Dividing Between Daughters

Shakespeare writes against the grain of his sources, showing Lear’s daughters in a more sympathetic light. This chapter explores the medical, legal, and theological discourses surrounding women, noting patriarchal expectations about royal women and pious women in particular. The Catechism, through the concept of duty, interpolates individuals into social roles. Cordelia’s rebellion occurs in this context of a more expansive sense of duty, which tragically overlaps with the masochistic demands of idealised femininity. Legal and religious techniques of policing women’s reproduction and inheritance—the banns of matrimony, coverture, fama publica, and carnaliter cognoscere—dissolve the modern specificity of biopolitics. As Goneril discovers, high (but also petit) treason proves the sanctification of life extended beyond individual sovereigns. Goneril’s entire arc—which mirrors Edmund’s dissatisfaction with the “plague of custom” (1.2.3)—trends towards a thwarted desire for autonomy. Following her affair, she is condemned to death for defiling a power she was not permitted to wield. Criticism has too often been content to measure Lear’s daughters by their obedience to the office of the daughter, to only ask of them: “Which of you shall we say doth love [Lear] most?” (1.1.51) This is a test that, crucially, Shakespeare’s play itself repudiates.