READ STUDY GUIDE: Act I, scenes i–ii |
|
Act I, Scene ii:
A Hall in the Earl of Gloster's Castle.
A Hall in the Earl of Gloster's Castle.
| [Enter Edmund with a letter.] |
| Edm.: |
| 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 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 Gloster.] |
| Glou.: |
| 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? |
| Edm.: |
| So please your lordship, none. |
| [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. |
| 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. |
| 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 perus'd, |
| I find it not fit for your o'erlooking. |
| Glou.: |
| Give me the letter, sir. |
| Edm.: |
| I shall offend, either to detain or give it. The contents, as in |
| part I understand them, are to blame. |
| Glou.: |
| Let's see, let's see! |
| Edm.: |
| I hope, for my brother's justification, he wrote this but as an |
| essay or taste of my virtue. |
| 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.' |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Edm.: |
| It is his hand, my lord; but I hope his heart is not in the |
| contents. |
| Glou.: |
| Hath he never before sounded you in this business? |
| Edm.: |
| 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. |
| Glou.: |
| 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? |
| 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 should 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 writ this to feel my affection to your |
| honour, and to no other pretence of danger. |
| Glou.: |
| Think you so? |
| Edm.: |
| 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. |
| Edm.: |
| Nor is not, sure. |
| Glou.: |
| 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. |
| Edm.: |
| I will seek him, sir, presently; convey the business as I shall |
| find means, and acquaint you withal. |
| 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.] |
| 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 on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; |
| knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; |
| 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. |
| [Enter Edgar.] |
| 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. |
| Edg.: |
| How now, brother Edmund! what serious contemplation are you in? |
| Edm.: |
| I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read this other day, |
| what should follow these eclipses. |
| Edg.: |
| Do you busy yourself with that? |
| 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. |
| Edg.: |
| How long have you been a sectary astronomical? |
| Edm.: |
| Come, come! when saw you my father last? |
| Edg.: |
| The night gone by. |
| Edm.: |
| Spake you with him? |
| Edg.: |
| Ay, two hours together. |
| 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 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. |
| Edg.: |
| Some villain hath done me wrong. |
| 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 you, go; there's my key.—If you do stir abroad, go |
| armed. |
| Edg.: |
| Armed, brother! |
| Edm.: |
| 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! |
| Edg.: |
| Shall I hear from you anon? |
| Edm.: |
| 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!—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.] |
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