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 performed twice more, after the Restoration, before being replaced by Tate's version. Tate's radical adaptation — "The History of King Lear" — appeared in 1681. In the dedicatory epistle, he explains how in Shakespeare's version, he realised that he had found "a Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht; yet so dazling in their Disorder, that [he] soon perceiv'd [he] had seiz'd a Treasure", and how he found it necessary to "rectifie what was wanting in the Regularity and Probability of the Tale," a love between Edgar and Cordelia, which would make Cordelia's indifference to her father's anger more convincing in