Sentence:  Zoe could not believe her eyes: this man looked nothing like the Uncle Max of her memories and nightmares; this chubby old man looked like a dwarfed bon vivant, a lecherous Santa Klaus, a comical figure in an opera, a "<WSD>mechanical</WSD>" from a Shakespeare play. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  One who does manual labor, especially one who is similar to Shakespeare's "rude mechanicals"