“Tell me, my daughters/(Since now we will divest us both of rule,/Interest of territory, cares of state),/Which of you shall we say doth love us most,/That we our largest bounty may extend/Where nature doth with merit challenge.” 

Lear’s fateful question tells us a great deal about his character. His demand that his daughters flatter him before he will give them the land is a form of emotional terrorism and a private tyranny born of insecurity and power-hunger. That his two eldest daughters readily play along suggest that this is not an unfamiliar pattern in the royal family. Over the course of the play, this inflated, egocentric king will have to learn that he, like everyone else, is just a mortal man.

“Good my lord,/You have begot me, bred me, loved me: I/Return those duties back as are right fit,/Obey you, love you, and most honour you./Why have my sisters husbands, if they say/They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,/That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry/Half my love with him, half my care and duty:/Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,/To love my father all.”

Cordelia’s retort to Lear’s emotional demands is both reasonable and revealing. She works like a logician, pointing out that it doesn’t make much sense to get married if all your love goes to your father. But this argument is also emotive, suggesting a squeamish incestuous current in Lear’s claims to his daughters’ love.

“[…] Why brand they us/With base? with baseness? Bastardy base? Base?/Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take/More composition and fierce quality/Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,/Go to th’ creating a whole tribe of fops/Got ‘tween asleep and wake? Well then,/Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land./Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund/As to th’ legitimate. Fine word, “legitimate.”/Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,/And my invention thrive, Edmund the base/Shall top th’ legitimate. I grow, I prosper./Now, gods, stand up for bastards.”

Edmund’s first soliloquy is a masterpiece of broad villainy. Edmund introduces himself and his motives plainly: he wishes to be a self-made man, regardless of society’s prejudices against his illegitimacy, and he is willing to trample both his father and brother to gain power. His sense of self is straightforward yet mysterious; he blames “Nature” for his cruelty while his conscience about his own behavior is utterly untroubled.