EDMUND [Alone] 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 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 th' creating of 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 th' legitimate. Fine word, "legitimate." Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed And my invention thrive, Edmund the base Shall top th' legitimate. I grow, I prosper. Now gods, stand up for bastards! [Enter GLOUCESTER] GLOUCESTER Kent banished thus? And France in choler parted? And the king gone tonight, prescribed his power, Conferred it on Goneril and Regan, his Cormorants? Is it not well? What should you need of more? Why came not the slave back to me when I called him? EDMUND So please your lordship, none. 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'erlooking. 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 [Reading] "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 forever and live the beloved of your brother, EDGAR." Hah! 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 honor 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 honor and to no other pretense of danger. GLOUCESTER Think you so? EDMUND If your honor 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 'tween 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 offense honesty! 'Tis strange. [Exit GLOUCESTER] EDMUND This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune--often the surfeits of our own behavior--we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spheral 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 on 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. Edgar-- [Enter EDGAR] and 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? EDGAR When saw you my father last? EDMUND The night gone by. EDGAR Spoke you with him? EDMUND Ay, two hours together. EDGAR Parted you in good terms? Found you no displeasure in him by word nor countenance? EDMUND None at all. EDGAR 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. All with me's meet That I can fashion fit.