Cordelia has brought her father to the French camp. Doctors have let him sleep; he has been dressed in fresh clothes; music plays. Cordelia kisses him: “Restoration hang / Thy medicine on my lips.”
He wakes and thinks he has died: “You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave: / Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead.” Slowly he comes back: “Pray, do not mock me: / I am a very foolish fond old man, / Fourscore and upward… And, to deal plainly, / I fear I am not in my perfect mind.” He thinks this lady is his child Cordelia. “And so I am, I am.”
Then the guilt: “If you have poison for me, I will drink it. / I know you do not love me; for your sisters / Have, as I do remember, done me wrong: / You have some cause, they have not.”
“No cause, no cause.”
In the first scene, Lear demanded that love be measured and spoken. Here Cordelia refuses to measure his guilt. Forgiveness is given without accounting — the opposite of the love test.
Use it for forgiveness, reconciliation between parents and children, and love that refuses to keep score.
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related by shared connectionsCordelia
Lear’s youngest daughter, who will not flatter, is disinherited, returns to rescue him, forgives him with “No cause, no cause” — and is hanged.
The Blinding of Gloucester
Betrayed by Edmund, Gloucester is tied to a chair and blinded by Cornwall while Regan watches — and learns in the same instant that Edgar was innocent.
King Lear
The proud old king who divides his kingdom by a love test, banishes the daughter who loves him, and is stripped of everything until he learns, too late, what love and suffering are.
The Dover Cliff
Edgar leads his blind father to a “cliff” that isn’t there, lets him leap, and convinces him he has survived by a miracle — curing his despair with a theatrical trick.
Edmund
Gloucester’s illegitimate son — the brilliant, charming, self-made villain of King Lear, who worships Nature as amoral force and scorns “the plague of custom”.
The Death of Cordelia
Lear enters carrying his hanged daughter, howling, searching for her breath with a mirror and a feather — “Never, never, never, never, never.”