King Lear I.i.253-269

That face of hers

[CORDELIA                                  Peace be with Burgundy.
Since that respect and fortunes are his love,
I shall not be his wife.]

FRANCE   Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor;
Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised,
Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon,
Be it lawful I take up what’s cast away.
Gods, gods! ’Tis strange that from their cold’st neglect
My love should kindle to enflamed respect.—
Thy dowerless daughter, king, thrown to my chance,
Is queen of us, of ours, and our fair France.
Not all the dukes of wat’rish Burgundy
Can buy this unprized precious maid of me.—
Bid them farewell, Cordelia, though unkind.
Thou losest here a better where to find.

LEAR    Thou hast her, France. Let her be thine, for we
Have no such daughter, nor shall ever see
That face of hers again. Therefore begone
Without our grace, our love, our benison.—
Come, noble Burgundy.

Flourish. Exeunt [Lear and his train including Burgundy]

France is astonished by Cordelia. His declaration of awed love for her, his surprise at the strangeness of its sudden growth to human respect shows that he, like Lear (and unlike Cordelia), had reasonably understood the ritual declaration of love as a ceremony. But in this brief interchange she’s taught him a thing about love — that it can kindle to enflamed respect, which may sound less romantic than love but is in fact the transcendence of cliché.

Yet once more Shakespeare insists on a daring reversal of valorization. Cordelia complains that Burgundy’s love is for “respect and fortunes," but France shows a different kind of respect — respect for Cordelia, and not (as she says) Burgundy’s love for the “respect and fortunes” that would be due to him once he obtained her dowry. That reversal, making her the object of respect, is of course the point of his speech: she is most rich, being poor; most choice, forsaken; most loved despised. (Again note the interaction of superlatives with the bare positives that undergird them. She had been Lear’s favorite although his last and least; now France values her the same way.)

Most choice, forsaken, even forsaken by the gods. This is what France finds so strange: that it’s not only Lear’s cold neglect but that of the gods that kindles his respect. That respect takes the form as well of a kind of intimacy, as he uses the singular thou, both in addressing Cordelia — “thee and thy virtues” — and in addressing Lear: “Thy dowerless daughter”. That last phrase is an interesting, subliminal echo of the way Lear opened the scene, declaring his intent to publish “Our daughter’s several dowers”. Here we can hear France taking up Lear’s slack by concatenating those words. (Daughter and dower go together — remember: she is herself a dowry — for another reason too, I think. Both are simple nouns and yet there’s a trace of the comparative in their second syllables.)

The singular thou here doesn’t in any way sound like the bracing insult that Kent uses it for. Rather it serves as a contrast to Burgundy’s formality. Like it or not, France, Cordelia, and Lear now make up a familial group, for whom the familiar pronoun is appropriate. Thus Lear too switches to thou in responding to France: “Thou hast her, France.” Although “we” have no such daughter, the majesty of the we doesn’t cover the intimacy of the thou. The hurt is personal and goes deeper than the majesty the polite plural form displays.

France himself assimilates Cordelia to the plural, as though she gives that majesty back to him: my chance is such that now she is queen of us, of ours, and our fair France. But he’s still singular — not all the dukes of “waterish Burgundy” can buy this “precious maid of me.” The parallels are interesting: wat’rish to precious and Burgundy — the Duke called by the name of his duchy — rhymed with the personal, singular me.

Both France and Lear speak in couplets to end this third part of the scene, just as Kent has done earlier, and the sense of an ending here also calms things down a little, just as Kent’s exit in couplets calmed things down. Not that France is actually about to exit, but his reassurance to Cordelia — “Thou losest here a better where to find” establishes those adverbial designations as spatial. Here (!) I want only to flag what I think is the importance that the word where is going have later on.

Lear now exits for the next two scenes, comprising several hundred lines, which allows the audience’s anger at him to subside. But his last lines already have something moving about them. It may be that Wordsworth’s great sonnet on the death of his daughter Catharine, where he refers to “her heavenly face,” gone forever, never to be restored, affects my reading of Lear’s reference to “that face of hers,” but I think Wordsworth is only alerting us, and himself responding, to something that’s really there — the deep unconscious regret in that phrase of his.