ABSTRACT
Braggadocchio’s general affinity to the tone and mood of Ariostan romantic epic is undeniable. Although he has been thought to derive specifically from the boastful Mandricardo, Ariosto’s King of Tartary is a noble figure, not a churl or impostor, and although sometimes extravagant is not wholly ridiculous. In his cowardly aspect, Braggadocchio is more closely related to Ariosto’s Martano (Var 2:206-11). He is not as close kin to the miles gloriosus of Roman comedy and the braggart captain of Italian comedy as is usually claimed, for he is only an amateur, and his baseness, pretentiousness, and meanness of spirit are stronger than his easily exposed braggartism. He is Aristotle’s rash man: ‘boastful and only a pretender to courage’ (Nichomachean Ethics 3.7). Whether he ultimately descends from Menander’s alazon, the boastful soldier of Greek New Comedy, is an unanswerable question. By Spenser’s time, a wide variety of stage figures of swagger and oath was well known: Herod in the medieval mystery plays, the civilian boaster Ralph Roister Doister, bragging Vices like Ambidexter in Thomas Preston’s Cambises. Others were shortly to appear: Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Parolles, Jonson’s Captain Bobadill.
