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 Yiddish King Lear was later successfully revived. The play is not a translation of William Shakespeare's "King Lear", but the title is an acknowledgement of the roots of the plot. Gordin's play is set in Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania), in 1890. It begins at the Purim feast given by David Moishele, a wealthy Russian Jewish merchant – a personification of what Adler referred to as the "Grand Jew", surrounded by family, friends, servants: in effect, a monarch in his court. As he divides his empire, the story of Shakespeare's "Lear" is recounted to him as a warning by the virtuous daughter who denied his