Labouring for invention: a `Shakespearean' play called Bennelong, with a rhetorical analysis of Shakespeare's inventio

Abstract

This creative writing thesis presents a blank verse 'Shakespearean' drama called 'The Tragicall Hiftorie of Woollarawarre Bennelong' and conducts a detailed analysis of Shakespeare's writings to determine new findings about Shakespeare's use of rhetorical invention. Partly in response to T.S. Eliot's lament that the tradition of writing blank verse drama like the Elizabethans had 'died', this work explores the prospect of restoring that tradition by examining and imitating Shakespeare's methods to produce a full-length 'Shakespearean' drama about a crucial episode of Australia's colonial past. ‘Bennelong' dramatizes the relationship between Australia's first governor, Arthur Phillip, and the Aboriginal man he kidnapped to become his so-called 'ambassador', Woollarawarre Bennelong. My approach to this contentious episode of Australian history is guided by the protocols for working with Indigenous cultural themes, and in many ways the work challenges the Eurocentric view of history which prevails in contemporary mainstream Australian society. The play aims to encourage Australians to reconsider and reconceive their own past by presenting it in the form of dignified Shakespearean tragedy. The play is written to be performed but only in accordance with processes of cultural consultation which has informed this project from its early stages. My dissertation seeks to understand practical aspects of Shakespeare's creative process by considering his works in light of the rhetorical precepts for ‘invention’ taught in Renaissance grammar schools. After presenting an account of these precepts, the dissertation conducts a systematic analysis of Shakespeare's texts to demonstrate that he was using these methods and that he was trained in Cicero’s ‘topics of invention’, frequently drawing on them to help invent the material of his poems and plays. These findings have then been reapplied to my play Bennelong to assist with its 'Shakespearean' aesthetic. The dissertation therefore provides insights into Shakespeare’s creative process and how these can inform the development of new drama; it improves our understanding of how Shakespeare applied Renaissance rhetorical theory; and it develops new methods for examining traces of the arts of inventio in a text.