Lear turns to Cordelia, as to his favourite child, in fond expectation of even sweeter protestations of love, and is proportionately offended when they are denied. She is his youngest child and his least not alone in age and bodily stature but in that babyhood which has drawn to itself the peculiar affection of his old age. The use of the expression least ones, meaning younger children, is still continued in the Kentucky Highlands where the mountaineers have been but little disturbed by social changes since their settlement not long after the time of Shakespeare.

Cordelia surely has been accustomed to expressing her affection warmly, else she would never have become her father's favourite, but, being disgusted by her sisters' flattery bluntly refuses to cater to her father's whim and holds herself proudly superior to hypocrisy and self-seeking. She is like her father and her sisters in stubborn selfwill; but our sympathy goes out to the child whose instinct is so true and so wholesome.

Her lack of tact, amounting to unkindness, brings a severe penalty not only at the moment but later, yet she herself gives the explanation: however expressive she may usually be in matters of emotion, she cannot on compulsion heave her heart into her mouth. Too young and natural to have learned to force the expression of emotion, she is silent under demand, and finds no one of the sweet love-terms which in the past have so frequently fallen from her lips.

Lear. How, how, Cordelia! mend your speech a

little,

Lest it may mar your fortunes.

Cordelia.

Good my lord,

You have begot me, bred me, lov'd me; I

Return those duties back as are right fit,

Obey you, love you, and most honour you.

100

Why have my sisters husbands, if they say

They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,

That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry

Half my love with him, half my care and duty.

Sure I shall never marry like my sisters.*

99.

as which. Those fit duties are obedience, love and honour.

(Furness.)

102. all give you all their love.

Haply: perhaps, it may be.

103. plight: pledge. Here the wife's pledge of faithful loyalty and love.

* See Appendix I. Here, and throughout the play, the * marks the omission of lines found in the quartos but not in the Folio,

105

Lear's warning-lest it may mar your fortune—is most untactful, and only deepens Cordelia's determination not to seek favour by flattery. However much affection may be cultivated from a sense of duty, it cannot in itself be commanded; but Cordelia finds it hard to explain her meaning save in words that sound heartless. Even in her argument that a true wife must love her husband there is a touch of petulance. Yet she reveals an ideal of marital love to which

neither of her sisters has attained. As appears later, the only love which they can feel is passion.

Lear. But goes thy heart with this?

Cordelia.

Lear. So young, and so untender?

Ay, my good lord..

Cordelia. So young, my lord, and true.

Lear. Let it be so; thy truth then be thy dower;

110

For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,
The mysteries of Hecate and the night,
By all the operation of the orbs

From whom we do exist and cease to be,

Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity and property of blood,

And as a stranger to my heart and me

Hold thee from this forever. The barbarous Scythian
Or he that makes his generation messes

To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom.

Be as well neighbour'd, pitied, and reliev'd,

As thou my sometime daughter.

112. Hecate the patroness of all evil. The word, properly trisyllabic, is in Shakespeare usually dissyllabic.

113. operation of the orbs: influence of the stars upon human life.

116. Nearness and, as it were, identity of blood.

119. Eats his children.

122. sometime: one time, former time.

115

120

Lear's oath is in form appropriate to an ancient Briton, a natureworshipper and a believer in the influence of the stars; but its utterance to Cordelia, the child whom he loved best, is insanity. Insanity is a state of unbalanced equilibrium. When advanced sufficiently to be clearly noticed, it is usually a mental affliction; but its initial stage is that of perverted emotion. Lear's nature, characterized by uncontrolled self-will, is, for the time being, emotionally insane. It is this disturbed equilibrium of the emotion, this initial phase of insanity, which we find in all cases of uncontrolled anger or passion of any kind.

Cordelia's silent suffering under her father's curse is particularly difficult to portray upon the stage; but it must be done if we are to understand rightly the deeply affectionate character of the child.