Cordelia's Plight

Yesternight I started rescripting the play—nothing fancy for the moment, mostly just nips and cuts to keep things moving. I got halfway through Act 1 Scene 1—the good old “love test”—and I stopped short. I was looking at Cordelia’s response to Lear (after “Nothing, my lord”):

Good my lord,
You have begot me, bred me, loved me; I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,
(To love my father all.)

I’ll get to the parentheses in a moment. When reading it, two things struck me. First: the unexpected question after the fourth line (“Why have my sisters husbands...?”). Abrupt topic shifts like that usually indicate heightened emotions (which make sense here), and subtexts breaking forth into words. What’s the subtext? That Cordelia resents her sisters? Or that she resents their marriages, because she knows they are loveless?

The second odd thing was the line, “That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry...” My plight? My Arden says “plight” here means “pledge” (ie. promise of marriage). But that still sounds weird—his hand must take her promise? And what’s with the must in there? There are two lords waiting just outside who can’t wait to marry her. Nobody’s being forced to do anything they don’t want to, and yet there is a desperate, constrained sense in the words “must” and “plight.”

Enter my Revelation: Someone is being forced. Not only is Cordelia being forced to take part in this barbaric ceremony, but she will very soon be forced to marry either France or Burgundy. She doesn’t have a choice. These marriages are all arranged by Lear. Look at Lear’s language, when he turns to Cordelia a few lines earlier:

Now, our joy,
Although our last and least, to whose young love
The vines of France and milk of Burgundy
Strive to be interess’d...

“Interess” means “lay claim to,” but the image (when joined with “vines”) is of interweaving, surrounding, and capturing Cordelia. This is the point of the ceremony: not for Lear to give away his lands or titles—that’s all formality. The purpose is to marry Cordelia off.

And she doesn’t want to do it. She clams up because it’s the only way to escape the trap Lear has set for her—the same trap King Leir invented in the earlier play. The last line of her indignant speech only appears in the Quarto version of Lear. The later Folio version (which Shakespeare probably revised himself) omits this line, despite its dramatic punch. Without it, Cordelia’s rebellion comes in to focus:

Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters.

That is: I’m not going to play your game, Dad. I’m going to marry for love, not politics. So there.