any one of the categories above. In fact, Falstaff not only contains elements from all four of Frye's stock types, but, as Shakespeare moved him from play to the next, the playwright also posited the character into a quite different comic role that determined both the character's language and actions.
Of course, through no fault of his own, Shakespeare was unaware of Frye’s four types. However, Shakespeare did seem to be fully aware of the three Aristotelian comic character types from which Frye derived his own analysis. In Janko’s translation of the Tractatus Coislinianus and in his A Hypothetical Reconstruction of Poetics II, the three comic types bear similarities to Frye’s first three types listed above. 3 However, the definitions for the three Aristotelian types differ remarkably from that by Frye:
Characters of comedy are the buffoonish, the ironical and the boasters.
(Tractatus Coislinianus 45)
Comedy represents characters who are inferior to ourselves, i.e. worse than we are: therefore comic characters are those who are somehow in error in soul or body. Typical characters of comedy are the buffoonish, the ironical, and the boasters. Each of these diverges from the mean, and therefore deserves not praise but reproach. As we said in the Ethics, the buffoon errs in humor, as