Internet Shakespeare Editions

Author: William Shakespeare
Editor: Michael Best
Not Peer Reviewed

King Lear (Modern, Extended Folio)

1.2
Enter [the] Bastard [with a letter].
335Bastard
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
340Lag 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"?
345Who, 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,
350Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.
Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
As to th'legitimate. Fine word, "legitimate."
Well, my "legitimate," if this letter speed
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
355Shall to th'legitimate. I grow, I prosper.
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!
Enter Gloucester.
Gloucester
Kent banished thus? and France in choler parted?
And the King gone tonight, prescribed his power,
360Confined to exhibition? All this done
Upon the gad?--Edmund, how now? What news?
Bastard
[Pockets the letter.] So please your lordship, none.
Gloucester
Why so earnestly seek you to put up that letter?
Bastard
I know no news, my lord.
365Gloucester
What paper were you reading?
Bastard
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 370nothing I shall not need spectacles.
Bastard
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.
375Gloucester
Give me the letter, sir.
Bastard
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!
380Bastard
I hope for my brother's justification, he wrote this but as an assay, or taste of my virtue.
[He gives Gloucester the letter.]
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 385and 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.
390Hum, conspiracy! "Sleep till I wake 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 you to this? Who brought it?
Bastard
It was not brought me, my lord, there's the 395cunning of it. I found it thrown in at the casement of my closet.
Gloucester
You know the character to be your brother's?
Bastard
If the matter were good, my lord, I durst swear it were his; but in respect of that I would fain think it 400were not.
Gloucester
It is his?
Bastard
It is his hand, my lord, but I hope his heart is not in the contents.
Gloucester
Has he never before sounded you in this business?
405Bastard
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.
Gloucester
O villain, villain! His very opinion in the 410letter. Abhorred villain! Unnatural, detested, brutish villain, worse than brutish. Go sirrah, seek him. I'll apprehend him, abominable villain. Where is he?
Bastard
I do not well know, my lord. If it shall please you to suspend your indignation against my brother till you can 415derive 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 honor and shake in pieces the heart of his obedience. I dare pawn down my life for him that 420he hath writ this to feel my affection to your honor, and to no other pretense of danger.
Gloucester
Think you so?
Bastard
If your honor judge it meet, I will place you where you shall hear us confer of this, and by an 425auricular assurance have your satisfaction--and that without any further delay than this very evening.
Gloucester
He cannot be such a monster.
427.1Bastard
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 430myself to be in a due resolution.
Bastard
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 435reason 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 440prediction--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 445thee nothing. Do it carefully. And the noble and true-hearted Kent banished; his offence, honesty. 'Tis strange.
Exit
Bastard
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune--often the surfeits of our own behavior--we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the 450moon, and stars, as if we were villains on 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 455thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on 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." I should 460have 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 villanous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom 465o'Bedlam. --Oh, these eclipses do portend these divisions. Fa, sol, la, me.
Edgar
How now, brother Edmund. What serious contemplation are you in?
Bastard
I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read this 470other day, what should follow these eclipses.
Edgar
Do you busy yourself with that?
Bastard
I promise you, the effects he writes of succeed unhappily, 473.1as 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. 473.5
Edgar
How long have you been a sectary astronomical?
Bastard
Come, come. When saw you my father last?
475Edgar
The night gone by.
Bastard
Spake you with him?
Edgar
Ay, two hours together.
Bastard
Parted you in good terms? Found you no displeasure in him, by word, nor countenance?
480Edgar
None at all.
Bastard
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 485mischief of your person it would scarcely allay.
Edgar
Some villain hath done me wrong.
Bastard
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 490fitly bring you to hear my lord speak. Pray ye go. There's my key. If you do stir abroad, go armed.
Edgar
Armed, brother?
Bastard
Brother, I advise you to the best. I am no honest man if there be any good meaning toward you. I have told 495you 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?
Exit [Edgar].
Bastard
[Calling after him] I do serve you in this business.
A credulous father and a brother noble,
500Whose 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.