Inactivity and the call to action, lassitude and energy, pessimism and optimism, stasis and history – there could perhaps be no more significant opposition than that between two of the greatest playwrights of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Anton Chekhov and Bertolt Brecht. And within this opposition, this contrast of mood and possibility, it is possible to trace some of the vicissitudes of pity. In Chekhov we can find an apparently endless sequence of meditations, soliloquies which represent self-pity in all its plethora of forms – soliloquies which, of course, diverge widely, even wildly, from the Shakespearean standard in that, far from providing windows onto the stage of the individual's soul, they rather serve to provide the audience with further insight into the delusions of the characters, into how far it is possible to misrepresent the state of one's emotions and concomitantly to build up a false image of the self and the other upon which one can then feel bound to act, to the distress of all involved.

Where Chekhov is apparently languorous (although this, of course, is a carefully contrived effect of his plays rather than their guiding principle), Brecht is brisk. He engages directly with Aristotle, to the effect that pity is no longer to be any part of the purpose of the theatre. The problems with Aristotelian theory, as far as Brecht is concerned, are twofold, although the two are inextricably linked. The first is the personalisation of the purported effects of drama: for Brecht, theatre is essentially a social activity – as of course it also was for Aristotle, but for Brecht the effects themselves need to be felt upon the social pulse rather than within a potentially individual act or feeling of catharsis. Second, Brecht is concerned about the ‘end-stopped’ nature of the Aristotelian diagnosis: theatre for Brecht is part of a wider, more general social texture, and the feelings it inculcates or causes will thus themselves have societal repercussions.