I found this footnote about Shakespeare's character Falstaff in Burke's "Four Master Tropes". I would consider Falstaff a gloriously ironic conception because we are so at one with him in his vices, while he himself embodies his vices in a mode of identification or brotherhood that is all but religious. Falstaff would not simply rob a man, from without. He identifies himself with the victim of a theft; he represents the victim. He would not crudely steal a purse; rather, he joins forces with the owner of the purse -- and it is only when the harsh realities of this imperfect world have imposed a brutally divisive clarity upon the situation, that Falstaff is left holding the purse. He produces a new quality, a state of synthesis or merger -- and it so happens that, when this synthesis is finally dissociated again into its analytic components (the crudities of the realm of practical property relationships having reduced this state of qualitative merger to a sta...