The Tragedy Of King Lear

1 Enter Edmund with a
2 letter.
3 EDMUND.
4 Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
5 My services are bound. Wherefore should I
6 Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
7 The curiosity of nations to deprive me?
8 For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
9 Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base?
10 When my dimensions are as well compact,
11 My mind as generous, and my shape as true
12 As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us
13 With base? With baseness? bastardy? Base, base?
14 Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
15 More composition and fierce quality
16 Than doth within a dull stale tired bed
17 Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops
18 Got ’tween asleep and wake? Well then,
19 Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land:
20 Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund
21 As to the legitimate: fine word: legitimate!
22 Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
23 And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
24 Shall top the legitimate. I grow, I prosper.
25 Now, gods, stand up for bastards!
26 Enter Gloucester.
27 GLOUCESTER.
28 Kent banish’d thus! and France in choler parted!
29 And the King gone tonight! Prescrib’d his pow’r!
30 Confin’d to exhibition! All this done
31 Upon the gad!—Edmund, how now! What news?
32 EDMUND.
33 So please your lordship, none.
34 [_Putting up the letter._]
35 GLOUCESTER.
36 Why so earnestly seek you to put up that letter?
37 EDMUND.
38 I know no news, my lord.
39 GLOUCESTER.
40 What paper were you reading?
41 EDMUND.
42 Nothing, my lord.
43 GLOUCESTER.
44 No? What needed then that terrible dispatch of it into your pocket? The
45 quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself. Let’s see. Come,
46 if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles.
47 EDMUND.
48 I beseech you, sir, pardon me. It is a letter from my brother that I
49 have not all o’er-read; and for so much as I have perus’d, I find it
50 not fit for your o’er-looking.
51 GLOUCESTER.
52 Give me the letter, sir.
53 EDMUND.
54 I shall offend, either to detain or give it. The contents, as in
55 part I understand them, are to blame.
56 GLOUCESTER.
57 Let’s see, let’s see!
58 EDMUND.
59 I hope, for my brother’s justification, he wrote this but as an
60 essay, or taste of my virtue.
61 GLOUCESTER.
62 [_Reads._] ‘This policy and reverence of age makes the world
63 bitter to the best of our times; keeps our fortunes from us
64 till our oldness cannot relish them. I begin to find an idle
65 and fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny; who sways
66 not as it hath power, but as it is suffered. Come to me, that
67 of this I may speak more. If our father would sleep till I
68 waked him, you should enjoy half his revenue for ever, and live
69 the beloved of your brother EDGAR.’
70 Hum! Conspiracy? ‘Sleep till I wake him, you should enjoy half
71 his revenue.’—My son Edgar! Had he a hand to write this? A heart
72 and brain to breed it in? When came this to you? Who brought it?
73 EDMUND.
74 It was not brought me, my lord, there’s the cunning of it. I
75 found it thrown in at the casement of my closet.
76 GLOUCESTER.
77 You know the character to be your brother’s?
78 EDMUND.
79 If the matter were good, my lord, I durst swear it were his; but
80 in respect of that, I would fain think it were not.
81 GLOUCESTER.
82 It is his.
83 EDMUND.
84 It is his hand, my lord; but I hope his heart is not in the
85 contents.
86 GLOUCESTER.
87 Has he never before sounded you in this business?
88 EDMUND.
89 Never, my lord. But I have heard him oft maintain it to be fit
90 that, sons at perfect age, and fathers declined, the father
91 should be as ward to the son, and the son manage his revenue.
92 GLOUCESTER.
93 O villain, villain! His very opinion in the letter! Abhorred
94 villain! Unnatural, detested, brutish villain! worse than
95 brutish! Go, sirrah, seek him; I’ll apprehend him. Abominable
96 villain, Where is he?
97 EDMUND.
98 I do not well know, my lord. If it shall please you to suspend
99 your indignation against my brother till you can derive from him
100 better testimony of his intent, you should run a certain course;
101 where, if you violently proceed against him, mistaking his
102 purpose, it would make a great gap in your own honour, and shake
103 in pieces the heart of his obedience. I dare pawn down my life
104 for him, that he hath writ this to feel my affection to your
105 honour, and to no other pretence of danger.
106 GLOUCESTER.
107 Think you so?
108 EDMUND.
109 If your honour judge it meet, I will place you where you shall hear us
110 confer of this, and by an auricular assurance have your satisfaction,
111 and that without any further delay than this very evening.
112 GLOUCESTER.
113 He cannot be such a monster.
114 EDMUND.
115 Nor is not, sure.
116 GLOUCESTER.
117 To his father, that so tenderly and entirely loves him. Heaven
118 and earth! Edmund, seek him out; wind me into him, I pray you:
119 frame the business after your own wisdom. I would unstate myself
120 to be in a due resolution.
121 EDMUND.
122 I will seek him, sir, presently; convey the business as I shall
123 find means, and acquaint you withal.
124 GLOUCESTER.
125 These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us:
126 though the wisdom of Nature can reason it thus and thus, yet
127 nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love cools,
128 friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in
129 countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked
130 ’twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the
131 prediction; there’s son against father: the King falls from
132 bias of nature; there’s father against child. We have seen the
133 best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all
134 ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. Find out
135 this villain, Edmund; it shall lose thee nothing; do it
136 carefully.—And the noble and true-hearted Kent banished! his
137 offence, honesty! ’Tis strange.
138 [_Exit._]
139 EDMUND.
140 This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are
141 sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we
142 make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as
143 if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion;
144 knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance;
145 drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of
146 planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine
147 thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his
148 goatish disposition to the charge of a star. My father compounded
149 with my mother under the dragon’s tail, and my nativity was under
150 Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I
151 should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the
152 firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.
153 Enter Edgar.
154 Pat! he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy: my cue
155 is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’Bedlam.—O,
156 these eclipses do portend these divisions! Fa, sol, la, mi.
157 EDGAR.
158 How now, brother Edmund, what serious contemplation are you in?
159 EDMUND.
160 I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read this other day,
161 what should follow these eclipses.
162 EDGAR.
163 Do you busy yourself with that?
164 EDMUND.
165 I promise you, the effects he writes of succeed unhappily: as of
166 unnaturalness between the child and the parent; death, dearth,
167 dissolutions of ancient amities; divisions in state, menaces and
168 maledictions against King and nobles; needless diffidences,
169 banishment of friends, dissipation of cohorts, nuptial breaches,
170 and I know not what.
171 EDGAR.
172 How long have you been a sectary astronomical?
173 EDMUND.
174 Come, come! when saw you my father last?
175 EDGAR.
176 The night gone by.
177 EDMUND.
178 Spake you with him?
179 EDGAR.
180 Ay, two hours together.
181 EDMUND.
182 Parted you in good terms? Found you no displeasure in him, by word
183 nor countenance?
184 EDGAR.
185 None at all.
186 EDMUND.
187 Bethink yourself wherein you may have offended him: and at my
188 entreaty forbear his presence until some little time hath
189 qualified the heat of his displeasure; which at this instant so
190 rageth in him that with the mischief of your person it would
191 scarcely allay.
192 EDGAR.
193 Some villain hath done me wrong.
194 EDMUND.
195 That’s my fear. I pray you have a continent forbearance till the
196 speed of his rage goes slower; and, as I say, retire with me to
197 my lodging, from whence I will fitly bring you to hear my lord
198 speak: pray ye, go; there’s my key. If you do stir abroad, go
199 armed.
200 EDGAR.
201 Armed, brother?
202 EDMUND.
203 Brother, I advise you to the best; I am no honest man
204 if there be any good meaning toward you: I have told you what I
205 have seen and heard. But faintly; nothing like the image and
206 horror of it: pray you, away!
207 EDGAR.
208 Shall I hear from you anon?
209 EDMUND.
210 I do serve you in this business.
211 [_Exit Edgar._]
212 A credulous father! and a brother noble,
213 Whose nature is so far from doing harms
214 That he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty
215 My practices ride easy! I see the business.
216 Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit;
217 All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit.
218 [_Exit._]