Shakespeare and the Universal Topics of Invention

Abstract

ABSTRACTShakespeare’s remarkable literary achievements attract interest in his schooling and the compositional techniques that he would have applied as part of his creative repertoire. Yet where much of the scholarship on Shakespeare’s rhetoric has focused on his applications of the tropes and figures (his elocutio), the last of three processes of rhetorical composition (inventio, dispositio, and elocutio), this paper will present new findings about Shakespeare’s likely applications of topical invention. In this paper, I will introduce the art of inventio and distinguish between the “specific topics” and the “universal topics” of invention, where the universal topics could be used for any kind of speech and were first presented as a practical scheme by Cicero’s Topica (44 BCE). From a review of the literature, I then draw the original hypothesis that Shakespeare may have been signalling some of his reliance on topical invention by displaying topical terms in passages that appear to have been shaped by a consideration of those topics – a mode of composition called “demonstrare artem”. This paper examines Shakespeare's work against a selection of topics from Cicero’s scheme that are definitional in nature – the topics of enumeration, partition, genus, species, differentia, and definition – to provide evidence that affirms the proposal that Shakespeare was trained in the universal topics and using them as part of his repertoire. These findings are important for scholarship in rhetoric because they demonstrate how an author trained in rhetoric would have applied his training on inventio in a variety of contexts, and they are important for Shakespeare scholarship because they provide new ways of understanding Shakespeare’s texts and how they may have been produced, demonstrating how inventio techniques could support and coordinate Shakespeare’s dexterous applications of elocutio.