Aristotle's Poetics and storytelling

Aristotle's Poetics: lecture notes by Aristotle himself? Or note-taking by one of his students? Is this surviving fragment a rulebook, a prescriptive guide for narrative structure (as Robert McKee, among others, claims)? What does Plato, French classicists, Italian Renaissance scholars and Shakespeare have to do with it? And what about the many books claiming that adopting Aristotle's ideas makes for good screenwriting?

Let's read Aristotle's Poetics and supporting texts, inspect examples from the books of his misreaders (Syd Field, Michael Tierno) and opposers (Augusto Boal) to make up our own minds.