The Earl of Gloucester's Castle.
 Enter EDMUND with a letter.

Edmund	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, tird bed,
	Go to th'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 th'legitimate. Fine word 'legitimate'!
	Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
	And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
	Shall top th'legitimate. I grow, I prosper.
	Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

                            Enter GLOUCESTER.

Gloucester	Kent banished thus! And France in choler painted!
	And the king gone tonight! Prescribed his power,
	Confined to exhibition! All this done
	Upon the gad!-Edmund, how now, what news?

Edmund	So please your lordship, none.
												[Putting up the letter.

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

Edmund	I know no news, my lord.

Gloucester	What paper were you reading?

Edmund	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 nothing I shall not need 
	spectacles.

Edmund	I beseech you, sir, pardon me. It is a letter from my 
	brother that I have not all o'erread, and for so much as I 
	have perused, I find it not fit for your o'erlooking.

Gloucester	Give me the letter, sir.

Edmund	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.

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

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 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 you this? 
	Who brought it?

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

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

Edmund	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.

Gloucester	It is his.

Edmund	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?

Edmund	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 letter! 
	Abhorred villain! Unnatural, detested, brutish villain! 
	Worse than brutish! Go, sirrah, seek him; I'll apprehend 
	him. Abominable villain! Where is he?

Edmund	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.

Gloucester	Think you so?

Edmund	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.

Gloucester	He cannot be such a monster-

Edmund	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 myself to be in a due resolution.

Edmund	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 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.

Edmund	This is the excellent foppery of the world that, when we 
	are sick in fortune -often the surfeits of our own 
	behaviour -we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the 
	moon, 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 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. 
	Fut! I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star 
	in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar-

                               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. 
	[Sings.] Fa, sol, la, mi.

Edgar	How now, brother Edmund! What serious contemplation are you 
	in?

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

Edgar	Do you busy yourself with that?

Edmund	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.

Edgar	How long have you been a sectary astronomical?

Edmund	When saw you my father last?

Edgar	The night gone by.

Edmund	Spake you with him?

Edgar	Ay, two hours together.

Edmund	Parted you in good terms? Found you no displeasure in him 
	by word nor countenance?

Edgar	None at all.

Edmund	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.

Edgar	Some villain hath done me wrong.

Edmund	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.

Edgar	Armed, brother?

Edmund	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.

Edgar	Shall I hear from you anon?

Edmund	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.
