SOURCE: Pechter, Edward. “On the Blinding of Gloucester.” ELH 45, no. 2 (summer 1978): 181-200.

In the following essay, Pechter elucidates a pattern of vengeance, punishment, and suffering in King Lear.

We are in the midst of a revolution in Lear criticism. Only six years ago A. L. French declared:

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...