“the Disposition of Natures”: Aristotle, Comedy, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure

“Poetry,” claims Aristotle, “is a more philosophical and more serious thing than history.” Exactly how tragedy can be such occupies much of Aristotle’s subsequent thought in the Poetics, but he is referring here to all dramatic poetry. This is significant; it implies that comedy (the other dramatic genre he discusses) shares tragedy’s capacity for serious speculative thought. Just how comedy might do this, though, receives only a brief treatment in the Poetics, despite Aristotle’s apparent intention to give it attention equal to that he allots tragedy. Indeed, it has long been thought that this promised account was written, but (pace Umberto Eco) was lost before the sixth century. There are at least three sources, however, which classicists have for some time identified as offering substantial clues to what Aristotle might have had to say about comedy. These are, in order of significance, the extant Poetics itself; relevant passages from other works recognized as part of Aristotle’s corpus; and the Tractatus Coislinianus, a tenthcentury Byzantine manuscript which may be a summary of Aristotle’s lost treatise on comedy. The extant Poetics, often assumed to be a work solely on tragedy, actually devotes equal time in its opening chapters to comedy. Two crucial questions left us by the Poetics are what Aristotle