For Richer or Poorer: The Editing of Love’s Value in King Lear

         Cordelia recognizes her father's self-division as clearly as her sisters do—if not more clearly—and her love for him prevents her from responding to the false version of himself that he projects publicly. This is both why he tries to avoid her love (long habituated to social prestige, his deception and self-absorption have become more than second nature) and why she cannot pay the social obligation he demands. Stanley Cavell comments that "Lear is torturing her, claiming her devotion, which she wants to give, but forcing her to help him betray (or not to betray) it, to falsify it publicly" (Cavell, p. 63). Cordelia cannot violate what she loves, even at the cost of her own social ruin, and her love prevents her from voicing the rhetoric of public courtly adulation, as her sisters do: "What shall Cordelia speak? Love and be silent" ( 1.1.62).

         Her second response, said to herself after Regan's speech, is in keeping with the first (after Goneril's), but it is easily misconstrued:

                        Then poor Cordelia!
             And yet not so, since I am sure my love's
             More ponderous than my tongue. (1.1.76-78)

Harry Berger construes "poor" to imply self-pity, and he therefore comments that "The speaker of the first line already senses the value of the victim's role." (Berger 33) "Poor," however, also connotes literal material poverty, a reading that is clearer in the Quarto's "more richer than my tongue" than in the Folio's "more ponderous." "Ponderous" is in obvious contrast with "poor". Responding to Lear's bribe, Goneril and Regan both sprinkle their speeches liberally with the language of material value: "dearer," "valued," "rich or rare," "poor," "worth," "precious." Especially noticeable is Goneril's assertion that she loves her father with "A love that makes breath poor and speech unable" ( 1.1.60), because she thereby establishes a comparison of love to speech that Cordelia's response implicitly reflects: "Love and be silent." This subtext of the sisters' speeches is well understood and in effect explicated by France, when he declares his admiration for Cordelia:

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. (1.1.254-57)

          She is literally "dowerless," as he acknowledges (260), recognizing that she has made herself "poor" in just the way she feared; nonetheless, he declares that Burgundy cannot "buy this unprized precious maid of me" (263), echoing Goneril's use of "precious" (74) but giving it an entirely different evaluation.

           While "ponderous" also had the meaning of weighty, it is possible that the Folio reading was meant to suggest that her love was something for the audience to ponder. Her love is so great that even if she were going to speak of it, words would not adequately describe it. So she determines that she will say nothing, and does so.

           Nonetheless the issue of material wealth, of any wealth and desire for ownership and possession, is what I find most resonant in the words of Lear and his daughters as well as in the themes of the play, and why if I were given the power of the editor I would choose the Quarto's "richer." Were Lear to take a truer inventory of what belonged to him, of the love and devotion he actually had in Cordelia, then much pain and death could have been avoided.