A quieter scene in the French camp near Dover, composed largely of reported speech, but what is reported matters.
Kent asks the gentleman whether his letters reached Cordelia and what effect they had. The answer is one of the play's most delicate passages. She read them in his presence. She wept, but without losing herself: "patience and sorrow strove / who should express her goodliest." Her smiles and tears came together like sunshine and rain. She cried out, "Sisters! sisters! Shame of ladies! sisters! Kent! father! sisters! What, i' the storm? i' the night?", and then went away to deal with her grief alone.
Kent notes the strangeness of it: the same parents, the same marriage, producing Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. "It is the stars, / the stars above us govern our conditions; / else one self mate and make could not beget / such different issues." He has no better explanation.
Lear is nearby, in town, but will not come to Cordelia. Kent explains why. It is shame. His own treatment of her, stripping her of his blessing, leaving her to France, giving her "dear rights" to her sisters, now burns in him so completely that he cannot face her. "Burning shame detains him from Cordelia."
It is a quietly devastating detail. Cordelia has come with an army to restore her father. Lear is close enough to see her. And he will not go, because doing what he did to her and then asking for her help is a thing he cannot make himself do.
Kent keeps his own identity concealed still. He promises the gentleman that when he is known rightly, he will not regret having kept his company. For now he leads him toward Lear and leaves him to attend the old king.
The armies of Albany and Cornwall are already moving toward Dover. The military confrontation is coming. But the scene's real weight is in those two images: Cordelia weeping like sunshine and rain, and Lear unable to cross the distance between them.
