The precursors: you're moderately educated, you read a great deal, you're a man. All of these things will help make your play a reality -- you've got a familiarity with Classical authors and your own contemporaries, a touch of historical grounding, an infusion of Biblical imagery and Continental plot devices, all the good stuff. You might have a little experience as a player yourself. You might have attended university, and you might not have. Your sense of what makes a good play is shaped not only by artistic and aesthetic sensibilities fostered at educational institutions but by keeping an ear to the ground -- the public's responses to the works of your contemporaries and the buzz generated in taverns and at court alike. You've got a good idea, and you're ready to capitalize on it.

#Find a prospective buyer.

Find someone who wants to pay you money for the play. Which should be easy, right? If you're lucky, your services as a playwright are already known to a particular playing company, and its shareholders will be the ones approaching you when they want to hear your newest composition. (Shakespeare was in a somewhat unusual position as a sort of artist-in-residence for much of his career, being positioned to write whole works and individual revisions for one playhouse rather than selling his services to many.) If you're unlucky, you can hope to parley your connections with other writers for the stage into an introduction and ensuing employment, or coast on the reputation of your prior works to grease the wheels for further commissions. There were a number of entrepreneurs like Philip Henslowe who didn't write for the stage or act but whose financial efforts were central to the theatre as an enterprise; the process of buying the rights to plays was handled by these playhouse entrepreneurs on behalf of shareholders, along with other money matters on the company's behalf like payments made for construction of playhouses, wages paid to laborers, and the acquisition of garments and materials for costuming. A play might be sold in completed form or simply promised on the strength of a plot outline -- x amount of money (perhaps £1) as a down-payment in exchange for the eventual delivery of a certain play fitting a certain description, either a promised plot summary or a sequel resolving an earlier installment. What was trendy and what wasn't varied with the year, but it seems likely that when certain genres of play grew popular, other playwrights capitalized on the evident profitability of pastoral romantic comedies/unified dramatic history plays with spicy bits/bloody Mediterranean revenge narratives/etc. to springboard their own careers. A typical going rate for a new, finished play would be around £6; for rewrites or partial contributions to a larger work, £2, and for the text of a play that had already premiered, £2.

It might also help to find a patron -- an aristocratic patron, someone who'll offer you legal and social protections as an artist while in return receiving glowing mentions in the introductions to your published poems.

#Write a treatment.

In place of a complete play, a plot-scenario would be presented to interested buyers -- the closest comparison I can think of off the top of my head would be a novelist's query letter or a screenwriter's film treatment, a document that serves as a condensed outline of the story's events. (Advertising playbills for the play in performance would draw their descriptions of the entertainment on offer from this plot-scenario as well -- few of these playbills remain, however.) The plot in this era is considered distinct from its actual lines, the poetic substance that distinguishes a familiar narrative poorly-written from the same narrative well-written -- if you can't have a good plot, aim for a well-written play. Writers and critics weighed the trade-offs to be made there quite seriously. A writer beginning a new play would start naturally with a broad idea (a history play about a usurped English king, for instance, with lots of ripping poetry and violent bits) or a source-text (an Italian novel, an episode from Chaucer, even a play that was popular last decade) and then drill down from there, until the outline of the scenario could be written. From there individual speeches and scenes might be written and rearranged to suit. The unfinished outline of the play Philander, King of Thrace, written by amateur playwright and Elizabethan drama groupie Edward Dering, gives us a glimpse of what the scenarios accompanying later finished plays might look like with scene-by-scene skeletal summaries of each scene's action.

Act. i. Scaen: i. Philander and his sister Suavina walke and conferre: she greives for ye warre.

Sc. 2. Philander telleth Euphrastes ye cause why he will not marry Suavina to any but a present K.

Scn: 3. Aristocles and Suavina discover theire passions and are discovered by Phonops.

Sc: 4. Philander doth banish Aristocles.

Sc: 5. Euphrastes doth counsel Aristocles to go to ye warres between ye Epirot and Achaian.

Plots like these might be co-written with other playwrights -- either as a collaborative all-in effort or piece by piece, with Writer A writing the first two acts and Writer B handing the last third, for instance. On the flipside, a playwright might outsource his entire plot to another writer and merely furnish the play's text; this could pay handsomely, but it resulted in exactly the kind of conflicts you'd expect about who "really" wrote the finished play. Depending on the nature of the playwright's inspiration, there were multiple options.

#Write!

Write, then revise, then write, then revise. Quite a bit of revision went into Elizabethan and Jacobean playwriting, and significant quantities of both paper and ink. References to writing and then blotting out abound -- take for instance Ben Jonson's remarks on Shakespeare:

I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakspeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, “Would he had blotted a thousand,” which they thought a malevolent speech.

Jonson's other remarks regarding Shakespeare characterize him as spirited but in serious need of editing and fact-checking, activities which would take place at this stage in the creative process rather than later. On the flipside, a 17th century poem which praises the poet's brother-in-law, writer Thomas Randolph, by denigrating Randolph's contemporaries who struggle to come up with decent material:

He was not like those costive wits, who blot

A quire of paper to contrive a plot,

And ere they name it, cross it, till it look

Rased with wounds like an old mercer's book

Writers collaborated with one another, and in this way divided the labor of play-writing according to each individual writer's strengths. Playwrights of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century spent a significant amount of time in bars, and establishments like taverns served as a collaborative space for spitballing ideas and composing verse -- from the earliest days of a play's creation to brainstorming narrative details, from the first-draft stage to live readings. Brainstorming sessions were sometimes carried on in public, which had some drawbacks. One anecdote records playwrights and collaborators Beaumont and Fletcher

[...] meeting once in a Tavern to contrive the rude draught of a Tragedy, Fletcher undertook to kill the King therein; whose words being overheard by a listener (though his Loyalty not to be blamed herein) he was accused of High Treason, till the mistake soon appearing, that the plot was only against a Drammatick and Scenical King, all wound off in merriment

Whether on not this specific incident ever really happened, the gist of it is still useful -- playwrights collaborated and discussed the twists and turns of their plot as they wrote. (Once a play's text made it to the stage, drinking establishments served as a valuable venue for feedback and public reception of a play.) Scenes and fragments of scenes were written down as they were composed, as so-called "foul papers", and from those pages a more polished copy would be transcribed for the use of players-- transformed from a collection of papers to a broadly unified text. This unified text was used to furnish scripts for individual actors' lines and prompt-books identifying performers' entrances/exits. in cases where the play-text in this form did not survive long enough for a printer's use, the rude draughts rough drafts might be returned to in order to reconstruct a missing sequence.

The play-texts used by actors and playing-companies were composed from these drafts, but various bits of stagecraft might be added into the mix as the play passed through various stages. The finished stage event could be an amalgam of material composed by different artists, infused with songs, dances, and physical comedy interludes-- with the lyrics of onstage songs provided by the composers of said songs and improvised material provided by stage comedians. After the rights to a play had been acquired by a particular playing company, alterations might be made to freshen up older material or to meet the exigencies of the playing company -- when the playing company dissolved, individual players might take their play-texts with them to their new companies, or sell them to interested third parties hungry to revisit a favorite play that had perhaps passed out of performance.