Pity, Compassion, Commiseration: Theories of Theatrical Relatedness

Abstract

In this essay I address the language of fellow feeling in seventeenth-century French discussions of tragedy. I argue that as dramatic theorists move away from Aristotle's Poetics and its assessment of catharsis, they broker a distinction between pity and compassion. Pity is understood as a part of the great machine of catharsis that serves as a schooling for the purged self, whereas compassion ushers in a broader vision of the social, where theatre is prized not because it schools the individual but because it gives rise to a commonality of experience. Looking at theorists such as d'Aubignac, La Mesnardière, Corneille and Rapin, I argue that although the discourse of compassion is first imagined as a private response to staged suffering, the shared nature of that response means it also comes to form a particular sense of the social.

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