Aristotelean comedy according to Cooper, 1

I am fascinated with the academic side of comedy, as this previous post hopefully demonstrated. So this post (or series of them) won't be funny or humorous, but more about how philosophers think about comedy linguistically. I'm just an interested spectator, not a researcher myself but, hopefully this motivates you the reader to explore this interesting topic yourself! 

We start with Aristotle's Poetics, which is a philosophical discussion of drama (especially tragedy) as it relates to epic poetry and stage play dramas. Several academics have conjectured that Aristotle also wrote a second volume concerning comedy (remember the Aristotelean dichotomy drama is either tragedy or comedy). My source shall be Lane Cooper's 1922 book, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy with an adaptation of the Poetics and a translation of the Tractatus Coislinianus. To quote from its preface:

As the Poetics of Aristotle helps one to understand Greek tragedy and the epic poem, and, if employed with care, modern tragedy and the serious novel, so, it is hoped, the present volume will help college students and others to understand comedies ... have indeed included everything I could find in Aristotle, in his teacher Plato, or in his successors, that might aid us in reconstructing his views on comedy.

In the section "A lost Aristotelian discussion of comedy", Lane says:

It is generally believed that Aristotle included in his writings or lectures a systematic treatment of comedy ... evidence in the Poetics, references in his other works, evidence in other writers who refer to him, and general probability, favor the view that he discussed the subject in more than passing fashion in a written record. ... It is generally agreed that the loss of any discussion of comedy by Aristotle is a very serious one to students of literature.

The question is: if there really was a "lost" Aristotelean treatment of comedy, can we deduce from other sources what it might have said? A significant source of information for Lane Cooper's book is, as mentioned, the Tractatus Coislinianus. According to wikipedia, this is an ancient Greek manuscript outlining a theory of comedy in the tradition of Aristotle's Poetics. Some scholars believe it is the work of a commentator on Aristotle's theory of comedy, some that it's notes or sketches (written by Aristotle or a student of his) of the lost second section of the Poetics, and some believe that it's a later work, perhaps by Theophrastus (the successor to Aristotle in the Peripatetic school). While the Tractatus Coislinianus is significant, it is not primary for Cooper's analysis. The primary source is Aristotle's Poetics.  

 I quote from Cooper's section "Fundamental demands of Aristotle":

According to Aristotle, in every drama there arc six constitutive elements, to each of which the poet must give due attention. These are

1. plot;
2. ethos or moral bent (shown in the kind of choices made by the personages of the drama);
3. dianoia or "intellect" (the way in which the personages think and reason, their generalizations and maxims, their processes in going from the particular to the general or from the general to the par- ticular, and their efforts to magnify or to belittle the importance of things);
4. the diction, the medium in which the entire story is worked out by the poet through the utterance of the personages;
5. melody or the musical element in the drama (including the chants of the chorus, individual songs, and the instrumental accompani- ment);
6. "spectacle" (all that appertains to costume, stage-setting, scenery, and the like).

The composing dramatist obviously does have to attend to these six elements, and the list, as Aristotle correctly observes, is exhaustive. It would be the same for a comic as for a tragic poet.

That's all for now. More in a later post.