The Earl of Gloucester’s castle.
[Enter EDMUND, with a letter]
EDMUND Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam’s issue? 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 the 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 the legitimate: fine word,–legitimate!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper:
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!
[Enter GLOUCESTER]
GLOUCESTER
Kent banish’d thus! and France in choler parted!
And the king gone to-night! subscribed his power!
Confined to exhibition! All this done
Upon the gad! Edmund, how now! what news?
EDMUND So please your lordship, none.
[Putting up the letter]
GLOUCESTER
Why so earnestly seek you to put up that letter?
EDMUND I know no news, my lord.
GLOUCESTER What paper were you reading?
EDMUND Nothing, my lord.
GLOUCESTER
No? What needed, then, that terrible dispatch of
it into your pocket? the quality of nothing hath
not such need to hide itself. Let’s see: come,
if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles.
EDMUND I beseech you, sir, pardon me: it is a letter
from my brother, that I have not all o’er-read;
and for so much as I have perused, I find it not
fit for your o’er-looking.
GLOUCESTER Give me the letter, sir.
EDMUND I shall offend, either to detain or give it. The
contents, as in part I understand them, are to blame.
GLOUCESTER Let’s see, let’s see.
EDMUND I hope, for my brother’s justification,
he wrote this but as an essay or taste of my virtue.
GLOUCESTER [Reads] ‘This policy and reverence of age
makes the world bitter to the best of our times; keeps
our fortunes from us till our oldness cannot relish
them. I begin to find an idle and fond bondage
in the oppression of aged tyranny; who sways, not
as it hath power, but as it is suffered. Come to
me, that of this I may speak more. If our father
would sleep till I waked him, you should half his
revenue for ever, and live the beloved of your
brother, EDGAR.’
Hum–conspiracy!–‘Sleep till I waked him,–you
should enjoy half his revenue,’–My son Edgar!
Had he a hand to write this? a heart and brain
to breed it in?–When came this to you? who
brought it?
EDMUND It was not brought me, my lord; there’s the
cunning of it; I found it thrown in at the
casement of my closet.
GLOUCESTER You know the character to be your brother’s?
EDMUND If the matter were good, my lord,
I durst swear it were his; but, in respect of that,
I would fain think it were not.
GLOUCESTER It is his.
EDMUND It is his hand, my lord; but I hope his heart
is not in the contents.
GLOUCESTER
Hath he never heretofore sounded you in this business?
EDMUND Never, my lord: but I have heard him oft
maintain it to be fit, that, sons at perfect age,
and fathers declining, the father should be as
ward to the son, and the son manage his revenue.
GLOUCESTER O villain, villain! His very opinion in the
letter! Abhorred villain! Unnatural, detested,
brutish villain! worse than brutish! Go, sirrah,
seek him; I’ll apprehend him: abominable villain!
Where is he?
EDMUND I do not well know, my lord. If it shall please
you to suspend your indignation against my
brother till you can derive from him better
testimony of his intent, you shall run a certain
course; where, if you violently proceed against
him, mistaking his purpose, it would make a great
gap in your own honour, and shake in pieces the
heart of his obedience. I dare pawn down my life
for him, that he hath wrote this to feel my
affection to your honour, and to no further
pretence of danger.
GLOUCESTER Think you so?
EDMUND If your honour judge it meet, I will place you
where you shall hear us confer of this, and by an
auricular assurance have your satisfaction; and
that without any further delay than this very evening.
GLOUCESTER He cannot be such a monster–
EDMUND Nor is not, sure.
GLOUCESTER To his father, that so tenderly and
entirely loves him. Heaven and earth! Edmund, seek
him out: wind me into him, I pray you: frame the
business after your own wisdom. I would unstate
myself, to be in a due resolution.
EDMUND I will seek him, sir, presently: convey the
business as I shall find means and acquaint you withal.
GLOUCESTER
These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend
no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can
reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself
scourged by the sequent effects: love cools,
friendship falls off, brothers divide: in
cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in
palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ‘twixt son
and father. This villain of mine comes under the
prediction; there’s son against father: the king
falls from bias of nature; there’s father against
child. We have seen the best of our time:
machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all
ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our
graves. Find out this villain, Edmund; it shall
lose thee nothing; do it carefully. And the
noble and true-hearted Kent banished! his
offence, honesty! ‘Tis strange.
[Exit]
EDMUND This is the excellent foppery of the world,
that, when we are sick in fortune,–often the surfeit
of our own behavior,–we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star! My
father compounded with my mother under the
dragon’s tail; and my nativity was under Ursa
major; so that it follows, I am rough and
lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am,
had the maidenliest star in the firmament
twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar–
[Enter EDGAR]
And pat he comes like the catastrophe of the old
comedy: my cue is villanous melancholy, with a
sigh like Tom o’ Bedlam. O, these eclipses do
portend these divisions! fa, sol, la, mi.
EDGAR How now, brother Edmund! what serious
contemplation are you in?
EDMUND I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read
this other day, what should follow these eclipses.
EDGAR Do you busy yourself about that?
EDMUND I promise you, the effects he writes of succeed
unhappily; as of unnaturalness between the child
and the parent; death, dearth, dissolutions of
ancient amities; divisions in state, menaces and
maledictions against king and nobles; needless
diffidences, banishment of friends, dissipation
of cohorts, nuptial breaches, and I know not what.
EDGAR
How long have you been a sectary astronomical?
EDMUND
Come, come; when saw you my father last?
EDGAR Why, the night gone by.
EDMUND Spake you with him?
EDGAR Ay, two hours together.
EDMUND Parted you in good terms? Found you no
displeasure in him by word or countenance?
EDGAR None at all.
EDMUND Bethink yourself wherein you may have
offended him: and at my entreaty forbear his presence
till some little time hath qualified the heat of
his displeasure; which at this instant so rageth
in him, that with the mischief of your person it
would scarcely allay.
EDGAR Some villain hath done me wrong.
EDMUND That’s my fear. I pray you, have a continent
forbearance till the spied of his rage goes
slower; and, as I say, retire with me to my
lodging, from whence I will fitly bring you to
hear my lord speak: pray ye, go; there’s my key:
if you do stir abroad, go armed.
EDGAR Armed, brother!
EDMUND Brother, I advise you to the best; go armed:
I am no honest man if there be any good meaning
towards you: I have told you what I have seen
and heard; but faintly, nothing like the image
and horror of it: pray you, away.
EDGAR Shall I hear from you anon?
EDMUND I do serve you in this business.
[Exit EDGAR]
A credulous father! and a brother noble,
Whose nature is so far from doing harms,
That he suspects none: on whose foolish honesty
My practises ride easy! I see the business.
Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit:
All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit.
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