ACT I — SCENE II. A Hall in 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 moonshines

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 tonight! Prescrib’d his pow’r!

Confin’d 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 perus’d, 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 enjoy half his revenue for ever, and live

the beloved of your brother EDGAR.’

Hum! Conspiracy? ‘Sleep till I wake 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.

Has he never before 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 declined, 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 should 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 writ this to feel my affection to your

honour, and to no other 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 surfeits of our own behaviour, we

make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as

if we were villains on 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. Fut! I

should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the

firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.

Enter Edgar.

Pat! he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy: my cue

is villainous 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 with 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.

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

nor countenance?

EDGAR.

None at all.

EDMUND.

Bethink yourself wherein you may have offended him: and at my

entreaty forbear his presence until 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

speed 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; I am no honest man

if there be any good meaning toward 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 practices 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.

[_Exit._]