ABSTRACT
King Lear is a play that shows us that to succeed as human beings, we must make compassion a priority, because it is in compassion that we most fully realize our humanity, even if a life that prioritizes pity fails sometimes to alleviate personal and public suffering. The play offers another critique of Stoicism's rejection of pity, but it also offers a critique of the rhetorical conventions of pity themselves, conventions that unnecessarily pit the emotion against ideas such as justice.
