[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 Lear's subconscious coveting of esteem, which encourages the like in her; and she is as flustered by her sisters' apparent dishonesty as Lear is by her ungraciousness. But the sad result is that she becomes so absorbed in proving her own honesty that she ends by parading it as a rebuke to her sisters. She falls victim thus to an irony of self-contradiction. For how honest is it to declare that one can say "Nothing," but then to allow oneself to sermonize at length? Moreover, her sermon views love as a commodity to be measured and apportioned, and thus overlooks merciful love, an unmeasured sharing of fellowship. In this sense, her answer ironically is a "nothing," because it is defective as a response; and Lear's glib adage that "Nothing will come of nothing" proves to be, in one sense, immediately true of both her efforts and his, in that only defect comes from defect. (In another sense, however, this adage is a defectively Lucretian one, blind to the Christian truth of creation ex nihilo.) As any reader of Scholastic philosophy knows, evil is by definition a defect in being, a privation or lack, a nothing. It is what life sinks back into when deprived of love's creative Word.

Cordelia's reply falls back on a merely legalistic reasoning: she will love her father according to her bond, the bond of her conventional obligation, which calls for a returning of duties for debts, no more and no less. She cannot pretend to love her father "all," she argues, because when she marries she will owe half her love to her husband. This mathematical formula for a dividing of love in halves according to merit is strangely like Lear's proposal to divide his land in thirds according to merit. Both cases imply a substitution of calculation for the spirit of free giving. Moreover, to pride oneself on the Tightness of dividing one's love hardly agrees with the biblical adage, "Be fruitful and multiply." Divided love virtually epitomizes tragedy.

Thus the love test has miscarried in polar ways. By eliciting a boastful self-righteousness in both Lear and Cordelia, it has made a great breach in the abused nature of love instead of fostering love. Quite absent, in both tester and tested, is any awareness that the proper proof of love is (as in the Bible), "Feed my sheep." Later in Shakespeare's play, however, Cordelia will learn a shepherding love—when she harbors the homeless Lear, clothes the naked Lear, and visits him when sick and imprisoned. In meeting thus the criteria for Last Judgment (see Matthew 25), she will modify her first judgment. But in her initial test she fails, principally because she is interpreting filial love without brotherly love. She is viewing her father only as a demanding creditor, not as a fellow man who, having fallen among thieves, needs compassion.

But how does Shakespeare bridge the change to the new Cordelia? Dramatically he cannot present on stage each of the phases in her transformation; for he is developing his tragic focus around Lear, whose savagery must lead him to an abyss of disintegration, preparatory to the miracle of his moral reintegration by a Cordelia of charity in full blossom. To whet our anticipation, her advent as rescuer can be rumored in interim scenes, and thereby a modification of her earlier outlook can be inferred by us. But first, as a basis, we need to be shown some seed of change in her—as the aftermath of her banishment, and before the close of Act I. Here is where Shakespeare's introduction of the King of France (a wooer of far different mold from the Petrarchan prototype of the old Leir play) is of crucial importance. The realism of France's courtship lights up the wreckage of Lear's love test with a glimmering of high romance, alien to the England we have seen. His love begins, in fact, the renovation of Cordelia.

The very plight of Cordelia enkindles in France a rescuing love. Her unprized state as a penniless outcast makes her newly "precious" in his eyes. "Be it lawful I take up what's cast away." Here is love according to a new kind of law, which does not measure by merit, or by favors received, or by any customary bond of obligation:

          Love's not love
When it is mingled with regards that stand
Aloof from the entire point.

Out of compassion, which gives him an insight into the hidden worth of what Lear has dismissed as "that little seeming substance," Cordelia's soul, France takes Cordelia and makes her his queen. France does not argue that Cordelia's answer was faultless. Instead, he urges Lear to realize that her offense cannot be believed to be "of such unnatural degree" as to make her a monster. Is it not, rather, a "tardiness in nature" which has but left "unspoke / That it intends to do?" With this faith France espouses her.

The attitude of France signalizes a transcending both of Lear's morality tied to impulse and of Cordelia's morality tied to deserving, while at the same time it accords with what is for him both lawful and naturally spontaneous. He has acted from a morality open to the possibility of miracle, open to that supernatural ground of community which is implicit in natural community. He has taken to himself a bride, that he may perfect her—a concept that is basic to the New Testament idea of marriage. In this sense his act is figurally Christian, although he lives in pre-Christian times. We may contrast his outlook with the despairing naturalism of Gloucester who, when seeing the King fall "from bias of nature," idly accepts this bias. Whereas Gloucester regards "eclipses in the sun and moon" as nature's fortune-telling, France's response to eclipses of human judgment and love is in accord with the New Testament concept that such signs (see Luke 21:25) are occasions for men to "lift up your heads," since redemption draws nigh when there is "distress of nations with perplexity." Elizabethan auditors of Shakespeare's play could have recalled that this apocalyptic hope is the Prayerbook's "Gospel" for the second Sunday in Advent, and they therefore could have sensed in the figure of France an Advent truth.

France's faith begins soon to be justified. For by the end of the scene we find Cordelia saying to her sisters:

       Use 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.

A shift in Cordelia's attitude is here I think discernible, although Shakespeare is too careful of psychology to permit its emerging as an abrupt change. Cordelia has not modified her suspicion of her sisters, but she is acquiring the patience not to name their faults. And she is no longer justifying herself to her father, and in their hearing, as being rich by not having a "glib and oily art" and a "still-soliciting eye." Instead, her eye is now solicitous for "our" father's future welfare, and full of regret for having lost his grace. Considering the fact that this speech follows directly after Lear's own ungracious command to her to "be gone" without his love and favor, her compassion for his situation is noteworthy. We can anticipate that such a spirit will grow and deepen in her as Lear's plight worsens. Thus a possibility has been established for that eventual great scene of reconciliation, in which father and daughter will kneel each to the other, forgiving and giving benediction.

The Earl of Kent had defended Cordelia's blunt reply to the love test, declaring on her behalf that she had thought "justly" and had "most rightly said." But Shakespeare, as I have suggested, can scarcely have thought that Cordelia spoke "most rightly." Rather, he has been highlighting an initial flaw in her perspective.…