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Severe Mercy in King Lear
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The best thing about King Lear is that the deeper you dig, the more meat you find. It seems straightforward enough, except that every now and then something leaps out of the dialogue that severs the veil of coherent reality to strike sharp blows at the eternal Within. Even with a minimum of thought, few, I think, when considering King Lear, could emerge unshaken. There are shining archetypes of pain and grace and mercy and redemption. And like all truth, Lear abounds with paradox: we love him, we hate him; he is as King, deity; as father, a child. His beginning is noble yet immature, his end is destitute yet sublime. His subjects, all, are antonyms and mirrors.
The messages come to us disguised as both story and image. The two are hopelessly bound up with one another, but we shall consider them a little separated in hopes of making some progress through such mvstic mire. The images come as flashes of recognition and intuition. We needn’t understand something to be affected by it, for intuition is recognition on the sub-conscious level, which is equally, if not more, important. But unlike the “jolts of glory” that images may bear, the story is gradually grasped, perhaps even long after the performance, when the mind may consolidate and review the witnessed events.
On the surface, King Lear is a pagan play, as it is set pre-Christian England. But it has, for all that, no shortage of appeals to deity and interesting speculation. This is, after all, a play set on the brink of eternity and it must make us wonder on the universe in relationship to the characters and ourselves. The first tragedy is that Lear’s world is void of revelation. It is simply Man and the awesome silence of the Dead. They are a people with no assurence. We who watch the play with the benefit of a Christian worldview have got to displace ourselves and push our assurances and belief aside, if possible, to let inan inkling of the dispair and horror which must meet each man with no hope.
It is not easy to do, and extremely discouraging when we succeed. Asin Beowulf, one of our language’s oldest pieces of mythic literature, a man’s only assurance of afterlife was living on in the memory of those who remained alive, and the greatest end would be a heroic ballad, a song through which a man may live forever, if forever it were sung.
