ABSTRACT
Aristotle's Poetics was written in the fourth century bc, about a hundred years after Attic tragedy was at its height. Insofar as the Poetics can be seen as a reply to Plato's concerns, Aristotle is primarily concerned with justifying tragedy's capacity to arouse the emotions and thus to rehabilitate tragedy in terms of its political utility. For modern critics, Aristotle has come to supply a critical lexicon for tragedy that is all but definitive: the Unities, the fatal flaw, catharsis. Before the publication of the Poetics in a reliable textual form, scholars had had very limited access to, or knowledge of, Greek dramatic texts. Although Schleiner does not make specific claims about the Poetics, she does speculate that Jonson lent Shakespeare editions of Greek tragedy. But even without a text in hand, Shakespeare would have been familiar with the neo-Aristotelianism that permeates Jonson's plays.
