Is Shakespeare Really Thinking About the Request Moment?

When we're working on fiction, our minds are almost entirely conscious of the means that we are using to get the stories down on paper. In other words, when you say, is shakespeare really thinking about ambition with macbeth? Or in king lear, is he thinking about inheritance and love and so on? i don't think anybody has ever satisfactorily described how the mind goes about retrieving things. I once heard mike nichols talking about directing a film: 'The remarkable thing about making a movie is that both your conscious and your unconscious intentions go into the making of it'