When did William Shakespeare decide to write plays?

Answer 1

You might imagine something like this: he decided to write a play and when some of the people read it when it got sent off they wrote back to him and said "It is really good. We may need to tweak some bits, but apart from that it's great!"

But that is totally wrong.

We have no idea how he got interested in writing plays, but he most certainly did not write something and send it off to someone. Once he said he was interested in playwriting, he would probably have been asked to help an established playwright by writing a scene or a part of a scene. If the results were satisfactory, he would have been asked to contribute more and more until he was able to write whole plays on his own. Some speculate that the playwright he worked with in this way was George Peele.