‘What’s in a name?’ Shakespeare’s inventio and the Topic of ‘notatio’ (names) Kirk Dodd University of Sydney
[email protected] Students of the Elizabethan grammar school, including the King Edward VI School in Stratford-upon-Avon, were trained on the Ciceronian conception of the ars rhetorica which included the three canons of composition: inventio, dispositio, and elocutio (invention, arrangement, and style).1 Yet, while much has been published about Shakespeare’s uses of the tropes and figures (his elocutio), not a great deal is known about Shakespeare’s applications of inventio methods.2 Most precepts for inventio focus on the consideration of particular ‘topics’ to help invent arguments for oratory, such as considering the definition of one’s subject, or its name, its genus, its species, its causes, its effects and so forth. The Romans called these topics ‘loci’ (places) or ‘sedes’ (seats or regions), and they were conceived as quasi-literal hiding places in the mind where arguments lurked, waiting to be discovered, and drawn out, thus in-vented into the world.3 1 Quentin Skinner, Forensic Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p.4. 2 Raphael Lyne, discussing Barthes’s explanation of inventio as more ‘extractive’ for discovering existing material than ‘creative’, notes that ‘one of the problems in the reception of rhetoric has been an over- emphasis on the ‘third part of the technè rhétorikè known as lexis or elocutio, to which we are accustomed to pejoratively reducing rhetoric because of the interest [we] Moderns have taken in the figures of rhetoric’’, Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp.