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The Renaissance approached Aristotle's Poetics with at least two significantly different attitudes from the twentieth century. First, there existed a tremendous respect and indeed reverence for Aristotle, who continued to dominate higher education in spite of the Humanist rediscovery of and interest in Plato and the rhetorical attacks on Scholasticism. This respect was augmented by the fact that Robertello's new edition and translation (1548) brought into the public domain what was obviously the best treatise ever written on the subject of belles lettres (as many still believe today).1 Secondly the Renaissance shared with Aristotle a view of reality which profoundly differs from our own in the twentieth century, and this view largely determined what they understood Aristotle to mean by his basic definition of tragedy (or any poetic fiction) as "an imitation of an action" (6.2).2
The respect for Aristotle and the obviously high quality of his newly reintroduced treatise meant that, with the exception of a few vernacular critics, Renaissance scholars, thinking and writing in Latin, focused their attention on construing just what it was Aristotle was saying rather than trying to second-guess his conclusions, a habit of twentieth-century critical theorists approaching Aristotle from their own very different assumptions about art and life.
With the tradition of realistic fiction behind them, modem critics and translators of the Poetics have tended to misconstrue what Aristotle means by die imitation of humans in action (6.2). Aristotle identifies six categories of this imitation, four of them applying to all kinds of literature, not just tragedy: muthos, ethë, dianoia, and lexis. These four have almost universally been translated and referred to in English in this century as "plot," "character," "thought," and "style" - in the critical context of plot, character, setting, and theme of realistic fiction, as studied and taught to this day in high school and college literature classes. But Aristotle's muthos does not mean "plot" in this commonplace twentieth-century sense, nor does ethe or the singular ethos (also used by Aristotle) mean "character."
Here the Humanist scholars' use of Latin along with their sharing of Aristotle's assumptions about the reality of human personality, allowed them to reflect much more accurately what Aristotle is talking about. First of all, muthos, always translated^z¿>«/a by Renaissance critics, does not...