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    Cordelia is King Lear's youngest daughter in Shakespeare's play King Lear. She is characterized by devotion, kindness, beauty, and honesty. When Lear demands that his daughters profess their love for him, Cordelia refuses to flatter him. As a result, Lear banishes her. Though absent for much of the play, Cordelia represents virtue in contrast to her deceitful sisters. Her reunion with Lear briefly restores order, but tragically she is killed at the end of the play, highlighting the ultimate triumph of cruelty in the story.

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    Cordelia is King Lear's youngest daughter in Shakespeare's play King Lear. She is characterized by devotion, kindness, beauty, and honesty. When Lear demands that his daughters profess their love for him, Cordelia refuses to flatter him. As a result, Lear banishes her. Though absent for much of the play, Cordelia represents virtue in contrast to her deceitful sisters. Her reunion with Lear briefly restores order, but tragically she is killed at the end of the play, highlighting the ultimate triumph of cruelty in the story.

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    384 views1 page

    Cordelia, Character Analysis

    Uploaded by

    Hamza
    Cordelia is King Lear's youngest daughter in Shakespeare's play King Lear. She is characterized by devotion, kindness, beauty, and honesty. When Lear demands that his daughters profess their love for him, Cordelia refuses to flatter him. As a result, Lear banishes her. Though absent for much of the play, Cordelia represents virtue in contrast to her deceitful sisters. Her reunion with Lear briefly restores order, but tragically she is killed at the end of the play, highlighting the ultimate triumph of cruelty in the story.

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    Character Analysis: Cordelia

    Cordelia is a fictional character in William Shakespeare’s tragic play King Lear. Cordelia is the
    youngest of King Lear’s three daughters, and his favourite. After her elderly father offers her the
    opportunity to profess her love to him in return for one third of the land in his kingdom, she refuses and
    is banished for the majority of the play.

    Cordelia’s chief characteristics are devotion, kindness, beauty, and honesty—honesty to a fault,
    perhaps. She is contrasted throughout the play with Goneril and Regan, who are neither honest nor
    loving, and who manipulate their father for their own ends. By refusing to take part in Lear’s love test at
    the beginning of the play, Cordelia establishes herself as a repository of virtue, and the obvious
    authenticity of her love for Lear makes clear the extent of the king’s error in banishing her. For most of
    the middle section of the play, she is offstage, but as we observe the depredations of Goneril and Regan
    and watch Lear’s descent into madness, Cordelia is never far from the audience’s thoughts, and her
    beauty is venerably described in religious terms. Indeed, rumors of her return to Britain begin to surface
    almost immediately, and once she lands at Dover, the action of the play begins to move toward her, as
    all the characters converge on the coast. Cordelia’s reunion with Lear marks the apparent restoration of
    order in the kingdom and the triumph of love and forgiveness over hatred and spite. This fleeting
    moment of familial happiness makes the devastating finale of King Lear that much more cruel, as
    Cordelia, the personification of kindness and virtue, becomes a literal sacrifice to the heartlessness of an
    apparently unjust world.

    Cordelia genuinely loves her father, but her refusal to flatter him leads to the tragedy that
    unfolds. Cordelia’s tears at the news of her father’s treatment prove her compassion and establish that
    she is, indeed, the opposite of her sisters. Cordelia has no desire for revenge, nor any need to make her
    father suffer for having misjudged her. Her virtue and purity make it easy to see why she is often
    described as Christ-like or representative of God’s goodness. Her response to her father’s capture, and
    her own capture, evokes the stoicism of kings, and reveals that Cordelia is as royal as her father is.

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