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"
King Lear his subjects, not just his children, to address him in paternal terms, which infantises most of the people around him, which pointedly references James's statement in his 1598 book "The Trew Law of Free Monarchies" that the king is the "father of the nation", for whom all of his subjects are his children. "King Lear" provides a basis for "the primary enactment of psychic breakdown in English literary history". The play begins with Lear's "near-fairytale narcissism". Given the absence of legitimate mothers in "King Lear", Coppélia Kahn provides a psychoanalytic interpretation of the "maternal subtext" found in the play. According