SCENE II. The Earl of Gloucester's castle. King Lear  Shakespeare homepage  |  King Lear  | Act 1, Scene 2 

 Previous scene  |  Next scene  SCENE II. 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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