Act I, Scene 2

The Earl of Gloucester’s Castle.

Enter [Edmund the] Bastard solus, [with a letter].

• Edmund. Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
  My services are bound. Wherefore should I 335
  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, 340
  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 345
  Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
  Go to th' 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 350
  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! 355

Enter Gloucester.

• Earl of Gloucester. Kent banish'd thus? and France in choler parted?
  And the King gone to-night? subscrib'd his pow'r?
  Confin'd to exhibition? All this done
  Upon the gad? Edmund, how now? What news? 360

• Edmund. So please your lordship, none.

[Puts up the letter.]

• Earl of Gloucester. Why so earnestly seek you to put up that letter?

• Edmund. I know no news, my lord.

• Earl of Gloucester. What paper were you reading? 365

• Edmund. Nothing, my lord.

• Earl of 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. 370

• 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'erlooking.

• Earl of Gloucester. Give me the letter, sir.

• Edmund. I shall offend, either to detain or give it. The contents, as 375
  in part I understand them, are to blame.

• Earl of 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.

• Earl of Gloucester. [reads] 'This policy and reverence of age makes the world 380
  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 suffer'd. Come to me, that
  of this I may speak more. If our father would sleep till I 385
  wak'd him, you should enjoy half his revenue for ever, and live
  the beloved of your brother,
  'EDGAR.'
  Hum! Conspiracy? 'Sleep till I wak'd him, you should enjoy half
  his revenue.' My son Edgar! Had he a hand to write this? a heart 390
  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.

• Earl of Gloucester. You know the character to be your brother's?

• Edmund. If the matter were good, my lord, I durst swear it were his; 395
  but in respect of that, I would fain think it were not.

• Earl of Gloucester. It is his.

• Edmund. It is his hand, my lord; but I hope his heart is not in the
  contents.

• Earl of Gloucester. Hath he never before sounded you in this business? 400

• 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.

• Earl of Gloucester. O villain, villain! His very opinion in the letter! Abhorred
  villain! Unnatural, detested, brutish villain! worse than 405
  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; 410
  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. 415

• Earl of 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. 420

• Earl of Gloucester. He cannot be such a monster.

• Edmund. Nor is not, sure.

• Earl of 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 425
  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.

• Earl of 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 430
  nature finds itself scourg'd by the sequent effects. Love cools,
  friendship falls off, brothers divide. In cities, mutinies; in
  countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond crack'd
  'twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the
  prediction; there's son against father: the King falls from bias 435
  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 banish'd! his 440
  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 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; 445
  knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance;
  drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience of
  planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine
  thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay
  his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father 450
  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- 455
  [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 460
  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 465
  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. 470

• 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. 475

• 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 until some little time hath 480
  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 485
  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 arm'd.

• Edgar. Arm'd, brother? 490

• Edmund. Brother, I advise you to the best. Go arm'd. 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? 495

• 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 500
  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.