ABSTRACT
Sympathy, that quality of human connection arising from the spectatorship of “distress” described here by Elizabeth Gilding, represents one of the central moral and aesthetic concerns of the second half of the eighteenth century. Poets praised its virtues, moral philosophers contemplated its workings, and literary critics pondered its influence on the arts. As the most “social” of the arts, and that medium most dependent upon immediacy and spectatorship, drama was credited with inspiring sympathy to an extent possible in no other form. The ability to inspire this connection represents both the source of drama’s ability to delight and, of greater significance to eighteenth-century audiences, its moral impetus.
