On the Blinding of Gloucester

I can confidently say that there is a received reading of Lear'received' in the sense that pretty well everyone seems to accept it. It is a reading that reached full explicitness in Bradley * [who] proposed that we should change the title to The Redemption of King Lear, because the intention of the gods was 'neither to torment him, nor to teach him a noble anger, but to lead him to attain through apparently hopeless failure the very end and aim of life'. In the Bradleyan context, 'redemption', and . . . 'purification' . . . don't have any specifically theological overtones; but in his successors such overtones become deafening and are generally associated with a sort of unctuous religiosity which I, for one, find most distateful in itself as well as absurdly inappropriate to the spirit of Shakespeare's play

Blinding · Clinical trial · Internal Medicine · Law in Society and Culture · Medicine · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism