ABSTRACT

The audience to King Lear, intent on Cordelia’s reply, is only subliminally aware of the imagery in which Lear has framed his question. It is when we return to the lines, whether in performance or in reading, that we realise how strange is this metonymy which names Cordelia’s suitors in terms of agricultural produce such as might be inscribed on a map-‘here be vineyards’. Actually, one such map is already on the stage, and the audience may even be able to make out the familiar triangle of Britain,1 on which Lear has just indicated the tracts of land he has apportioned to Cornwall’s duchy in the south-west and to Albany’s in the north. There remains a portion more fertile than the moors and mountains of the other regions; one that Lear hopes, before he sets up his rest on Cordelia’s ‘kind nursery’, to see joined to the natural wealth of a great realm across the Narrow Seas.