Lear, King | Roy W. Battenhouse (essay date 1965)
Roy W. Battenhouse (essay date 1965)
SOURCE: "Moral Experience and Its Typology in King Lear," in Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises, Indiana University Press, 1969, pp. 269-302.
[In the excerpt below, Battenhouse, viewing King Lear as a Christian play, examines how Cordelia's sense of morality shifts during the play through her experiences with love.]
Cordelia, we must recognize, does not initially understand love as forgiveness. Her behavior in the opening scene's crisis, while less gravely faulty than Lear's, is nevertheless allied to his and helps precipitate his "hideous rashness." For she too seeks self-justification and acts from a sense of Tightness tinged with self-regard. How else explain the fact that she, who later (by Act IV, scene iii) "heaved the name of Father / Pantingly forth," can not in this opening scene "heave / My heart into my mouth"? She is of course here under constraint from...
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