[In this essay, Millard examines Cordelia's part in the political elements of King Lear, noting that her rejection of her role as daughter in favor of one typically reserved for a son results in an internal struggle to attain her identity.]

Cordelia's silences, absences, and the highly emblematic quality of the scenes in which she appears have inspired a strong critical tradition which views the role played by Lear's youngest daughter as primarily supportive and, therefore, dramatically secondary. With so few lines, Cordelia, however revered, has yet to be recognized fully as a major character at the center of the play's action, a tragic figure who consistently plays a crucial role in the determination of events in King Lear, including her own death.¹ This oversight may also be due in part to our assumptions about the importance of her military action within the political sphere of the play. As one critic articulates this view, Cordelia's decision to invade Britain is "not immediate or important in the play." Consequently, the battle is perceived as only a background for Edmund's speeches, while Cordelia "moves in shadows" as the truly patient woman and daughter.²

A comparison of King Lear with the earlier play, King Leir, however, emphasizes both the force and coherence of political elements in Shakespeare's play and Cordelia's central part in them. Rather than dismiss Cordelia's death as accident, the effect of Lear's tragic action, or even as poetically appropriate self-sacrifice, we might better consider the defeat of Cordelia's French forces and her subsequent death in terms of the importance of temporal structure in Renaissance drama; that is, as resulting from her decision to invade Britain, a preemptive attempt to reverse the effects of her rebellion in the first scene of the play.³ As the play moves from the ritualistic first act to its apocalyptic conclusion, Cordelia chooses to operate in a political sphere whose demands conflict with her more personal mission to rescue Lear. The military campaign in act four is the consequence of an off-stage decision by Cordelia to postpone giving "unaccommodated" Lear the serene "place" he needs in an effort to restore the place she believes him to have lost and desire still. In this militant and righteous posture, she not only suggests the doomed Virago of Renaissance legends but also assumes the role of the tragic hero, by mistaking both the nature of things and the proper way to attain the necessary end—Lear's rescue or release. More significantly, Cordelia presents a tragic paradigm as a woman who first rejects the self-obliterating role of daughter/mother demanded by her father, only to be defeated later by her attempt of the heroic militant role reserved for the son/father. In changing so radically Cordelia's fate from that of the traditional Leir story, Shakespeare's play not only presents us with a more ambiguous character but also raises challenging questions, reflective of Jacobean culture, about the redemptive role of women.

1

In attempting to comprehend the gothic structure that is Lear, one is sorely tempted to view Cordelia as monolithic. Indeed, Paula S. Berggren has noted that most women in Shakespearean tragedy seem to split into two basic types: the good, as victims, or the evil, as monsters.⁴ Yet, to see Cordelia as either sainted martyr (pathetic, timid, politically naive, misunderstood) or villain (cold, willful, insensitive, proud, unbending) is to ignore an important dramatic tension in the play. In fact, Cordelia's struggle to attain her identity while poised between political necessity in a patriarchal world and her own moral wisdom defines her tragic experience, her simultaneous movement toward retribution and atonement. Moreover, her ambiguous personality seems designed to elicit our ambivalence, our dual response. The Lear story in any of its forms demands that we recognize Cordelia's need for integrity in the love-test scene, and so too in Shakespeare's play, the tension of the first scene partly draws from our compulsion to align ourselves with the youngest, fairy-tale third child. But when we regard Cordelia as specifically a female child (as "our joy" and "least"), we—including many who are female, and especially, parents—tend to put her at the other end of the telescope, to see her in harsher, more traditional terms: one who betrays her identification as the loving nurse, one whose begrudging response must be an error, as later acknowledged by her tears in act four. Both Cordelia's plain truth and her "silence" in the first scene have been viewed as "manly" insofar as they are courageous, hard or untender postures (Kent is rarely criticized for his bluntness or lack of ceremony), which Lear would not expect from his most beloved daughter. That it is "pride which she calls plainness" is true, after all; that it is undesirable in any child, especially a daughter, is a paternalistic perception. From this point of view, the critic sees Cordelia's movement toward self-possession and her plea for her integrity as unladylike insubordination, a reflection of her father's pride and arrogance and a taint which is later purged by her banishment and/or converted by the romance of marriage with France.⁵

Another look at Shakespeare's probable sources for the Lear story, however, reveals more about Shakespeare's creation of tension and ambivalent response for the audience of this first scene. The purpose of the love-test in The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir and His Three Daughters is to divide equally the kingdom-as-dowry so as to dispose of three unwed daughters and to maneuver Cordelia into marrying the suitor Leir favors, not Shakespeare's foreign lord but "a King within this Isle." In his own version of the scene, Shakespeare removes hints about Lear's motivation which would lend him pathos (that he is sad and distraught because his wife has died, and that he wants to live in devout contemplation), and eliminates the suggestion of naiveté which might excuse his error (that he is ignorant of the affairs and character of daughters, "For fathers best do know how to governe sonnes" [1.1.19]).⁶ In Leir, Gonorill and Ragan are clearly revealed, in a scene before the love-test, to be carping, mean-spirited, and jealous of Cordelia's beauty, so that the audience is predisposed to appreciate Cordelia's disgust with their prevarication.

The most significant change is in the character of Cordelia as she appears in Shakespeare's play. The youngest daughters in the accounts of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Raphael Holinshed, and John Higgins are cryptic, riddling, and intimidated. The slightly varying answers invariably point to the issue of spiritual versus material evaluation: "Look how much you have, so much is your Value [or "woorth," or "goodes," respectively], and so much I love you." The injunction of such an answer is for the king to look within; the riddle is a key to the sisters' true avarice. In Leir, Cordelia's reply, "What love the child doth owe the father, / The Same to you I beare, my gracious Lord" (11. 279-80)—is yet personal as it speaks of a potentially open-ended relationship. As Shakespeare's Lear increases the demand ("more opulent") of the old men of the legends, so he receives less, in fact, nothing. As Cordella presented an expansive equation, Cordelia specifically limits hers: "I love you according to my bond, no more nor less." As Cordella, under fire from her father's wrath, reaches toward conciliation: "Deare father, do not mistake my words, / Nor my playne meaning be misconstrued; / My toung was never usde to flattery" (11. 301-3), so Cordelia stands taller in the fire and seeks justification. Thus Shakespeare transforms his material to ask what the older stories more confidently assume, and the question is one of central importance in the later romances: What does it mean to be a royal daughter in a patriarchal society? What does it require?

To begin, Shakespeare emphasizes Cordelia's competition with her already-married sisters. That her personal dislike of her sisters noticeably influences her behavior has been frequently observed. Her first response is to them in the aside, "What shall Cordelia speak?" Or, rather, it is to herself; for throughout the scene, Cordelia is primarily in a conversation with herself, as the third person reference in her question indicates. Meanwhile, Goneril's and Regan's opulence places her in a competition where being last is a distinct embarrassment if not a liability: "Then poor Cordelia!" But Cordelia's concern is less with winning or losing and more with her own feelings, as her answer to herself makes clear: "And yet not so, since I am sure my love's / More ponderous than my tongue." The Quarto text presents "richer" in lieu of "ponderous," alluding to the original riddle of spiritual/material worth. The substituted "ponderous," however, combines the idea of weight with thought. Cordelia's pondering, in the exchange with her father, about the real nature of her love and their relationship leads to a dialectic in which her asides posit one answer to the question (to one half of herself and to us) and her public response posits another (to Lear and her other half). As Lear divides his kingdom, so his uncompromising demand divides Cordelia, a psychological state which endures for one reason or another until her tragic death.

At this point, the political expediency of Lear's contest—to ensure his youngest daughter's power (and his own "rest") by means of "more opulent" property and a carefully selected husband—apparently does not escape Cordelia. Neither is the task at hand beyond her. She is eloquent in her brief asides and infuriatingly articulate and precise in her replies to Lear. In fact, she has forty-six lines in the scene as compared with the earlier Cordelia's eighteen, or her sisters' eleven and nine. Cordelia's famous "silence" refers not to what she does say but to what she does not say, beyond her hints in the asides (the other half of the dialectic). Rather than a helpless reply, "Nothing" is a deliberate choice, the alternative dictated by her own imperative: "Love and be silent," as well as by Lear's equation of words with reward. Whereas the Quarto text includes only Cordelia's "Nothing," the Folio adds Lear's query, "Nothing?" and its reprise, simultaneously prolonging the tension and asserting her rejection of Lear's formula.⁷ Like a person indicted. Cordelia is driven by Lear's imperatives into an equally uncompromising confrontation with herself, for she cannot answer Lear's question and define their relation without defining herself. It is a perilous journey for Cordelia in so little space and time. When she speaks again, she dramatically increases the proportion of first person pronouns to second person: "Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty / According to my bond, no more nor less." When she "mends" this speech a little, the proportion is more balanced: "You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I / Return those duties back as are right fit, / Obey you, love you, and most honor you." While the other Cordelias were teaching the father about himself, Cordelia teaches Lear about his daughter: "So young, my lord, and true."

A good deal of Cordelia's comment, of course, is an attempt to refute her sisters' hypocrisy, and in the process both define and distance herself from her siblings in the only was the social order permits, by distinguishing herself as daughter and wife: "Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, / To love my father all." By coming to realize the limits of her own personality, she finds the dimensions of her integrity. Cordelia's dramatic assertion bespeaks her claim to adulthood and emotional autonomy. Joyce Carol Oates has aptly commented on the tenor of this confrontation: "In this woman's insistence upon a moral intelligence not determined by her social role we have rebellion, the first and the most surprising of all."⁸ That Cordelia's rebellion is all the more offensive to her father because she is female is suggested by Lear's invocation of the witch Hecate in his curse. That he views her violation of familial duty as destructive of the civil order as well is indicated by his "preference" for the barbarous Scythian over this "sometime daughter."⁹

However splendid Cordelia's personal realization, her achievement is shadowed by the socio-political realities of the context. The fate of Britain as well as of her father hangs suspended, and neither her courage nor her militant candor can defeat her sisters' politic skill or avert their triumph. If she lacks that "glib and oily art," she also eschews poetry. Where her sisters imagine their golden future of "grace," "health," "beauty," "felicitation," "joys," "freedom," and "honor," Cordelia withdraws from the necessity of Lear's "darker purpose" and speaks of "duty," "bond," "care," "plight," "obedience," "vicious blot," "unchaste act," and dishonor. What her sisters eloquently proclaim with impunity is what Cordelia, as "last" and "least" would have to (and does) inherit, that is, to prefer her father to "space" or "libertie" or "life" or other "love." Cordelia's language reveals to Lear and the court what he would leave unsaid, his intention to usurp her life and subsume her future to his "rest." We recognize that the political alternatives are unacceptable, Burgundy, Lear's probable choice for Cordelia's husband ("I crave no more than hath your Highness offer'd"), proves greedy and politically ambitious. Cordelia's dowry of a larger third would ensure the enmity of her sisters and guarantee the strife Lear wished to avoid. So, too, Cordelia's unconditional commitment to the perpetual "nursery" of the father she must love "all" would preclude all hope of self-possession. As it is, Cordelia reverses their positions and power and, in effect, wins her freedom and ascends a throne of moral individualism. Furthermore, her ascension to the throne of France completes an emblem of a most highlycharged and threatening political meaning for British kings and subjects. Cordelia's role as Queen of France becomes a part of her identity which no one in the play can afford to forget. Edmund's only legitimacy in the last two acts of the play is as defender of Britain against this foreign Queen.

Both Cordelia's struggle to maintain her integrity and her right to rule Britain according to Lear's design would have been her unquestioned prerogative had the "least" been more in this society, that is, male. Unlike his counterparts in the source stories, Lear never laments the lack of a son but compensates himself instead with his demand for the full measure of his daughters' feminine virtues: obedience, love, servitude. With shattering clarity the events of the play dramatize the ramifications of Lear's attempt to impose these virtues rather than encourage the development of a true sovereignty in his daughters. Gloucester's apocalyptic vision in scene two reveals that Lear has tried, in fact, to make Cordelia both daughter-mother by her personal love-pledge and son through his gift of patrimony: "and the bond cracked d'twixt son and father . . . there's son against father; the king falls from bias of nature" (11. 111-14). Cordelia's independent stance, her rejected role as primary inheritor, and her "male" bluntness are thus put in ironic relief to Edmund's "lusty" bid to "top th' legitimate" in this juxtaposed scene.

Lear's unethical and politically dangerous experiment and its subsequent confusion—his hasty re-division of the kingdom to punish Cordelia—place him in jeopardy but not Cordelia. She has side-stepped the trap for a "better where." Her fate—to die as an invading queen—is not the inevitable consequence of this scene until, exiting, she "commits" him to the "professed bosoms" of the sisters whose "faults" and "cunning" she well knows, if "loath to call / . . . as they are nam'd." Having avoided one impossible commitment, she makes another she cannot, in her humanity, keep. Ironically, Cordelia's wish to "prefer him to a better place" suggests the scenario of the source material, his safe removal to her care in France, rather than the preemptive tragic invasion Shakespeare has her choose later when she recants this "commitment." When, in a recounted off-stage action, Cordelia's "importun'd tears" convince France to "incite" their arms in the service of her father's business, she chooses to imitate her father's impulsive act and punish her sisters, the "shame of ladies," by attempting to seize their patrimony through military offensive and return it to her father—an action personally ineffective and politically unacceptable.¹⁰ As we shall see, one of the most terrible ironies which Shakespeare suggests in the catastrophe of this play is that in her militant posture Cordelia unwittingly participates in her sisters' destructiveness, even as she battles their inhumanity.

Cordelia's choice of a militant role in advance of the ministerial one is central to both the play's action and its ominous theme regarding female ascendancy in conflict with patriarchal order. Having received their power through Cordelia's "default," Goneril and Regan demonstrate more obviously the dangers of female assertion and provide the context for Cordelia's actions in acts four and five. The steady descent of Goneril and Regan into "unnatural," ruthless monstrosity suggests the consequences of freeing these women from the patriarchal power which held them in check (and forced both obedience and eloquence upon demand) and the folly of allowing such daughters such "unnatural" authority. The Fool consistently chides Lear and Lear commiserates with Poor Tom, specifically, about "daughters" not children.

After the first scene of the play, Shakespeare mythically projects a situation similar to that described by Simone de Beauvoir as the fearful vision of patriarchal society. The reign of women is perceived as "the reign of irreducible duration, of contingency, of chance, of waiting, of mystery."¹¹ As an old dispossessed man, Lear is as vulnerable in the female realm of Nature as Cordelia is in the male-dominated settings provided for her trials: the court and the battlefield. The entire import of act three is that no man can stand in the fierce winds of a real matriarchy. Striving in his "little world of man," Lear not only identifies the storm (raw unchecked nature) with his mother-daughters but also recognizes that the support of patriarchy, Jupiter's thunderbolts, have been suborned as well: "But yet I call you servile ministers, / That will with two pernicious daughters join / Your high-engender'd battles 'gainst a head / So old and white as this" (3.2.21-24). As much as to the storm within, his own unleashed personality, Lear succumbs to two unpredictable forces of life: elemental nature and women. The movement of all the characters from dwellings, across a desolate landscape, to the field of battle and the cliffs of Dover in the last two acts of the play would seem to suggest that there is no home, no sanctuary of rest in the shifting world of female dominance. Even Cordelia who desires to provide shelter for Lear's "abused nature" can only offer the vicissitudes of the French camp.

2

Like so many other Renaissance writers, Shakespeare treats militant or Amazonian women according to whether they operate within the frame of the existing patriarchal order. Since there is no patriarchal order after Lear's abdication and subsequent madness, all his daughters' actions, however motivated, can only contribute to the chaos. Only when Albany demands authority from Goneril, and denies to Edmund that lent him by Regan (5.3.83-85), does the political turmoil begin to subside.¹² One can look at the anti-feminism of the Jacobean stage in general, and of King Lear in particular, as deriving from several contemporary events: male revulsion toward the threatening phenomenon of "a monstrous regiment of women" rulers and militant politicos in Europe; the recent death of the Queen, and with her the Tudor ideal of peace; and the various political plots against James I's throne, especially the Cobham plot in 1603, which attempted to overthrow the king in favor of the insubordinate Lady Arabella Stuart. One can also cite the strictures of various humanists, like Castiglione and Vives, against the teaching of martial arts and government to young ladies of the court, to explain Shakespeare's association of male disaster and psychological horror with female defiance and power. Contemporary polemicists were found of quoting the ancients, especially Juvenal: "Quem prestare potest mulier galeata pudorem?" (Satires 6.252: What modesty can you expect in a woman who wears a helmet?). However, the legend from British Celtic history of a real Virago, Boudicca, suggests a paradigm by which we can better comprehend Shakespeare's conception of the militant women in his plays and the necessity of their tragic fates.

Of that British stock from which the Tudors came, this queen and patriot fought gloriously against the Roman invaders of her country only to face ultimate defeat. Like Cleopatra, Boudicca had no mind to figure in a Roman triumph, and like several Shakespearean women of "manly" courage she killed herself. The Roman historian, Dion Cassius, records the Britons' deep respect and passionate mourning for her, while the Welsh Gildas exhibits contempt for "that deceitful lionness" who led a cowardly rabble army and lost the final battle.¹³ This duality of response to Boudicca's legend is manifest in Tudor histories and sheds light on Cordelia's complex character. The Elizabethan humanists were noticeably influenced by Tacitus' account of a wronged woman seeking revenge in a fool-hardy manner, but one book, Petruccio Ubaldini's The Lives of the Noble Ladies of the Kingdome of England and Scotland (written for Elizabeth in 1588 and published in 1591), specifies a double for Boudicca. Together "Bunduica" and her double, "Voadicia," resemble the dual image of the female warrior which appears in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The "Bunduica" figure, a bold Virago, is noted for her military prowess which is balanced by her marvelous virtues and praiseworthy deeds.¹⁴ We can see that image in Elizabeth I, in her white velvet dress and silver cuirass, "like some Amazonian Empress," and in the likes of Britomart, and perhaps Cordelia.¹⁵ Edmund Spenser celebrates Boundicca in The Faerie Queene as the precursor of Gloriana in her courageous opposition to oppression. Like Cordelia, Spenser's heroine loses the final battle underservedly, a victim of the universal corruption "overcome in happlesse fight," yet triumphant "on death in enemies despight" (2.10.14-16).¹⁶ On the other hand, Bunduica's double, Voadicia, suggests that Elizabethan man-woman whose thirst for vengeance leads to folly and impetuosity on the battlefield and chaos in the civil order. She is the actual Amazon queen of unmitigated power: a Tamora or Goneril or Pucelle. And she is also a failure. The legend of Boudicca generally connects with the exempla of other emotional women of classical fame, such as Dido or Cleopatra, who fail in moments of crisis, usually as a result of their passion (Note Goneril's "I had rather lose the battle than that sister / Should loosen him and me" [5.1.18-19]). After Elizabeth's death, the legend of Boudicca becomes increasingly tarnished. By the time she appears in Milton's History of Britain (1670), she is not only deplorably immodest, but also responsible for the barbaric and impotent conduct of British men and the failure of the campaign. Evidence that the legend of Boudicca, used for propaganda for the monarchy of Elizabeth, was turned to anti-feminist use in the Jacobean era can perhaps be found in Fletcher's Bonduca, performed by the King's Men in 1610 and therefore, contemporary with Shakespeare's own interest in ancient British history evident in Lear and Cymbeline. Bonduca is clearly subordinated in this play to the more chivalrous and competent leader Caratach, who watches in horror the fatal consequences of her generalship. After accusing her of complicity with the devil in meddling in "men's affairs," he bids the "trifle" go home and "spin" (3.5.132-35).¹⁷ Although many classical figures, human and divine, serve in Renaissance drama as models of female valor, Boudicca's dual identity is especially significant in the ambivalence it exposes in Renaissance culture towards militant women, an ambivalence which perhaps accounts for the incongruous juxtaposition of Cordelia's militant posture and patient resignation in acts four and five, if not for her defeat in battle. Indeed, Holinshed's account of Boudicca contains several parallels in tone and characterization with King Lear. Like Cordelia, Queene Voadicia moves against the Romans because of the disinheritance of her royal family and the plight of people who have been forced to endure a houseless condition of "hunger, thirst, cold. . . . " As Cordelia speaks of her sisters' treatment of Lear in contrast to that of a dog, Voadicia similarly complains of Roman cruelty "since there is no man that taketh so much as a wild beast, but at the first he will cherish it." Also like Cordelia, Voadica disclaims any motive of personal gain in her address to her troops. She comes not "to fight for her kingdome and riches," but to regain liberty and punish cruelty.¹⁸

That female militancy, however qualified by goodness, cannot prevail is indicated by the ironic interplay between the parallel careers of Edgar and Cordelia. Whereas Edgar, the elder, legitimate heir, can combine the dual role of "nurse" and champion—and triumph, Cordelia in her similar attempt cannot. So, too, the subconscious wish to punish the hurtful, unappreciative father can be executed with impunity and transcended by Edgar in the ritualized suicide attempt of his father.¹⁹ Conversely, Cordelia cannot prevent the annihilation of herself and her father as a consequence of both her attempt at separation in act one and her later chivalrous action in behalf of her "aged father's right." The virtues of goodness, patience, love, forgiveness, and "nursery," ultimately celebrated in Cordelia, are manifest first in Edgar. In acts three and four, he anticipates Cordelia's part by sympathizing with and tending to Lear, first, and then to his own father. At this point in the play, the sub-plot overtakes the main plot. Edgar, together with the Fool, assumes Cordelia's function, so that when Cordelia appears, her ministration is both a reflection of and comment on Edgar's. While Cordelia evokes all the "unpublished virtues of the earth" to "spring" with her tears and be "remediated in the good man's distress," Edgar, as Poor Tom, studies and learns. "How to prevent the fiend, and to kill vermin" (4.4.15-17; 3.4.157). Finally, Edgar's ability to cope with political and moral evil through personal, death-encountering ritual succeeds where Cordelia's tears and well-intentioned war fail. While both figure forth the moral victory of filial love, Cordelia pays the higher price, and Edgar's moment of justification is ironically juxtaposed with the terrible vision of hanged Cordelia in Lear's arms.

Although Cordelia and Edgar both might be described as naive in their response to evil, Edgar imitates the imaginative procedures of Shakespeare's women in the comedies and romances. He retreats to disguise, yields to emotional distress through the persona, Poor Tom, and learns the miseries of his father "by nursing them," before asserting his right.²⁰ Understanding "ripeness," he abides his father's death before engaging Edmund, not on his father's business, but his own. Thus he is at one with his action; a harmonious relation exists between all his ends and purposes, harmony exists between his purposes and means. Since tragedy stems from alternatives ignored as well as choices made, we should note the alternative to Cordelia's military action which Edgar offers when he allows time to bring Gloucester to him and prompt his part. That time is the remedy for destructive male impulse in the romances is generally acknowledged. Whatever Cordelia hopes to achieve by her action, the temporal structure of the play indicates that the military campaign is precipitous and premature. Often, in Lear, the motive for choosing alternative behavior is not given dramatic consideration; rather, the choices themselves and the consequences of these choices are more important than the reasons for them. Thus, Cordelia, who determines in an early letter to Kent to "give losses their remedies" (2.2.171-73), determines the events of the play from the blinding of Gloucester (3.7) to the battle (5.2), when she embarks "with a force" for England.

In this point, Shakespeare's divergence from his sources is only less dramatic than in Cordelia's death itself, a fact that suggests a relation between the two events. All known sources of the story have the king escape England and undergo a healing process before the redress of political wrongs. Leir, whose life is in certain danger from assassins hired by his daughters, seeks out Cordella in France and desires military assistance of her. The political implications of Shakespeare's events are specific. Cordella, France, and the French force, in whatever combination, however deployed in the various tales, are given legitimacy, first by the dukes' rebellion and second by Leir's responsible advocacy. No such legitimacy attends Cordelia's and France's invasion; this invasion is anticipated as retributive (3.3.11-13) and later described as personal: her love, its "mourning and importuned tears," did their "arms incite." That the Folio text excludes the several references to the invasion, prior to Cordelia's appearance in act four, attests to the political explosiveness of the issue for an English audience.

As a woman who will do before she says, Cordelia anticipates on her father's part a desire he no longer has—to reclaim his throne and power. While there is no textual evidence to support the contention that France has political ambitions for himself, there is his hasty retreat to deny it. In attempting to gauge Cordelia's motive, certainly, one cannot discount the punitive tone regarding the two who are the "Shame of Ladies" and the final cold anger of "Shall we not see these daughters, these sisters?" But this tone is only one of several, including her expression of filial sympathy when "she heav'd the name of 'father' / Pantingly forth, as if it press'd her heart" (4.2.27-28). Cordelia accepts and would restore the role Lear defined for himself in the first scene; she endeavors to atone for her sisters' crimes by returning kingly majesty to him through military exploit, as if, to quote Lamb, "the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station."²¹ Like Lear in act one, Cordelia treats Britain as her father's property. When she alludes to her dear father's business, we shiver to realize that the real business Lear must get on with is dying. Thus an exhausted old man tells Cordelia, "You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave" (4.7.45).

For his thematic purpose, then, Shakespeare not only compressed the events of Lear's rescue as they are described in the source material but also changed them so much as to risk troubling the play's audiences through the ages. Like Edgar, the Cordelias of the other versions minister to the father, providing him with shelter, comfortable rest, and restoring his confidence before raising troops to aid him in battle. For Cordelia, nursery and battle are simultaneous and therefore mutually defeating. Throughout act three, Lear's houseless condition suggests its remedy, the relief that Cordelia might provide. Indeed, Lear's confused question, "Am I in France?" suggests that happy alternative of the history; so too, the double edge of his reply ("Do not abuse me") to the truth of where he is suggests that to be in this hostile place, no longer "his," is both abuse and error. Shakespeare's use of dramatic contrast further conveys the inappropriateness of Cordelia's military campaign to her personal mission. The cries of a raving Lear in act three are punctuated with intelligence reports of France's maneuvers. After act three, scene four, Shakespeare never allows his characters to mention Lear's responsibility as king; rather, the mad king demonstrates all too clearly his distance from the mundane world of affairs. At the end of this sequence of "mad" scenes, Kent points to the real necessity of Lear's condition: "Oppressed nature sleeps. / This rest might yet have balm'd thy broken sinews / Which, if convenience will not allow, / Stand in hard cure" (3.6.95-98). In a scene positioned between Edgar's meeting with the blinded Gloucester and their arrival at the "cliff site, Cordelia discusses Lear's treatment with the Doctor (or Gentleman of the Folio text). The prescription echoes Kent's emphatically: "Our foster-nurse of nature is repose. / The which he lacks" (4.4.12-13). Immediately follows the report that the British powers are on the march. Whereas Lear has learned through extremity to transcend the political world, and Edgar, to suspend it, Cordelia is trapped and destroyed by both its realities (her foreign royalty and disinheritance) and its burdens, "the darker purpose" of her surrogate male-child role, or the punishment of her sisters. Once she commits herself to her "father's business," Cordelia casts herself in the image of the redemptive Son, a role immediately recognizable for its sacrificial implications, a role from which she cannot extricate herself once she discovers her father's transformation and hears his plea to "forgive and forget." In her "male" role, she eschews the imaginative, female suberfuge practiced by Edgar and the comedies' heroines: withdrawal and disguise. When the Gentleman describes her to Kent, the image poignantly depicts her struggle to remain poised within the dual impulse: "it seem'd she was a queen / Over her passion, who most rebel-like / Sought to be king o'er her" (4.2.15-17). The rebel-like Cordelia has brought herself and her father to the cliffs of Dover, in an action parallel to that of Edgar, only to find that she has misjudged her father's business and her own, and that the fall is real. Unlike Edgar, Cordelia does not enjoy integrity of action in act four. The reality of Lear's condition places her role as champion "son" at odds with that of nursing daughter:

O my dear father, restoration hang
Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss
Repair those violent harms that my two sisters
Have in thy reverence made!

(4.7.26-29)

As ministering daughter, Cordelia follows in the wellestablished tradition, dating at least from twelfth-century Arthurian romance, in which female healers tend the hero's wounds. The extension of this power to psychological healing is praised in the Renaissance by such as Anthony Gibson, in A Womans Woorth, defended against all the men in the world: "Even so a woman qualifies divers tempests, which wandring through a mans braines, do weaken his stronger powers untili this lawful and natural medicine be thereto applyed."²²

That her meeting with Lear is so peaceful, joyous, and genuine in its pathos only emphasizes the incongruity of the context in which Cordelia would attempt to cure "this great breach," his "untuned and jarring senses." Accordingly, Shakespeare presents jarring visual and auditory effects to underscore the irreconcilable nature of Cordelia's divided purpose. The Doctor and the Soldiers enter the scene together, the literal means by which Cordelia hopes to "repair those violent harms" made by her sisters.²³ As a "soul in bliss" dressed in battle armor, as she should be (and rarely is), Cordelia would appear to be a travesty. The newly feminized Lear, pacifist, patient and humble, is wakened to music and comfort only to face the alarum of troops. Cordelia has done her best to create the illusion of haven, a "redeemed world," but it evaporates all too quickly in the hostile landscape of civil war. Even Cordelia's expression of sympathy to her father combines the language of nursery: "restoration," "medicine," "kiss," "repair," "reverence," "pity," "benediction"—with the terms of warfare: "violent," "breach," "challenge," "oppos'd," "warring," "dread-bolted," "terrible and nimble stroke," "perdu," "helm," "enemy."²⁴

Plausibility has not been left behind in Lear regarding the defeat of Cordelia's forces and her death. Those in the British camp are so absorbed in preparation and the gathering of intelligence regarding the French force (5.1.51-54), that their personal affairs become muddled. But there is no discussion of strategy in the French camp where personal concerns have replaced the political. Cordelia prepares us for her tragic fate before Lear awakes. Acknowledging Kent's goodness, she predicts, "My life will be too short, / And every measure fail me" (4.7.2-3). While the gentle benedictions of Lear and Cordelia are yet fresh, the Gentleman reminds us that "the arbitrement is like to be bloody." While Edmund and Albany express their determination to repel the French and, now, English rebel forces, Cordelia in the fullness of her heart, is preoccupied with the Doctor's warning about Lear's condition: "Trouble him no more / Till further settling" (4.7.81-82). That Cordelia with Lear "by the hand" should fall into the abyss while walking the tightrope between these two poles of retribution and ministration should be no surprise. Victory for Lear and Cordelia, moreover, would present a situation as politically undesirable as Lear's proposal in act one. Whereas Cordila, in The Mirror for Magistrates version, "manly fought" beside her husband and her father, the spectacle of Cordelia, supporting a tottering Lear and leading forces against Goneril, Regan, Albany and Edmund is so obvious in its implication as to allow Shakespeare to omit most details of battle. The battle lost before it began, Cordelia's death at the hands of her ruthless enemy is, more likely than not, the logical outcome of principles of plot and characterization that have operated in the play.

As with another well-intentioned child, Hamlet, we can neither blame nor justify the action of Cordelia "who with best meaning . . . incurred the worst." Both France as a chivalrous prince, coming to the rescue of virtue in the first scene, and Edgar in his ritual combat with Edmund suggest analogues to Cordelia's militant stance. In ritual combat, however, Edgar accepts a higher (male) authority, submits to the gods' adjudication, and trusts to "this sword, this arm," with the result that he receives not only justice but also a confirmation of his authority. Without authority, Cordelia is indeed as a fly to whatever gods rule in the patriarchal world of Shakespearean tragedy. That Goneril ("the better soldier") and Regan are destroyed by their lusts does not provide occasion for Cordelia's rescue, but rather a fatal distraction from that purpose. Involved with the business of restoring a patriarchal order, the men in whose hands her life is suspended simply forget her.

Albany, as the eldest son-in-law and legal inheritor in scene one, finally assumes his patrimony, simultaneously with Cordelia's defeat, and yields it to Edgar, the champion son (Fl). The reestablishment of patriarchal order, however, is a destructive mission for Cordelia, and an undesirable one for at least two of the three male survivors. There are those who view the return of Lear's "kingly" manhood as worth the price of Cordelia's death ("sacrifice"). Robert Egan, for example, comments, "Cordelia is in Lear's arms, more his child now than ever, and Lear is massive with the dignity of his fatherhood."²⁵ Does Cordelia's death free Lear? He rouses from his feebleness to kill "the slave that was a-hanging" her. As he laments the loss of her life ("dead as earth") and its mystery—that "a dog, a horse, a rat, have life," and her no breath at all—does not the "idol" of a gilded cage become finally subordinate to his assertion that his "poor Fool is hanged?" However pathetic and magnificent Lear is in his last moments, his love for Cordelia remains possessive. The quality of love remains the human value which Cordelia carries like a grail on her quest, across that tightrope of polarities. But children cannot redeem their parents, neither by loving them "all" nor by living with them forever and wearing out "packs and sects of great ones." Children can only replace their parents, as Edgar does.

Whether Cordelia's "sacrifice" is redemptive at all remains one of those critical questions to which we bring our own perspectives. Unlike Desdemona, Juliet, or Cleopatra, Cordelia is denied a triumphant death on stage with its suggestion of moral quality. Unlike Ophelia or Lady Macbeth, she inspires no memorial description of her final moment. No recorded statement of faith or final assertion lingers after her. Her heroism is superseded by Lear's heroic boast regarding the hangman. And, unlike Hamlet, she receives no royal eulogy, no soldier's rites. Rather, Lear speaks of her as though she had died after many years as his companion and emphasizes her femininity: "Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman." If Cordelia, unlike her counterparts in the source material, never acknowledges responsibility for Lear's ordeal, neither does Lear acknowledge any responsibility for her fate now. To the contrary, Lear's perception and that of the survivors in the play is that her death was accidental, futile, and meaningless. The "men of stones," who say little else that they feel, vaguely wonder, "Is this the promised end?" and even Kent observes only that, "If Fortune brag of two she loved and hated, / One of them we behold" (5.3.283-84). Cordelia's requiem is indeed a "dull sight." The pity belongs to Lear for his loss rather than to Cordelia for hers.

Ever since Bradley, critics have found Cordelia's existence to be less important than what she represents. Cordelia's "No cause, no cause," inspires us to cherish her as a feminine principle of goodness, selflessness, and love. As Lisa Jardine has argued, the literary examples of "good" women from antiquity through the Christian martyrs enshrine a female hero that is defined by weakness, vulnerability, and tears, by her being other than manly.²⁶ In "gentle" Cordelia Shakespeare seems to reaffirm the traditional perspective that female sacrifice protects the sacred bonds of human society from the devastation which natural freedom would unleash. But it is Lear who calls Cordelia's imprisonment together with him a "sacrifice," not she, and it is Lear who denies her the measure of her greatness because of his total self-absorption in his sorrow. In his close reading of the last 70 lines of the play, Stephen Booth traces the pattern of testing by which Lear strains to determine Cordelia's renewed life, tests, Booth says, which echo the test "in which Cordelia could not heave her heart into her mouth" at the beginning of the play.²⁷ But what weighs in the balance of these tests of the looking glass and the feather is more than an ample third of the kingdom; it is, for Lear, no less than the redemption of "all sorrows / That ever I have felt" (5.3.67-68). The darkest implication here is that in her death, incurred as invading French Queen, Cordelia has failed Lear again, failed to redeem his sorrow, evaded the "sacrificial" role that he would have of her alive and in his keeping.

Like her "silence" regarding her heart in act one, her silence as she is led to prison and death assures her mystery. Her use of royal address—"We are not the first . . ."—indicates her self-possession and calm, and her acceptance of the consequence of her actions: "who with best meaning have incurred the worst." Having achieved an inner poise and freedom of spirit ("I am, I am"), she is sustained by insight and courage: "For thee, oppressed king, I am cast down; / Myself could else out-frown false Fortune's frown" (5.1.4-5). In this, the last scene in which she appears alive, Cordelia exemplifies that "manliness" in the face of death which humanists like Thomas Lupset espoused in his Treatise of Dieying Well (1530): "Let us then take a lusty courage of this desperation, seinge there is no remedy: lette us manfully go to it."²⁸ However few her lines or appearances, Cordelia's tragic stature is fully realized. Having rejected the static role that Lear would have imposed on her in act one, Cordelia goes on to create her own future, to seek retribution and the creation of a new order beyond her sisters', and eventually to achieve her own transcendence from political constraints through her reconciliation with Lear. She has in a "manly" fashion forged her own destiny and loses her life as a result of heroic risk. Like other heroic women in Shakespeare's tragedies, Cleopatra, Desdemona, or Juliet, she takes her "failure" upon herself. She does not try to evade it, but stands dignified by the truth or guilt of her free act.

Why then, in his last scene, does Shakespeare deny Cordelia the final recognition that he accords to others of his tragic women? Is it because she failed by her death to reaffirm, to redeem some hope of man in his own spiritual power? The only character who acknowledges the political reality of "the Queen's" militancy (as distinct from that of France) is Edmund who, in describing his plot and her apparent "suicide," alludes to her volition in the war and the possibility that "upon her own dispair . . . she fordid herself (5.3.256-57). As stated, this suicidal motive evokes the legendary fate of both the Cordella whose nephews (resenting the "gynarchy") had her imprisoned, and that predecessor of British warrior queens, Boudicca. According to Holinshed, Cordella, imprisoned, followed the example of Boudicca and, "being a woman of manlie courage, and despairing to recover libertie, there she slew hirselfe."²⁹ Throughout the play Shakespeare suggests that the invasion is a mistake, and that such a stance is destructive of that female virtue which can redeem man through other more poetic means. Yet, as the histories and tragedies portray, patriarchy frequently isolates women and forces them to seek relief or redress in the political sphere, where they are invariably destroyed (or, in the histories, at least bereft) and their destruction can usually be legitimized. As Juliet Dusinberre comments in Shakespeare and the Nature of Women: "If women go to war themselves they cease to offer an alternative to the male world of politics and violence . . . ferocity in women challenges the stability of the civilized world."³⁰

In Shakespeare's period of high tragedy, after 1603, the incidence of militant queens and women of "manly courage" who desire to be "fair warriors," but who end as "unhandsome," is highly suggestive of this male anxiety. They include: Desdemona, Cordelia, Goneril, Regan, Lady Macbeth, Volumnia, and Cleopatra. Like Shakespeare's histories, the tragedies are set in the dense landscape of social and cultural history. They present women who cannot survive the aggressive tactics of patriarchal politics with any tactics of their own: either their feminine goodness and compliance is important or their female power and determination to resist or change the landscape is destructive. Prior to this period, militant women appear in a noticeable cluster only in Shakespeare's earliest plays: Queen Margaret, Joan La Pucelle, Tamora, and perhaps Kate ("I think she'll sooner prove a soldier" [2.1.145]—whereas the women of the Henriad are "good soldier-breeders" (1 HIV [3.1.193]). When such militant women appear in the late romances, they are evidently types of female evil, such as Dionyza or the Queen in Cymbeline. On the other hand, Viola's comic declaration, "I am no fighter," extends literally to the heroines of Shakespearean romance: the gods must fight for Perdita, a "poor thing" (2.3.191); Marina turns to her needlework and virtuous speech to protect her; the angelic Imogen serves as a page to the Roman general Lucius; and Miranda's "affections / Are then most humble" (1.2.484-85). Possessed of the romantic heroines' beauty, youth, gentleness, and moral commitment, Cordelia clearly lacks only the monumental "Patience" which presides over their crises.

If critical response to Cordelia's role in King Lear continues to fracture along the lines of blame and praise, perhaps it is because a traditional cultural perspective, to some extent, informs the play. But, more importantly, such response seems to reflect the dramatic ambiguity of Cordelia's character as manifest in the two key scenes in which she figures (the love test and reconciliation scenes). The difficulty in reconciling the rebellious and dutiful in Cordelia also derives from the dramatic question which Shakespeare poses in the first scene of the play: What does it mean to be a royal female child? What is required?—and the playwright's intuitive response: nothing and all. If there is resistance to accepting her in her dual role as loving daughter and Virago, it is because these realities appear to be highly incongruent in the play itself. In Lear's darkest vision, she, like all women, is a centaur underneath, capable of opposition when least expected. Female militance in King Lear is, after all, more devastating than the male because its effects are more personal. However virtuous, Cordelia in her militant, rebellious posture is a sister to her monster sisters and a daughter to that dead, forgotten mother who bore such daughters. A tragic queen in cuirass, Cordelia in her nursing role anticipates the heroines of the last plays, who, Shakespeare seems to suggest, can only save themselves and the sons of man through their healing power.

Notes

¹ Since Coleridge, studies of Cordelia as a tragic figure locate her decisive action only in 1.1. The argument that Cordelia's contribution to the tragic plot is limited to that scene is exemplified by Robert B. Heilman who maintains that, although Cordelia is a tragic actor because of her decision to "withdraw" in the first scene, her fate is not a central effect of the play but only meaningful as it "amplifies the tragic experience of Lear" (This Great Stage: Image and Structure in "King Lear" [Louisiana State U. Press, 1948], pp. 35-36, 301); and more recently by John McLaughlin when he asserts: "Cordelia is a tragic figure because the flawed life plan that prevented her from giving Lear the flattery he demanded is punished too severely" ("The Dynamics of Power in King Lear, " Shakespeare Quarterly 29 [1978]: 40).

² Cf. John Reibetanz, The Lear World: A Study of"King Lear" in Its Dramatic Context (U. of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 14, 31, 52.

³ Reviewing past arguments for the dramatic justification of Cordelia's death, Susan Snyder argues that the event does not follow from the logic of the action, but is rather part of a grotesque joke (The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies [Princeton U. Press, 1979], pp. 156-59). As the debate continues, Stephen J. Lynch sees its tragic ending as an appropriate conclusion to a drama more consistently concerned with spiritual and Christian values than the earlier Leir play ("Sin, Suffering, and Redemption in Leir and Lear," Shakespeare Studies 18 [1986]: 172-74).

⁴ Berggren, "The Woman's Part: Female Sexuality as Power in Shakespeare's Plays," in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (U. of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 18.

⁵ See, for example, Sophia B. Blaydes, "Cordelia: Loss of Insolence," Studies in the Humanties 5 (1976): 15-21.

⁶ All citations of source material for King Lear are from those texts reproduced in Major Tragedies: "Hamlet, " "Othello, " "King Lear, " "Macbeth, " volume 7 of Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). Quotations of Shakespeare's texts are from The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972).

⁷ It is not my purpose here to debate the primacy of either the Ql or Fl texts, but the Folio text is generally accepted as a corrected or adjusted version of Ql, perhaps used as prompt copy. Whether the revisions are Shakespeare's or the playing company's, they suggest a more tactful approach to the political issues of the play. Hence Ql variants prove intriguing. Most of the variation in 1.1 concerns Lear's response to Cordelia. Fl variants change Lear's more authoritarian, formal expression in Ql to a personal, more paternal address. For example, Ql, "Goe to, goe to, mend your speech . . . / Lest you may mar your fortunes" becomes "How, how Cordelia?. . . . Lest you may mar your fortunes."

⁸ Oates, "Is This The Promised End?': The Tragedy of King Lear," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (1974): 22. Also, Marianne Novy observes: "Cordelia, by contrast with her sisters, is much less stereotyped. Shakespeare's presentation of her shows sympathy for the woman who tries to keep her integrity in a patriarchal world" ("Patriarchy, Mutuality, and Forgiveness in King Lear," Southern Humanities Review 13 [1979]: 284).

⁹ Both Lynda Boose and Coppèlla Kahn discuss this scene as a variant of the wedding ceremony. See Boose, "The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare," PMLA 97 (1982): 325-47; and Kahn, "The Absent Mother in King Lear," in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discoures of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (U. of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 33-49. Kahn argues further that the renunciation of Cordelia as "daughter/wife" awakens a deeper need in Lear for Cordelia as "daughter/mother" (p. 40).

¹⁰ In "The War in King Lear," Shakespeare Studies 33 (1980): 27-34, Gary Taylor argues convincingly against conflating the Ql and Fl texts, especially as they present different versions of the political/military action in the last three acts. Taylor's analysis concludes that the Folio text was revised to emphasize "who leads the invasion army" and to transform a French invasion into a "rebellion."

¹¹ DeBeauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1952), p. 70.

¹² Goneril significantly loses her claim to authority when Albany receives testimony of her adultery with Edmund. As Barbara Mowat observes, "Goneril and Regan are embodiments of the male anxieties about women seen in many of Shakespeare's males: in their power madness, their cruelty, their treachery they are like witches; in their lust for Edmund they are like harlots" ("Images of Women in Shakespeare's Plays," Southern Humanities Review 11 [1979]: 153).

¹³ Quoted by Donald R. Dudley and Graham Webster in The Rebellion of Boudicca (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962), p. 113. For Dion's account, see Dio's Annals of Rome, trans. Herbert Foster (Troy, N.Y.: Pafraets Book Co., 1906), 5: 29-40.

¹⁴ The OED documents the ambiguity of the term Virago as one of praise or blame in Renaissance usage, defining both "a man-like, vigorous, and heroic woman," and "a bold, impudent (or wicked) woman."

¹⁵ The phrase is cited by Paul Johnson in Elizabeth I: A Study of Power and Intellect (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1974), p. 320.

¹⁶ The reference is to The Faerie Queene, ed. J.C. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909-1910).

¹⁷ References are to the text of Bonduca in Volume 6 of The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. Arnold Glover and A.R. Waller (Cambridge U. Press, 1908).

¹⁸ Raphael Holinshed, The Historie of England, volume 1 of Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (London: J. Johnson, 1807; rpt. New York: AMS, 1965), p. 495.

¹⁹ See Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear (U. of California Press, 1972), pp. 334-35.

²⁰ Devon Leigh Hodges notes that Edgar and Kent remain intact because they adopt disguises which protect their noble natures. As a "sublime truth," however, Cordelia's spirit disintegrates into "fragmented matter in order to make it visible" ("Cut Adrift and 'Cut to the Brains': The Anatomized World of King Lear," English Literary Renaissance 11 [1981]: 210).

²¹ Charles Lamb, "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare," Lamb's Criticism, ed. E. M. W. Tillyard (Cambridge U. Press, 1923; rpt. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1970), p. 89.

²² Gibson, A Womans Worth (London: John Wolfe, 1599), Bl.

²³ The Doctor becomes a Gentleman in Fl in accordance with revisions which de-emphasize the French invasion before act four. Gary Taylor makes the point that, while surgeons appeared with armies in Elizabethan drama, the Doctor in Ql is an anomaly ("The War in King Lear," p. 30).

²⁴ Enfans perdus, to which Cordelia's term refers, were the most "reckless and intrepid volunteers for military exploits regarded as desperate ventures, "as noted in The Variorum King Lear, ed. W. H. Furness (1880; rpt. American Scholar Publications, 1965), p. 300. S. L. Goldberg notes this hostile vocabulary as well in An Essay on "King Lear" (Cambridge U. Press, 1974), p. 148.

²⁵ Egan, Drama within Drama: Shakespeare 's Sense of His Art in "King Lear," "The Winter's Tale," and "The Tempest," (Columbia U. Press, 1975), p. 55.

²⁶ Jardin, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Sussex: The Harvester Press: Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1983), p. 193.

²⁷ Booth, "King Lear, " "Macbeth, " Indefinition and Tragedy (Yale U. Press, 1983), p. 24.

²⁸ Lupset, A Compendious Treatise, Teachying the Waie of Dyeing Well, in The Life and Works of Thomas Lupset, ed. John Archer Gee (Yale U. Press, 1928), p. 280.

²⁹ Bullough, p. 319.

³⁰ Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 299.