Severe Mercy in King Lear The best thing about King Lear is that the deeper you dig, the more meat you find. It seems simple enough, except that every now and then something pops out of the dialogue that severs the veil of coherent reality to deliver hard blows to the eternal Inside. Even with a little reflection, I think few, if you consider King Lear, could emerge unshakable. There are shining archetypes of pain, grace, mercy and redemption. And like all truth, Lear abounds in paradoxes: we love him, we hate him; it is like King, divinity; like a father, a son. Its beginning is noble but immature, its end is destitute but sublime. His subjects, all of them, are opposites and mirrors. The messages come to us disguised as both story and image. The two are irremediably linked to each other, but we will consider them somewhat apart in the hope of making some progress through such mystical mud. The images come as flashes of recognition and intuition. We don't need to understand something to be affected by it, because intuition is recognition on a subconscious level, which is equally, if not more, important. But unlike the "flashes of glory" that images can endure, the story is gradually grasped, perhaps even long after the performance, when the mind can consolidate and review the events witnessed. On the surface, King Lear is a pagan play, as it is set in pre-Christian England. But despite all this, there is no shortage of references to divinity and interesting speculations. After all, this is a play set on the edge of eternity and must make us question the universe in relation to the characters and ourselves. The first tragedy is that Lear's world is devoid of revelation. It is simply Man and the impressive silence of the Dead. They are a people without certainties. We who watch the show with the benefit of a Christian worldview must shift and put aside our certainties and beliefs, if possible, to allow a glimpse of the desperation and horror that every hopeless man must encounter. It's not easy to do, and extremely disheartening when we succeed. As in Beowulf, one of the oldest pieces of mythical literature in our language, the only certainty of the afterlife for a man was to live in the memory of those who remained alive, and the greatest end would be a heroic ballad, a song by which a man may live forever, if forever were sung.