1    Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
2    My services are bound. Wherefore should I
3    Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
4    The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
5    For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines
6    Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?
7    When my dimensions are as well compact,
8    My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
9    As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
10   With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
11   Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
12   More composition and fierce quality
13   Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
14   Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops,
15   Got 'tween asleep and wake? Well, then,
16   Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land:
17   Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
18   As to the legitimate: fine word,--legitimate!
19   Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
20   And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
21   Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper:
22   Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

23   Kent banish'd thus! and France in choler parted!
24   And the king gone to-night! subscribed his power!
25   Confined to exhibition! All this done
26   Upon the gad! Edmund, how now! what news?

27   So please your lordship, none.

28   Why so earnestly seek you to put up that letter?

29   I know no news, my lord.

30   What paper were you reading?

31   Nothing, my lord.

32   No? What needed, then, that terrible dispatch of
33   it into your pocket? the quality of nothing hath
34   not such need to hide itself. Let's see: come,
35   if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles.

36   I beseech you, sir, pardon me: it is a letter
37   from my brother, that I have not all o'er-read;
38   and for so much as I have perused, I find it not
39   fit for your o'er-looking.

40   Give me the letter, sir.

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

43   Let's see, let's see.

44   I hope, for my brother's justification, he wrote
45   this but as an essay or taste of my virtue.

Reads
46    'This policy and reverence of age makes
47   the world bitter to the best of our times; keeps
48   our fortunes from us till our oldness cannot relish
49   them. I begin to find an idle and fond bondage
50   in the oppression of aged tyranny; who sways, not
51   as it hath power, but as it is suffered. Come to
52   me, that of this I may speak more. If our father
53   would sleep till I waked him, you should half his
54   revenue for ever, and live the beloved of your
55   brother, EDGAR.'
56   Hum--conspiracy!--'Sleep till I waked him,--you
57   should enjoy half his revenue,'--My son Edgar!
58   Had he a hand to write this? a heart and brain
59   to breed it in?--When came this to you? who
60   brought it?

61   It was not brought me, my lord; there's the
62   cunning of it; I found it thrown in at the
63   casement of my closet.

64   You know the character to be your brother's?

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

68   It is his.

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

71   Hath he never heretofore sounded you in this business?

72   Never, my lord: but I have heard him oft
73   maintain it to be fit, that, sons at perfect age,
74   and fathers declining, the father should be as
75   ward to the son, and the son manage his revenue.

76   O villain, villain! His very opinion in the
77   letter! Abhorred villain! Unnatural, detested,
78   brutish villain! worse than brutish! Go, sirrah,
79   seek him; I'll apprehend him: abominable villain!
80   Where is he?

81   I do not well know, my lord. If it shall please
82   you to suspend your indignation against my
83   brother till you can derive from him better
84   testimony of his intent, you shall run a certain
85   course; where, if you violently proceed against
86   him, mistaking his purpose, it would make a great
87   gap in your own honour, and shake in pieces the
88   heart of his obedience. I dare pawn down my life
89   for him, that he hath wrote this to feel my
90   affection to your honour, and to no further
91   pretence of danger.

92   Think you so?

93   If your honour judge it meet, I will place you
94   where you shall hear us confer of this, and by an
95   auricular assurance have your satisfaction; and
96   that without any further delay than this very evening.

97   He cannot be such a monster--

98   Nor is not, sure.

99   To his father, that so tenderly and entirely
100  loves him. Heaven and earth! Edmund, seek him
101  out: wind me into him, I pray you: frame the
102  business after your own wisdom. I would unstate
103  myself, to be in a due resolution.

104  I will seek him, sir, presently: convey the
105  business as I shall find means and acquaint you withal.

106  These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend
107  no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can
108  reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself
109  scourged by the sequent effects: love cools,
110  friendship falls off, brothers divide: in
111  cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in
112  palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son
113  and father. This villain of mine comes under the
114  prediction; there's son against father: the king
115  falls from bias of nature; there's father against
116  child. We have seen the best of our time:
117  machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all
118  ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our
119  graves. Find out this villain, Edmund; it shall
120  lose thee nothing; do it carefully. And the
121  noble and true-hearted Kent banished! his
122  offence, honesty! 'Tis strange.

123  This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
124  when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit
125  of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our
126  disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
127  if we were villains by necessity; fools by
128  heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
129  treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
130  liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
131  planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
132  by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
133  of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
134  disposition to the charge of a star! My
135  father compounded with my mother under the
136  dragon's tail; and my nativity was under Ursa
137  major; so that it follows, I am rough and
138  lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am,
139  had the maidenliest star in the firmament
140  twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar--
Enter EDGAR
141  And pat he comes like the catastrophe of the old
142  comedy: my cue is villanous melancholy, with a
143  sigh like Tom o' Bedlam. O, these eclipses do
144  portend these divisions! fa, sol, la, mi.

145  How now, brother Edmund! what serious
146  contemplation are you in?

147  I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read
148  this other day, what should follow these eclipses.

149  Do you busy yourself about that?

150  I promise you, the effects he writes of succeed
151  unhappily; as of unnaturalness between the child
152  and the parent; death, dearth, dissolutions of
153  ancient amities; divisions in state, menaces and
154  maledictions against king and nobles; needless
155  diffidences, banishment of friends, dissipation
156  of cohorts, nuptial breaches, and I know not what.

157  How long have you been a sectary astronomical?

158  Come, come; when saw you my father last?

159  Why, the night gone by.

160  Spake you with him?

161  Ay, two hours together.

162  Parted you in good terms? Found you no
163  displeasure in him by word or countenance?

164  None at all.

165  Bethink yourself wherein you may have offended
166  him: and at my entreaty forbear his presence
167  till some little time hath qualified the heat of
168  his displeasure; which at this instant so rageth
169  in him, that with the mischief of your person it
170  would scarcely allay.

171  Some villain hath done me wrong.

172  That's my fear. I pray you, have a continent
173  forbearance till the spied of his rage goes
174  slower; and, as I say, retire with me to my
175  lodging, from whence I will fitly bring you to
176  hear my lord speak: pray ye, go; there's my key:
177  if you do stir abroad, go armed.

178  Armed, brother!

179  Brother, I advise you to the best; go armed: I
180  am no honest man if there be any good meaning
181  towards you: I have told you what I have seen
182  and heard; but faintly, nothing like the image
183  and horror of it: pray you, away.

184  Shall I hear from you anon?

185  I do serve you in this business.
Exit EDGAR
186  A credulous father! and a brother noble,
187  Whose nature is so far from doing harms,
188  That he suspects none: on whose foolish honesty
189  My practises ride easy! I see the business.
190  Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit:
191  All with me's meet that I can fashion fit.