rategy of love nevertheless relies on its absolute ease of access wherever there is good feeling. Elsewhere, Shakespeare compares love to a star "whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken" (Sonnet 116), another way of expressing the idea that love eludes measure. Cordelia's strategy of love ignores that possibility, with the result that to "love and be silent," while perhaps a perfectly reasonable rejoinder to Lear's unreasoned demand for affection, is not sufficient to the task of answering the force of that demand. Still less does that strategy answer the showy flourish of phony emotion on the part of Goneril and Regan, which overtakes whatever force mere reason might have. Thus when Cordelia tries to make amends, asking Lear to "make known /It is no vicious blot, murder, or foulness . . . That hath deprived me of your grace and favour" (I.i.229-32), her plea falls on deaf ears, too little too late.
The authenticity of Cordelia's love can be read as moral rectitude, but she falls into the trap of considering love in quantitative terms, with the result that she cannot yield in her position. The charge that Cordelia is excessively proud of her superior virtue appears to derive from the quantitative characterization of love that begins with Lear's question "Which of you shall we say doth love us most?" and that continues in Goneril's and Regan's speeches. It seems significant that Cordelia's first, brief line comes in the form of an aside, directly after Goneril's pronouncement that she loves Lear "beyond all manner of so much" as has occurred to her to discuss. Regan proceeds to insist that, far as Goneril has gone with her pronouncement, "she comes too short," followed by Cordelia's next line, another aside: "Then poor Cordelia! / And yet not so; since, I am sure, my love's / More richer than my tongue" (I.i.78-80). This line can be seen as an expression of superior virtue, but a careful look at context--and subtext--seems...