Shakespeare and the theater of pity (William Shakespeare)

This dissertation explores Shakespeare's interest in pity as both a thematic and a theatrical concern. On the one hand, Shakespeare's plays dramatize rhetorical situations in which one character begs another character for pity or mercy; on the other, the plays are involved in a rhetorical context in which the action on the stage arouses a response of pity in the theater audience. Common to both contexts is a rhetorical understanding of pity as a powerful emotion that not only contributes to social harmony by cultivating charity and compassion, but also destroys social bonds by fostering modes of deception and vengeance based on counterfeit representations of suffering. Although this ambivalence is problematic for the philosopher, it provides the playwright with a rich source of situations and images that dramatize the volatility and unpredictability of human emotional relationships. This volatility, moreover, arises as a result of issues that are fundamentally theatrical in nature, such as the relationship between reality and fiction, the nature of visual and verbal representations of suffering, and the cultural and social conditions that inform an audience's response to such representations in the theater. For Shakespeare, ambivalent ideas about pity, and unpredictable responses to suffering, frame the competing interests of civic harmony and civil war in Titus Andronicus, ideal love and infidelity in Othello, and private and public emotions in King Lear.