Lear & Cordelia

The view of Cordelia in I.i as wholly either a model of rectitude and sound moral principles or hard, unyielding, and excessively proud of her superior virtue cannot be sustained, for her behavior and language indicate that she both has moral principles and is unyielding. To the degree she does not explain herself fully once the public demands for and declarations of love have begun, Cordelia seems unyielding. Her terse "Nothing" when she is asked what she can say to top her sisters and her refusal to be drawn in to their overearnest language call for explanation. If it is the case that in his foolish vanity and susceptibility to flattery Lear refuses to give any weight to the truth or explanation of such statements of love that Cordelia makes ("I . . . obey you, love you, and most honour you"), then it is also true that Cordelia does not press to make herself more fully or clearly understood. What she does instead of referring to different kinds or qualities of love that may be infinitely partitioned is indicate that love can be partitioned according to quantity.

The possibility that love itself provides its own increase does not occur to anyone, least of all Lear, who appears to measure his sense of worth by the quantity only, and who attaches his sense of entitlement to the fact of his royal status. Cordelia seems troubled by the manner of her sisters' declarations, but it does not occur to her that the premise of measuring love by quantity alone is itself a problem. Cont

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eem weak as well. His reaction is that of excessive royal temper. It is the height of an anger that has been building since being insulted by Goneril for allowing his knights to treat her castle like a brothel, an anger that is not assuaged when Regan does not agree to his plan to lodge himself and his hundred knights with her. Once the storm begins in earnest, it continues and rises. On the heath in III.ii, Lear's anger persists, aggravated by self-pity and something like surprise at the ungratefulness of his daughters. In shouting at the storm, he is really shouting his rage at his children: "I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness; / I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children, / You owe me no subscription: then let fall / Your horrible pleasure" (III.ii.15-20). The storm answers in kind, personified as the expression of what Lear is feeling. The self-pity that Lear experiences is what conveys the feeling that all the normal relationships that ought to prevail in an orderly world have broken down. His statement that he is more sinned against than sinning includes the meaning that as king he was entitled to expect certain prerogatives and that his children's stripping them from him was a far worse insult than any excesse

Category: Literature - L