Cordelia
Cordelia is the play's moral center precisely because she refuses to participate in its opening act of theatre - her honesty costs her everything the ceremony was designed to grant, and her return late in the play, offering rescue and forgiveness to the father who cast her off, is the nearest thing King Lear allows to grace before it withdraws that grace entirely.
Appears In
Who is Cordelia?
Cordelia's entire tragedy begins in a single refusal. Asked, like her sisters, to declare her love for Lear in exchange for the richest third of the kingdom, she will not translate what she feels into the currency the ceremony demands - 'I love your majesty according to my bond, no more nor less' - and watches her father's fury descend on her precisely because her honesty exposes her sisters' performance for what it is. She is disinherited and banished from the kingdom's love-market within the play's first hundred lines, and the King of France, alone among the men in the hall, understands what he is looking at and takes her as his queen for herself alone, dowry or no dowry.
She disappears from the play for its entire descent into cruelty and madness, present only in report - the messages Kent intercepts, the letter that gives him hope, the tears that mix with smiles when she hears of her father's suffering - and this absence has its own force: the audience feels Lear's need for her precisely because she is not there to answer it. When she returns, it is at the head of a French army, raised not for conquest but for rescue, a daughter's private grief converted into a military expedition to reclaim a father who publicly discarded her.
Her reunion with Lear, waking him gently from madness and grief and offering forgiveness before he can even finish asking for it, is the single scene in the play where cruelty is entirely absent. Shakespeare allows this mercy exactly one scene of safety before destroying it: the war is lost, Cordelia and Lear are captured, and Edmund's order for her death - countermanded too late - leaves her hanged in a prison cell, held in her father's arms as he dies beside her. She dies for nothing the play can redeem; her goodness buys her no exemption at all.
Motivation
Cordelia is motivated by a love too genuine to perform on command, and later by an undivided loyalty to her father that survives his rejection of her completely intact. She does not forgive Lear because she has forgotten what he did; she forgives him because her love was never conditional on his deserving it.
Personality
Cordelia's defining trait is a refusal to inflate her feelings into performance, even when performance is exactly what is being asked of her and the cost of refusal is everything she has. This is not coldness - her grief at Lear's suffering, reported before we see her again, is total - but a kind of integrity that will not bend even to save itself. Her courage is quiet rather than martial: she raises an army not for ambition but for love, and faces capture and death with the same unshowy steadiness with which she once faced her father's rage.