Cordelia (King Lear) by Cordelia's wicked sisters, Goneril and Regan, he goes mad. Cordelia returns at the end of the play with the intentions of helping Lear, ultimately reversing her role as daughter to that of mother. But when she arrives, Lear can not even recognize her in his state of madness. Nevertheless, she forgives him for banishing her. By the time Lear finally regains his reason and realizes who Cordelia is, they have little time to talk and reconcile. Edmund arrives and sends them both to prison, where Cordelia is ultimately hanged. In Nahum Tate's "happy-ending" revision "The History of King Lear"
The History of King Lear greatest work, the best of his plays, was yet less popular than "Hamlet", "Macbeth", and "Othello"; that the general reader, though acknowledging its greatness, would also speak of it with a certain distaste; and that it was the least often presented on stage, as well as being the least successful there. Bradley suggested that the feeling which prompted Tate's alteration and which allowed it to replace Shakespeare on stage for over a century was a general wish that Lear and Cordelia might escape their doom. Distinguishing between the philanthropic sense, which also wishes "other" tragic figures to be saved, and