Re-inventing Shakespeare: his methods of inventio and a new ‘Shakespearean’ play called Bennelong

Abstract

Most Renaissance grammar schoolboys would have been trained in a tripartite process of rhetorical composition – inventio, dispositio and elocutio – yet there has been an incorrect tendency to analyse only Shakespeare’s application of rhetorical figures as Shakespeare’s application of rhetoric. Rhetorical figures concern only the third and final method of composition, elocutio, and whilst methods of inventio (discovering arguments) and dispositio (arranging those arguments) seem more ideational than they do textual, we should not exclude the prospect of finding evidence for Shakespeare’s applications of inventio methods in his work. This paper will introduce the still-emerging field of Shakespeare’s inventio and the strategies I have developed to find evidence for this part of Shakespeare’s creative process – evidence that I suggest is hiding in plain view, camouflaged, as it were, before our every eyes. I will argue that Shakespeare’s use of inventio methods conforms to Cicero’s treatise on rhetorical invention, and present three analyses of Shakespeare’s application of the topics: notatio, contraries, and definitions. I will then illustrate the practical applications of inventio methods by demonstrating how I have re-applied these findings to my own blank verse drama called Bennelong, which aims to achieve a ‘Shakespearean’ aesthetic.