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SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
glad not to have.?f! Second, it could also mean that the situation itself makes it
impossible for her to speak. Given the ceremonial context, Cordelia sees Lear
as the King rather than her father, which is even linguistically marked, since
in this scene she consistently addresses him either as “lord” or “majesty.”??
Thus, her words signal that in a public speech, she finds her social role more
imperative than her filial duties, and were she to join the rhetorical game her
sisters have started, anything she might say would be nothing but flattery,
treason, or both. To strengthen this second meaning, there is a scene later
in the play that highlights the contrast between Cordelia’s public and private
behavior concerning her relation to Lear. When Kent asks the Gentleman
about Cordelia’s reaction to his letter in which Kent informs her of Lear’s
desperate state after his outburst of madness in the storm scene, the words
Shakespeare uses to describe her verbal response are the following: “Faith
once or twice she heau’d the name of father, / Pantingly forth as if it prest
her heart.”?® In this case the repetition of the same expression that Cordelia
uses to define her relation to Lear in the love trial scene indicates that during
a less formal, semi-private conversation, which significantly enough does not
take place on stage, she identifies this emotional rapport in familiar terms.
With regard to the poetical peculiarities of Shakespeare’s craft as a
playwright, Tom McAlindon calls attention to one more aspect of the trope
of the heart. As he argues, not only does it describe Cordelia’s “nature and
dramatic role,” but once she utters the sentence that she cannot heave her
heart into her mouth, the figure also “functions as a silent pun,” relying on
the etymological root of her name, the Latin “cor” meaning heart. This
connection between the name and the character is further supported by the
lexical repetition of the word “heart,” as Lear himself refers to Cordelia with
the trope of the heart three times in this scene.?©
So far, I have shown how the tropes in Cordelia’s utterances especially the
trope of the heart become semantically dense even in a historical reading,
and it is precisely this feature of Shakespeare’s art that makes it so difficult
to reconstruct the meanings to which the character’s figurative words may
refer, especially from a twenty-first century perspective. Yet, this semantic
complexity should be distinguished from ambiguity or “Amphibologia,” which
Puttenham describes as one of the vices in speech and writing:
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Shak-speare: His True Chronicle, sig. B4r.
In fact, she calls him “maiesty” twice (“I loue your Maiestie according to my bond” (sig. B2r);
“I yet beseech your Maiestie” (sig. B4v.)) and addresses him “lord” four times (“Nothing my
Lord”; “Good my Lord” “I good my Lord” “So yong my Lord and true” (sig. B2r)).
Ibid., sig. I1r.
Tom McAlindon: Tragedy, King Lear and the Politics of the Heart, Shakespeare Survey 44
(1991), 87.
“But goes this with thy heart?” (sig. B2r); “as a stranger to my heart and me” and “as here I
giue, / Her fathers heart from her”(sig. B2v).
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