Neil Bowen on
From Kieran Ryan's 'Shakespearean Tragedy'
Although moral opposites, Cordelia and Edmund ‘collude as agents of violent disruption… instrumental in engineering crises’ that punish other members of the ruling class and subvert the ‘assumptions and values’ underpinning their society. Hence they both serve to ‘throw into questions what seemed normal, natural and necessary’ while redefining the ‘scope of the desirable, the conceivable and the possible’.
In the love test, Cordelia refuses to conform to expectations of a dutiful daughter and to ‘obey her sovereign’, wounding him both as father and as king. She refuses to use the same ‘oily art’ as her sisters, because to do so would be to ‘succumb to the language of comparison, competition and calculation that treats love as a commodity and puts a price on it’. Cordelia is at pains to keep her speech, ‘plain, direct and measured’ in comparison to the ‘ornate extravagance’ of her sisters. But Ryan believes there is also a ‘steely glint of spite’, a ‘barbed desire to hurt’ and that we would be wrong to reduce Cordelia simply to an angelic opposite to her wicked sisters, with whom she shares a stubbornness inherited from their father. Nor should view her ‘brave intransigence’ as ‘retaliation against a possessive, domineering father’ - her motives are more complex and proud. (Ed. comment: e.g. expose her sisters and establish her moral superiority.)
Cordelia’s speech and her asides set her ‘apart as the voice and symbol of a sensibility that belongs to a new dispensation’, the ‘embodiment of the play’s utopian trajectory’. As Wilson Knight put it ‘she is of the future humanity, suffering in the present dispensation for her virtue’. Lear sees her behavious as ‘heartless and baffling’ because he doesn’t understand this new dispensation. Her confrontation with her father in the love test is the catalyst for the ‘transvaluation of values and transfiguring of perceptions’ that the play’s action unfolds.