Cordelia's Return

Abstract

WISH TO CONSIDER A PARTICULAR TEXTUAL and structural problem in King Lear, concerning an event that happens offstage, out of the audience's sight or hearing, and yet upon which the whole outcome of the play depends. As everyone knows, in Act 1 King Lear's favorite daughter Cordelia is suddenly disowned by her father, scorned and dismissed by her sisters, and deprived of any claim to British land or power. Then, just as suddenly, her fortunes are reversed: she is taken to wife by a noble and loving man, is thereby made queen of the great country of France, and is forthwith moved safely away from her father's wrath and her sisters' malice. Why then should she return so soon, almost instantly, to her native country, now alien and hostile to her, only to lose everything, including her life? The tragic genre requires it, of course; she must return in order to die and in order for her death to overwhelm Lear. History also required it: in all of Shakespeare's apparent sources she returns-though more happily, restoring Lear to his throne for several years and then succeeding him. In Shakespeare's play, however, her personal motive for this most crucial of decisions is anything but clear. Like much else in the play, it happens offstage and can be understood, if at all, only from occasional passing hints. Even to attempt to comprehend it, as many critics have done, raises basic critical questions: Should we be able to understand her action? If so, does Shakespeare give us the means to do so? If he does not, why does his play differ so radically from all of his sources, where the motive for the French invasion is always made perfectly explicit? If audiences watching a performance do not much worry about such questions, should anyone else? Is our critical attention to such offstage events mere perversity, an attempt to play omniscient author and convert a dramatic action into a novelistic fiction? Or can it tell us anything of Shakespeare's dramatic art, about his intentions and his degree of success in realizing them? There is in the sources no mystery about the motive or circumstances of the French invasion. In Geoffrey of Monmouth's twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain, which is the origin of the Lear story and source of all later versions, after Lear has been forcibly bereft by Albania and Cornwall of the half of his kingdom he had retained, he goes to Gaul and asks Cordeilla and the king of the Franks to help him recover his dominions. They do so out of sympathy. This is essentially the series of events in Holinshed's Historie of England, John Higgins's Mirourfor Magistrates, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and William Warner's Albion's England. In the anonymous play The History of King Leir, Leir's complaint is graver-after he has dispossessed himself, two daughters order him murdered-but here, as in all of the other sources, righteous moral outrage on the part of Cordelia and France motivates an armed invasion to restore Lear to his throne.1