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  • Title: King Lear (Quarto 2, 1619)
  • Editor: Pervez Rizvi
  • Coordinating editor: Michael Best

    • ISBN: 978-1-55058-463-9

    Copyright Michael Best. This text may be freely used for educational, non-profit purposes; for all other uses contact the Editor.
    Author: William Shakespeare
    Editor: Pervez Rizvi
    Not Peer Reviewed

    King Lear (Quarto 2, 1619)

    The History of King Lear.
    loue cooles, friendship fals off, brothers diuide, in Cities muti-
    nies, in Countries discords, Pallaces treason, the bond crackt
    betweene sonne and father; finde out this villaine, Edmund it
    shall lose thee nothing, do it carefully; and the noble and true
    hearted Kent banisht, his offence honest; strange, strange!
    Bast. This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we
    are sicke in Fortune, often the surfet of our owne behauiour,
    we make guilty of our disasters, the Sunne, the Moore, and the
    450stars, as if we were villaines by necessity, fooles by heauenly
    compulsion, knaues, theeues, and trecherers by spirituall predo-
    minance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'st obedi-
    ence of planitary influence, and all that we are euill in, by a di-
    uine thrusting on, an admirable euasion of whore-master man,
    to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of stars; my Father
    compounded with my Mother vnder the Dragons taile, & my
    natiuity was vnder Vrsa maior, so that it followes I am rough &
    lecherous; Fut, I should haue beene that I am, had the maiden-
    460lest starre of the Firmament twinckled on my bastardy; Edgar,
    Enter Edgar.
    & out he comes like the Catastrophe of the old Comedy, mine
    is villanous melancholy, with a sigh like them of Bedlam; O
    465these Ecclipses do portend these diuisions.
    Edgar. How now brother Edmund, what serious contempla-
    tion are you in?
    Bast. I am thinking brother of a prediction I read this other
    470day, what should follow these Ecclipses.
    Edg. Doe you busie your selfe about that?
    Bast. I promise you the effects he writ of, succeed vnhappily,
    as of vnnaturalnesse betweene the childe and the parent, death,
    473.1dearth, dissolutions of ancient armies, diuisions in state, mena-
    ces and maledictions against King and Nobles, needlesse diffi-
    dences, banishment of friends, dissipation of Cohorts, nuptiall
    breaches, and I know not what.
    473.5Edg. How long haue you bin a sectary Astronomicall?
    Bast. Come, come, when saw you my father last?
    475Edg. Why the night gone by.
    Bast. Spake you with him?
    Two
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