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 traditional conflated text. Both Anthony Nuttall of Oxford University and Harold Bloom of Yale University have endorsed the view of Shakespeare having revised the tragedy at least once during his lifetime. As Bloom indicates: "At the close of Shakespeare's revised "King Lear", a reluctant Edgar becomes King of Britain, accepting his destiny but in the accents of despair. Nuttall speculates that Edgar, like Shakespeare himself, usurps the power of manipulating the audience by deceiving poor Gloucester." Analysis and criticism of "King Lear" over the centuries has been extensive. John F. Danby, in his "Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature – A Study