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
The History of King Lear was equally appalled by the introduction of a romance between Cordelia and Edgar, which had not been part of the old legend. While acknowledging that prior to Shakespeare's writing of "King Lear", some versions of the story had ended happily, and that Tate's returning of the crown to Lear was therefore not a complete innovation, Jameson complained that on stage: they have converted the seraph-like Cordelia into a puling love heroine, and sent her off victorious at the end of the play—exit with drums and colours flying—to be married to Edgar. Now anything more absurd, more discordant with all our