How can I use context in an essay about King Lear?

It might be helpful here to look at a question from an A level paper: 'Despite the cruel treatment Gloucester suffers, his moral awakening is uplifting and enduring.' To what extent do you agree with this view?'Tragedies as a whole ask us about the nature of suffering - and whether that suffering is somehow dignifying or instead defines humanity as condemned to a godless, ultimately meaningless existence - and so bringing in this thematic and crictical context can really add to your answer and give it depth. We can ask whether Gloucester's suffering speaks to this general idea of 'moral awakening(s)' in tragedy as a whole. King Lear itself exists in a religious and political context in which the overt discussion of religion was banned on stage - and yet that hasn't stopped critics from labelling the play as 'apocalyptic', explicitly engaging with ideas of the Last Judgement in the bleakness of the play's conclusion, with Cordelia and Lear's deaths (an overt decision by Shakespeare, given that the original historical basis of the play from Holished's chronicles describe Lear and Cordelia surviving and being restored to the throne - a version actually performed on stage from the 17th until the late 18th century so as not to upset the audience). In Gloucester's suffering, we might see that conflict between religion and overtly absent religion (Sean McEvoy describes the divine as 'chillingly and provocatively absent'), particularly in the pivotal moment of his false fall from the cliff, which is a form of resurrection that we might see in Christ's crucifixion and resurrection in the Bible - so his fall is, in a sense, redemptive and fits within a divine patterning, suggesting that Shakespeare uses tragedy to suggest that all suffering has a purpose within broader Christian contexts. But then again, all Jan Kott sees in Gloucester's fall is 'the paradox of pure theatre', a 'philosophical buffoonery' - that Shakespeare isn't suggesting that Gloucester's suffering is somehow recalling Christian redemption but instead he is playing with the nature of theatre, with the fact that Gloucester's fall is always trickery because all theatre is false, a representation of reality and not in itself 'real'. If we believe Gloucester's fall is recalling the resurrection, we can perhaps believe that his moral awakening is 'uplifting' - but if we believe Kott, and think instead that Shakespeare is simply pointing towards a falsity and meaninglessness of human identity, and that no redemption is real but is instead trickery, then perhaps his suffering is instead futile. In the context of the play as a whole, which has a plot hinging upon the conflict created by Lear's valuing of his daughters at their 'worth' - a worth which turns out, in the end, to be worthless - these questions of meaning and identity are crucial to understanding the play as a whole. In using these Christian, historical and critical contexts, it becomes much easier to argue and consider alternative interpretations which will really help to shape your argument with the support of well selected quotations from pivotal moments of the play.