This was easy, as Elizabethan London was crazy for rhetorical figures. A chap called George Puttenham had a bestseller in 1589 with his book on them (that’s about the year of Shakespeare’s first play). And that was just following on from Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence, which had come out a decade earlier. Book after book was published, all about the figures of rhetoric. So I should probably explain what the figures of rhetoric are.
