Shakespeare’s plots and his language, particularly in King Lear do not work upon principles of common sense. It is obvious that Shakespeare suffered from the same bad case of tachycardia which troubles Lear:
Lear goes through the speech, as I say, like one actually being born, with a confused terror of the incarceration into flesh (in the grip of the weaver at the womb door), and broken glimpses of the female genitalia as the topography of Hell. But then, immediately after this darkest moment, and after some snatches of ‘we came crying hither’ and ‘the first time that we smell the air/We waul and cry’, and ‘When we are born we cry that we are come/To this great stage of fools’, he emerges, as on the opposite side of a Black Hole, into a new universe, punished, corrected, enlightened and transfigured, as a grey-haired babe, and the Goddess embraces him, correspondingly transformed, and wakens him with a kiss, as Coredelia.
(Ted Hughes. Shakespeare & the Goddess of Complete Being. Faber & Faber, 1992, revised & corrected, 1993. 263, 264).
When Ted Hughes was writing his chapter(s) about the eye in King Lear in Shakespeare & the Goddess of Complete Being (it is my favourite book on Shakespeare in which Hughes hits upon the skeleton-key to understanding Shakespeare) he came down with shingles and had to continue writing in bed, blind in his right eye. Shortly before his death he told the poet Andrew Motion that writing the book had shortened his life and showed him his hands, the lines of which had ruptured in blood as he wrote the book. In it, he touches upon reactivation of myths of the Egyptian sun god Re and his daughter, the Eye.
There is a passage in Geoffrey of Monmouth - One of Shakespeare's major sources for the play) in which, after relating him (Lear) to the god Janus (an altar to whom was reconstructed as Llyr’s tomb) - A prophecy is recorded from the mouth of Merlin that the ancient Drudic religion of the oak-cult will be swept away by Christianity and left to dwell forgotten in the Castle of Arianrod (the Corona Borealis).
Lear is England’s first Crow God (descended by archeological/religious/mythical evidence from Apollo, also a Crow God). Llyr also has canny associations with King Lud. At Ludgate, according to Islamic Tradition will take place the encounter between the Messiah and the antichrist.
There are stories in literature that exist upon the page and there are underlying, hidden, inner stories within them and inside the page (between the lines, so to say). If the reader can get to the heart of a book or the play within the play he has got to the truth.
And what of Cordelia’s mythic ancestry? In the Welsh myth from whence the story originates, she, Creddylad, is the third of the Triple Goddesses, she was banished out to sea as a heron for 300 years (her name is still the Welsh word for heron). Cordelia is the triple Tragic Equation itself and as such is silent. One of the meanings of her name is the heart of Lear, in French.
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