How does Shakespeare present Lear's daughters in Act One, Scene One?

From its outset, Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’ challenges the fundamental qualities of human relationships and connections that are traditionally thought to be stable. In particular, it is the institution of the family that is debased and reduced, with this process catalysed in Act One. Rather than appearing as the dutiful daughters responding to their father’s demands, in the pageant of the love-test, Shakespeare exposes Goneril and Regan’s manipulative and avaricious natures, just as he establishes the anomaly Cordelia’s honesty and rationality in the face of King Lear’s insecurity and blindness.In Scene One Shakespeare presents Goneril and Regan initially as superficially dutiful, indulging their father in his ritual. It is the apparent perfection in their answers that raises suspicion concerning their motives. Their language is hyperbolic, jumping to the heights of professions of devotion more suggestive of romantic love than familial – Goneril announces she loves him ‘more than words can wield to the matter’, although her words of love are used with notable proficiency, and Regan that her love for him is uncontested. Cordelia outlines the underlying faults in their confessions, which Lear in his ignorance and desire to ratify his own self-worth fails to see, or ignores. She highlights the faults in claiming that their love for their father is unique, especially as their husbands are also present – ‘why have my sisters’ husbands if they love you all?’ and more viciously, upon her departure with France, Cordelia announces that ‘I know you what you are’. Her concern for her father’s wellbeing in the event of her banishment illuminates the underlying malicious nature of her sisters. The two are scheming and manipulative and must act '‘i’th’heat’: they understand that Lear is approaching senility, and they seize the opportunity presented to them to ensure their survival, and their quick remarks suggest that perhaps indulging their father, ratifying their love for him, is not a unique event. Contrastingly, Cordelia loves Lear according to Elizabethan traditions of familial relationships, it is suggested Lear hoped to ‘set his rest on her kind nursery’, implying that Lear knows the extent of Cordelia’s love for him, he was intimately aware of her compassion and that it would extend into his senility.