pitying

By offering Desdemona a handkerchief as his first gift to her, Othello seeks to ease Desdemona's suffering for him, and in the later scene Desdemona reaches out to help Othello in a reciprocal act of kindness and compassion, taking her part in the narrative of Othello's adventures by pitying him, and even providing an oblique verbal indication of what that action represents in her first word to him: "Faith." Desdemona had earlier indicated to Emilia that her love for Othello involves the sharing of griefs: "he hath left part of his grief with me/To suffer with him" (3.3.55-56).

They look at such examples as the pittiers and the pitted in Herodotus and Thucydides; pity, power, and spectacle in Sophacles' Trachiniae; vase painting; pitying the sick in the Hippocratic corpus and Greek tragedy; and Plutarch.

It is the contrast between Ladislaw's 'sunny brightness' and Casaubon's 'rayless gloom' (241) that prompts in Dorothea 'the first stirrings of a pitying tenderness fed by the realities of [Casaubon's] lot and not by her own dreams' (242).

Her husband looks at her "piteusement [with pity]." In both tales 2 and 26 there is no pitying party who can mitigate the suffering of another.