Understanding Shakespeare: The Merry Wives of Windsor by Robert A. Albano - HTML preview

A translation of it is included here, together with a hypothetical reconstruction of Poetics II, which integrates the known fragments of Book II into the Tractatus” (xxiii).

4 Brackets are removed from the quote which Janko had inserted to distinguish the Tractatus from the reconstruction. Janko also adds a pertinent note regarding the characters of comedy: “The three examples of comic character are subtly chosen. All are departures from the mean, and therefore in error … but not to a criminal degree, precisely as Aristotle described the characters of comedy at Poetics 49a32-5. These three types, buffoon (bomolochos), ironist, (eiron), and boaster (alazon), are fundamental to Aristophanic comedy. They are found together at Ethics II 7.1108a21ff.: ‘pretension in the direction of overstatement is boastfulness and the person who has it is a boaster, but in the direction of understatement it is irony and [the person who has it] an ironist. Regarding what is pleasant in fun, … the excess is buffoonery and the person who has it is a buffoon, but the person who is lacking it is a kind of boor’” (170).

5 Holland emphasizes the distinction at some length: "We can see the difference in the Falstaffs of the two parts. Twinned in avoirdupois, soldiering, and appetites, they nevertheless differ in some important ways. In both parts, Falstaff is a creature who defeats expectation, not only in the action, but also in our response (as Freud notes). From the point of view of