of the hundreds and hundreds of Elizabethan plays have come down to us in manuscript form, and it is our bad luck that so few of these are by major dramatists. None is Shakespeare's if we except the good possibility that one scene in the manuscript of the unacted Sir Thomas More is in his hand.–Bowers, Fredson. ''What Shakespeare Wrote.'' Approaches to Shakespeare, by Norma Rabkin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964 (Page 266).

Verse Form of Plays:  Shakespeare wrote most of his plays in poetry. Although the plays contain rhyming poetry, most of the lines are written in unrhyming poetry. Each line usually contains ten syllables. A typical ten-syllable line begins with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. This pattern continues until the completion of the line. Such a line is said to be written in iambic pentameter. When lines written in iambic pentameter do not rhyme, they are known collectively as blank verse. The following additional information will help you to understand iambic pentameter and blank verse. 

Iambic Pentameter: To understand iambic pentameter, you first need to understand the term ''iamb.'' An iamb is a unit of rhythm consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The words ''annoy,'' ''fulfill,'' ''pretend,'' ''regard,'' and ''serene'' are all iambs because the first syllable of each word is unstressed (or unaccented) and the second syllable is stressed (or accented). Iambs can also consist of one word with a single unstressed (unaccented) syllable followed by another word with a single stressed (accented) syllable. In addition, they may consist of a final unstressed syllable of one word followed by an initial stressed syllable of the next word. The following line from Romeo and Juliet demonstrates the use of iambs. The unstressed words or syllables are in blue, and the stressed words or syllables are underlined in red: 
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...............But, soft!.what.light.through.yonder.window.breaks? 
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Here are two more lines from Romeo and Juliet that also demonstrate the use of iambs:  
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...............I.will.notfail: 'tis.twenty.years.till.then. 
...............I.have.forgot.why.I.did.call.thee.back. 
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When a line has five iambs, it is in iambic pentameter. The prefix ''pent'' means ''five.'' (A figure with five sides is called a ''pentagon''; an athletic competition with five track-and-field events is called a ''pentathlon.'') The suffix ''meter'' (in ''pentameter'') refers to the recurrence of a rhythmic unit (also called a ''foot''). Thus, because the above lines contain iambs, they are ''iambic.'' Because they contain five iambs (five feet) they are said to be in iambic pentameter. Finally, because the words at the end of each line do not rhyme, the lines are said to be in unrhymed iambic pentameter.  
Blank Verse: Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. This format was modeled after ancient Greek and Latin verse. It was first used in 1514 in Renaissance Italy by Francesco Maria Molza. In 1539, Italian Giovanni Rucellai was the first poet to label the unrhymed iambic pentameter in his poetry as blank verse (versi sciolti in Italian). Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, first used blank verse in English in his translation of Vergil's epic Latin poem The Aeneid. The first English drama in blank verse was Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, staged in 1561, by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton. It was about an early British king. Later in the same century, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare turned blank verse into high art when they used it in their plays. Marlowe used the verse form in Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine, and Edward II. Shakespeare used it in all of his plays. In Germany, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) popularized blank verse in his poem "Nathan the Wise" ("Nathan der Weise"), published in 1779.

4. Publication of  a Play
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 ........The publishing industry operated under the control of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, a trade organization which the government established and supervised in order to guard against printing subversive books or books unduly critical of the Crown. If a play met government standards–that is, if it did not attempt to inflame the people against the crown–a publisher could print and sell the play. Authors of plays often had misgivings about committing their work to print. 

The plays of the first professional companies [in Shakespeare's day] were written mainly by actors themselves. . . . The players were reluctant to allow their dramas to be printed. They apparently thought that if a play could be read, few people would wish to see it acted. They may also have feared that their plays, if printed, would be appropriated for acting by rival companies. This reluctance explains the fact that only eighteen of Shakespeare's plays were printed during his lifetime. They were published in small pamphlets called quartos, which sold for only sixpence a piece.–Alden, Raymond MacDonald. A Shakespeare Handbook. Revised and enlarged by Oscar James Campbell. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1970 (Page 74).