Classical Invention in the York Trial Plays

Inherently, a play is a rhetorical event. It is generally not written for silent reading, but is meant to be heard and seen. As such, its speeches and dialogue must appeal to an audience, teaching, entertaining, or arousing it to reach whatever conclusion the playwright wishes to communicate. An understanding of composition theory current when a play was written may in fact help to uncover the methods by which a playwright convinces an audience. For analyzing a set of plays from fifteenth-century England, when rhetoric was the basis for teaching written and oral composition, knowledge of this theory is especially important.