ABSTRACT
In the middle of William Shakespeare's King Lear an unnamed gentleman is distressed to find the old king trading insults with the worst thunderstorm in living memory. In "Shakespeare and the Skeptics" Richard Strier writes that in King Lear Shakespeare advances a kind of secular, de-mythologized Christianity. C. L. Barber, to take another example, writes: in Shakespeare's mature work, religious language comes into play to express the investment in the family bond. The suggestion that Shakespeare is offering a critique of pityor better still, empathy, a term that truly captures the sense of deep emotional identification with the sufferer that King Lear investigatesis insupportable. Pity directly challenges one of the most gruesome acts of persecution in Shakespeare's corpus: the blinding of Gloucester. The events of the recent past offered Shakespeare examples of hands-on politics by those in power, and of resistance to such acts.
