Cordelia (King Lear) is depicted as Queen Cordelia. In Shakespeare's "King Lear", Cordelia is briefly on stage during Act 1, scene 1. Her father Lear exiles her as a response to her honesty when he asks for professions of love from his three daughters to determine how to divide the lands of his kingdom between them. Cordelia's sisters, Goneril and Regan, give deceitfully-lavish speeches professing their love, flattering his vanity. Cordelia, seeing right through her sisters' feigned professions of love, refuses to do the same. Lear deems her answer ("Love, and be silent" 1.1.62) as too simple. Lear asks her, "What can you
King Lear of a common folk tale, Love Like Salt, Aarne–Thompson type 923, in which a father rejects his youngest daughter for a statement of her love that does not please him. The source of the subplot involving Gloucester, Edgar, and Edmund is a tale in Philip Sidney's "Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia" (1580–90), with a blind Paphlagonian king and his two sons, Leonatus and Plexitrus. Besides the subplot involving the Earl of Gloucester and his sons, the principal innovation Shakespeare made to this story was the death of Cordelia and Lear at the end; in the account by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Cordelia