The character of Cordelia in King Lear Cordelia is the embodiment of goodness in Shakespeare's King Lear. “What should Cordelia say?” / Love and be silent” (Ii63-64). These words recall a time when loyalty to the king and one's father was paramount. King Lear, Cordelia's father, planned to divide his lands between his three daughters, but at a price, the price of their love. While her sisters exaggerated their love for their father to win the "prize", Cordelia remained true to herself and her loyalty to Lear by not making fun of her feelings for him and playing it cool. She was also not characterized by openness of her feelings. She was a quiet girl who kept her emotions bottled up inside. Despite this, Lear became angry at his response and disowned him. Why such a brutal attack on his daughter? Cordelia is known to be Lear's favorite and he had hoped to be able to give her the largest plot of land so that he could reside there with her, but the plan failed. Overall, the king's decision led him and his daughter to their tragic downfall. With all the swarms of evil residing in this room, Cordelia is the epitome of goodness. She is loving, virtuous and forgiving. She also demonstrates law and order in that she was a dutiful daughter and had great respect for her father and his position. Her goodness is highlighted in Act IV, Scene VII, when she is at Lear's side and he slowly wakes up and thinks of her as an angel. He asks Cordelia's "angel" to forgive him, but according to Cordelia, this is not necessary. Cordelia, however, is a tragic character, as her kindness and keeping within the confines of the social norms of the Elizabethan era ironically proved to be her tragic downfall. Many people were very moved and perplexed by his death, many of them seeing it as an injustice. Samuel Johnson had said: “Shakespeare allowed Cordelia's virtue to perish for a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader and, what is still stranger, to the faith of the chronicles. .. A play in which the wicked prosper and the virtuous fail. The public will not always emerge happier from the final triumph of persecuted virtue. What exactly was Cordelia's role in the play? Was she there as an angelic figure who made the distinction between good and evil more visible? Was she just presented as a nice little girl who didn't do anything wrong, and maybe, to some extent, we were supposed to look down on her? Or was it there to make us more aware of a society in ruins where many things were contrary to what one might think, where evil generally outweighed good (which to some extent , is prophetic for today's society)? There are many theories surrounding this particular character, and no one has come to a definitive conclusion as of late. However, the best answer I can come up with is simply the answer "Yes" to all of the questions above..