Description	Cordelia
Source	Shakespeare Illustrated
Date	1888
Author	William Frederick Yeames (British Painter, 1835-1918)

Cordelia's portion

Cordelia's Portion (1843-44)
Ford Madox Brown
Oil on canvas
size unknown
Lady Lever Art Gallery
Port Sunlight, Merseyside.

LEAR
In the meantime I'll get down to my real business.—Hand me that map over there.—I hereby announce that I've divided my kingdom into three parts, which I'm handing over to the younger generation so I can enjoy a little rest and peace of mind in my old age.—Cornwall and Albany, my loving sons-in-law, I now want to announce publicly what each of my daughters will inherit, to avoid hostilities after I die. The two great princes of France and Burgundy, vying for the hand of my youngest Cordelia, have been at my court a long time and will soon have their answers.—My daughters, since I'm about to give up my throne and the worries that go along with it, tell me which one of you loves me most, so that I can give my largest gift to the one who deserves it most.—Goneril, my oldest daughter, you speak first.

GONERIL
Sir, I love you more than words can say. I love you more than eyesight, space, and freedom, beyond wealth or anything of value. I love you as much as life itself, and as much as status, health, beauty, or honor. I love you as much as any child has ever loved her father, with a love too deep to be spoken of. I love you more than any answer to the question “How much?”

CORDELIA
(to herself) What will I say? I can only love and be silent.

LEAR
I give you all this land, from this line to that one—dense forests, fertile fields, rivers rich with fish, wide meadows. This land will belong to your and Albany's children forever.—And now what does my second daughter Regan, the wife of Cornwall, have to say? Tell me.

REGAN
Sir, I'm made of the same stuff as my sister and consider myself just as good as she is. She's described my feelings of love for you precisely, but her description falls a little short of the truth. I reject completely any joy except my love for you, and I find that only your majesty's love makes me happy.

CORDELIA
(to herself) Poor me, what am I going to say now? But I'm not poor in love—my love is bigger than my words are.

LEAR
You and your heirs hereby receive this large third of our lovely kingdom, no smaller in area or value than what I gave Goneril.—Now, you, my youngest daughter, my joy, courted by the rich rulers of France and Burgundy, what can you tell me that will make me give you a bigger part of my kingdom than I gave your sisters? Speak.

CORDELIA
Nothing, my lord.

LEAR
Nothing?

CORDELIA
Nothing.

LEAR
Come on, “nothing” will get you nothing. Try again.

CORDELIA
I'm unlucky. I don't have a talent for putting my heart's feelings into words. I love you as a child should love her father, neither more nor less.

LEAR
What are you saying, Cordelia? Revise your statement, or you may damage your inheritance.

CORDELIA
My lord, you brought me up and loved me, and I'm giving back just as I should: I obey you, love you, and honor you. How can my sisters speak the truth when they say they love only you? Don't they love their husbands too? Hopefully when I get married, I'll give my husband half my love and half my sense of duty. I'm sure I'll never get married in the way my sisters say they're married, loving their father only.

LEAR
But do you mean what you're saying?

CORDELIA
Yes, my lord.

LEAR
So young and so cruel?

CORDELIA
So young, my lord, and honest.

LEAR
Then that's the way it'll be. The truth will be all the inheritance you get. I swear by the sacred sun, by the mysterious moon, and by all the planets that rule our lives, that I disown you now as my daughter. As of now, there are no family ties between us, and I consider you a stranger to me. Foreign savages who eat their own children for dinner will be as close to my heart as you, ex-daughter of mine.

Act I, scene I

King Lear II

King Lear
Edwin Austin Abbey
Oil on canvas
size 54.5 x 127.25 inches
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

Abbey exhibited King Lear, another of his large, dramatic pictures, at the Royal Academy in 1898; the painting was accompanied in the catalog by these lines from Act I, scene i:

Ye jewels of our father, with washed eyes
Cordelia leaves you. I know what you are;
And, like a sister, am most loth to call
Your faults as they are named. Love well our father.
To your professed bosoms I commit him.
But yet, alas! stood I within his grace,
I would prefer him to a better place.
So farewell to you both.

The play begins with King Lear making the decision to abdicate the throne and divide his kingdom among his three daughters: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. The eldest two are already married, while Cordelia is much sought after as a bride, partly because she is her father's favourite. It is announced that each daughter shall be accorded lands according to how much she demonstrates her love for him in speech. To his surprise Cordelia refuses to outdo the flattery of her elder sisters, as she cannot be compelled to describe her love with dishonest hyperbole. Lear, in a fit of pique, divides her share of the kingdom between Goneril and Regan, and Cordelia is disowned. The King of France however marries her, even after she has been disinherited.

Soon after Lear abdicates the throne, he finds that Goneril and Regan's feelings for him have turned cold, and arguments ensue. The Earl of Kent, who has spoken up for Cordelia and been banished for his pains, returns disguised as the servant Caius, who will "eat no fish" (that is to say, he is a Protestant), in order to protect the king, to whom he remains loyal. When Lear's daughters refuse to house his rowdy escort of knights, he rejects their suggestion of firing the knights and is turned out into the stormy darkness, along with his Fool. Meanwhile, Goneril and Regan fall out with one another over their attraction to Edmund, the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester—and are forced to deal with an army from France, led by Cordelia, sent to restore Lear to his throne. A cataclysmic war is fought.

Meanwhile, there is the Earl of Gloucester and his two sons, Edgar and Edmund. The illegitimate Edmund concocts false stories about his legitimate half-brother, and Edgar is forced into exile, affecting lunacy. Edmund engages in liaisons with Goneril and Regan. Gloucester is confronted by Regan's husband, the Duke of Cornwall, but is saved from death by several of Cornwall's servants, who object to the duke's treatment of Lear; one of the servants wounds the duke (but is killed by Regan), who plucks out Gloucester's eyes and throws him into the storm telling him to, "smell his way to Dover". Cornwall dies of his wound shortly thereafter.

Edgar, still under the guise of a homeless lunatic, finds Gloucester out in the storm. The earl asks him whether he knows the way to Dover, to which Edgar replies that he will lead him. Edgar, whose voice Gloucester fails to recognise, is shaken by encountering his blinded father and his guise is put to the test.

Lear appears in Dover, wandering and raving. Gloucester attempts to throw himself from a cliff, but is deceived by Edgar in order to save him and comes off safely, encountering the king shortly after. Lear and Cordelia are briefly reunited and reconciled before the battle between Britain and France. After the French lose, Lear is content at the thought of living in prison with Cordelia, but Edmund gives orders for them to be executed.

Edgar, in disguise, then fights Edmund, fatally wounding him. On seeing this, Goneril, who has already poisoned Regan out of jealousy, kills herself. Edgar reveals himself to Edmund and tells him that Gloucester has just died. On hearing this, and of Goneril and Regan's deaths, Edmund tells Edgar of his order to have Lear and Cordelia murdered and gives orders for them to be reprieved.

Unfortunately, the reprieve comes too late. Lear appears on stage with Cordelia's dead body in his arms, having killed the servant who hanged her, then dies himself.

Source: Wikipedia

Cordelia

Description	Cordelia
Source	Shakespeare Illustrated
Date	1888
Author	William Frederick Yeames (British Painter, 1835-1918)

Lear’s youngest daughter, disowned by her father for refusing to flatter him. Cordelia is held in extremely high regard by all of the good characters in the play—the king of France marries her for her virtue alone, overlooking her lack of dowry. She remains loyal to Lear despite his cruelty toward her, forgives him, and displays a mild and forbearing temperament even toward her evil sisters, Goneril and Regan. Despite her obvious virtues, Cordelia’s reticence makes her motivations difficult to read, as in her refusal to declare her love for her father at the beginning of the play.

Cordelia’s chief characteristics are devotion, kindness, beauty, and honesty—honesty to a fault, perhaps. She is contrasted throughout the play with Goneril and Regan, who are neither honest nor loving, and who manipulate their father for their own ends. By refusing to take part in Lear’s love test at the beginning of the play, Cordelia establishes herself as a repository of virtue, and the obvious authenticity of her love for Lear makes clear the extent of the king’s error in banishing her. For most of the middle section of the play, she is offstage, but as we observe the depredations of Goneril and Regan and watch Lear’s descent into madness, Cordelia is never far from the audience’s thoughts, and her beauty is venerably described in religious terms. Indeed, rumors of her return to Britain begin to surface almost immediately, and once she lands at Dover, the action of the play begins to move toward her, as all the characters converge on the coast. Cordelia’s reunion with Lear marks the apparent restoration of order in the kingdom and the triumph of love and forgiveness over hatred and spite. This fleeting moment of familial happiness makes the devastating finale of King Lear that much more cruel, as Cordelia, the personification of kindness and virtue, becomes a literal sacrifice to the heartlessness of an apparently unjust world.

King Lear I

James Barry, "King Lear Weeping Over the Death of Cordelia" (1786-87)

full title · The Tragedy of King Lear

author · William Shakespeare

type of work · Play

genre · Tragedy

language · English

time and place written · England, 1604–1605

date of first publication · First Folio edition, 1623

publisher · John Heminge and Henry Condell, two senior members of Shakespeare’s acting troupe

narrator · Not applicable (drama)

climax · Gloucester’s blinding in Act III, scene vii

protagonist · Lear, king of Britain

antagonists · Lear’s daughters Goneril and Regan; Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester

setting (time) · Eighth century b.c.

setting (place) · Various locations in England

foreshadowing · Goneril and Regan’s plotting in Act I foreshadows their later cruel treatment of Lear.

tone · Serious and tragic; the occasional bursts of comedy are uniformly dark

themes · Justice, authority versus chaos, reconciliation, love and forgiveness, redemption

motifs · Madness, betrayal, death

symbols · Weather plays an important symbolic role in the play, notably in Act III, when the tremendous thunderstorm over the heath symbolizes Lear’s rage and mounting insanity; the actual blindness of Gloucester symbolizes the moral blindness that plagues both Lear and Gloucester himself in their dealings with their children; the “wheel” of fortune is another symbol by means of which Edmund, at the end of the play, conceives of his fall from power back into insignificance.