Severe Mercy in King Lear :: King Lear essays

Severe Mercy in queen regnant Lear The silk hat thing about King Lear is that the deeper you dig, the more meat you find. It seems straightforward enough, still that every now and then something leaps out of the dialogue that severs the veil of ordered 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 argon flicker archetypes of pain and grace and mercy and redemption. And like all truth, Lear abounds with paradox we cope him, we hate him he is as King, deity as father, a child. His solution is noble yet immature, his difference is destitute yet sublime. His subjects, all, are antonyms and mirrors. The messages go 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 by means of such mvstic mire. The images come as flashes of recognition and intuition. W e neednt understand something to be unnatural by it, for intuition is recognition on the sub-conscious level, which is equally, if not more, important. But impertinent the jolts of glory that images may bear, the story is gradually grasped, perhaps even huge 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 eagerness 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 ask on the universe in relationship to the characters and ourselves. The first tragedy is that Lears mankind 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 authorisations and belief aside, if possible, to let inan inkling of the dispair and repulsive force which must meet each man with no hope. It is not well-to-do to do, and extremely discouraging when we succeed. Asin Beowulf, one of our languages oldest pieces of mythic literature, a mans 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.