Stand in the plague of custom, and permit The curiosity of nations to deprive me, For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines My mind as generous, and my shape as true, Enter GLOUCESTER Glou. 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? 20 [Putting up the letter Glou. Why so earnestly seek you to put up that letter? Edm. I know no news, my lord. Glou. What paper were you reading? Edm. Nothing, my lord. 25 Glou. 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. 30 Edm. 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. Glou. Give me the letter, sir. Edm. I shall offend, either to detain or give it. contents, as in part I understand them, are to blame. Glou. Let's see, let's see. 34 The Edm. I hope, for my brother's justification, he wrote this but as an essay or taste of my virtue. 39 Glou. [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.' 48 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? Edm. It was not brought me, my lord; there's the cunning of it; I found it thrown in at the casement of my closet. 55 Glou. You know the character to be your brother's? Edm. 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. Glou. It is his. 60 Edm. It is his hand, my lord; but I hope his heart is not in the contents. Glou. Hath he never heretofore sounded you in this business? 64 Edm. 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. Glou. O villain, villain! His very opinion in the letter! Abhorred villain! Unnatural, detested, brutish villain! worse than brutish! Go, sirrah, seek him; I'1l apprehend him: abominable villain! Where is he? 72 Edm. 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. Glou. Think you so? 81 Eam. 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. Glou. He cannot be such a monster— 86 Glou. To his father, that so tenderly and entirely loves him. Heaven and earth! me into him, I pray you: own wisdom. resolution. Edmund, seek him out; wind frame the business after your I would unstate myself, to be in a due Edm. I will seek him, sir, presently; convey the business as I shall find means, and acquaint you withal. 95 Glou. 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 109 Edm. 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 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 man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! Edgar— 119 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. Edg. How now, brother Edmund! what serious contemplation are you in? 125 Edm. I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read this other day, what should follow these eclipses. Edg. Do you busy yourself about that? 128 Edm. 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. 135 Edg. How long have you been a sectary astronomical? Edm. Come, come; when saw you my father last? Edg. Why, the night gone by. Edm. Spake you with him? Edg. Ay, two hours together. 140 Edm. Parted you in good terms? Found you no displeasure in him by word or countenance? Edg. None at all. Edm. 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 ot your person it would scarcely allay. Edg. Some villain hath done me wrong. 149 Edm. 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. Edg. Armed, brother! 155 Edm. 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. 160 [Exit Edgar 165 [Exit Edg. Shall I hear from you anon? All with me 's meet that I can fashion fit. SCENE III. The Duke of Albany's palace Enter Goner1l, and Oswald, het steward Gon. Did my father strike my gentleman for chiding of his fool? Osw. Yes, madam. Gon. By day and night he wrongs me; every hour He flashes into one gross crime or other, That sets us all at odds: I'll not endure it: His knights grow riotous, and himself upbraids us I will not speak with him; say I am sick: You shall do well; the fault of it I'll answer. 5 ΙΟ [Horns within Gon. Put on what weary negligence you please, You and your fellows; I Id have it come to question: If he distaste it, let him to our sister, Whose mind and mine, I know, in that are one Not to be over-ruled. Idle old man, That still would manage those authorities That he hath given away! Now, by my life, With checks as flatteries, when they are seen abused. Osw. Well, madam. 15 20 |