ABSTRACT
After a brief discussion of ancient commentaries on pity in dramatic poetry and rhetoric, this chapter examines Hamlet's response to the First Player's speech, which is both an emotional reaction to Priam's death and a narrative account of Hecuba's grief for Priam, as a model for understanding how Shakespeare imagines and dramatizes the rhetorical function of pity in his plays. I conclude by examining Shakespeare's allusions to Sinon from Virgil's Aeneid, a figure who embodies the kind of feigned appeals to pity, especially appeals to pity designed to conceal motives of revenge, that will be explored in later chapters.
