Act 1, Scene 2

A Hall in the Earl of Gloster's Castle.

[Enter Edmund with a letter.]
Edmund
323 Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
324 My services are bound. Wherefore should I
325 Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
326 The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
327 For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
328 Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?
329 When my dimensions are as well compact,
330 My mind as generous, and my shape as true
331 As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
332 With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
333 Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
334 More composition and fierce quality
335 Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
336 Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops
337 Got 'tween asleep and wake?—Well then,
338 Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land:
339 Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
340 As to the legitimate: fine word—legitimate!
341 Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
342 And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
343 Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper.—
344 Now, gods, stand up for bastards!
[Enter Gloster.]
Gloucester
345 Kent banish'd thus! and France in choler parted!
346 And the king gone to-night! subscrib'd his pow'r!
347 Confin'd to exhibition! All this done
348 Upon the gad!—Edmund, how now! What news?
Edmund
349 So please your lordship, none.
[Putting up the letter.]
Gloucester
350 Why so earnestly seek you to put up that letter?
Edmund
351 I know no news, my lord.
Gloucester
352 What paper were you reading?
Edmund
353 Nothing, my lord.
Gloucester
354 No? What needed, then, that terrible dispatch of it into your
355 pocket? the quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself.
356 Let's see.
357 Come, if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles.
Edmund
358 I beseech you, sir, pardon me. It is a letter from my brother
359 that I have not all o'er-read; and for so much as I have perus'd,
360 I find it not fit for your o'erlooking.
Gloucester
361 Give me the letter, sir.
Edmund
362 I shall offend, either to detain or give it. The contents, as in
363 part I understand them, are to blame.
Gloucester
364 Let's see, let's see!
Edmund
365 I hope, for my brother's justification, he wrote this but as an
366 essay or taste of my virtue.
[Reads.]
Gloucester
367 'This policy and reverence of age makes the world
368 bitter to the best of our times; keeps our fortunes from us
369 till our oldness cannot relish them. I begin to find an idle
370 and fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny; who sways,
371 not as it hath power, but as it is suffered. Come to me, that
372 of this I may speak more. If our father would sleep till I
373 waked him, you should enjoy half his revenue for ever, and live
374 the beloved of your brother,
375 'EDGAR.'
376 Hum! Conspiracy?—'Sleep till I waked him,—you should enjoy half
377 his revenue.'—My son Edgar! Had he a hand to write this? a heart
378 and brain to breed it in? When came this to you? who brought it?
Edmund
379 It was not brought me, my lord, there's the cunning of it; I
380 found it thrown in at the casement of my closet.
Gloucester
381 You know the character to be your brother's?
Edmund
382 If the matter were good, my lord, I durst swear it were his; but
383 in respect of that, I would fain think it were not.
Gloucester
384 It is his.
Edmund
385 It is his hand, my lord; but I hope his heart is not in the
386 contents.
Gloucester
387 Hath he never before sounded you in this business?
Edmund
388 Never, my lord: but I have heard him oft maintain it to be fit
389 that, sons at perfect age, and fathers declined, the father
390 should be as ward to the son, and the son manage his revenue.
Gloucester
391 O villain, villain!—His very opinion in the letter! Abhorred
392 villain!—Unnatural, detested, brutish villain! worse than
393 brutish!—Go, sirrah, seek him; I'll apprehend him. Abominable
394 villain!—Where is he?
Edmund
395 I do not well know, my lord. If it shall please you to suspend
396 your indignation against my brother till you can derive from him
397 better testimony of his intent, you should run a certain course;
398 where, if you violently proceed against him, mistaking his
399 purpose, it would make a great gap in your own honour, and shake
400 in pieces the heart of his obedience. I dare pawn down my life
401 for him that he hath writ this to feel my affection to your
402 honour, and to no other pretence of danger.
Gloucester
403 Think you so?
Edmund
404 If your honour judge it meet, I will place you where you shall
405 hear us confer of this, and by an auricular assurance have your
406 satisfaction;
407 and that without any further delay than this very evening.
Gloucester
408 He cannot be such a monster.
Edmund
409 Nor is not, sure.
Gloucester
410 To his father, that so tenderly and entirely loves him.—Heaven
411 and earth!—Edmund, seek him out; wind me into him, I pray you:
412 frame the business after your own wisdom. I would unstate myself
413 to be in a due resolution.
Edmund
414 I will seek him, sir, presently; convey the business as I shall
415 find means, and acquaint you withal.
Gloucester
416 These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us:
417 though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet
418 nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects: love cools,
419 friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in
420 countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked
421 'twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the
422 prediction; there's son against father: the king falls from
423 bias of nature; there's father against child. We have seen the
424 best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all
425 ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.—Find out
426 this villain, Edmund; it shall lose thee nothing; do it
427 carefully.—And the noble and true-hearted Kent banished! his
428 offence, honesty!—'Tis strange.
[Exit.]
Edmund
429 This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are
430 sick in fortune,—often the surfeit of our own behaviour,—we
431 make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as
432 if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion;
433 knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance;
434 drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of
435 planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine
436 thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his
437 goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded
438 with my mother under the dragon's tail, and my nativity was under
439 ursa major; so that it follows I am rough and lecherous.—Tut! I
440 should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the
441 firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.
[Enter Edgar.]
Edmund
442 Pat!—he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy: my cue
443 is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o' Bedlam.—O,
444 these eclipses do portend these divisions! fa, sol, la, mi.
Edgar
445 How now, brother Edmund! what serious contemplation are you in?
Edmund
446 I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read this other day,
447 what should follow these eclipses.
Edgar
448 Do you busy yourself with that?
Edmund
449 I promise you, the effects he writes of succeed unhappily: as of
450 unnaturalness between the child and the parent; death, dearth,
451 dissolutions of ancient amities; divisions in state, menaces and
452 maledictions against king and nobles; needless diffidences,
453 banishment of friends, dissipation of cohorts, nuptial breaches,
454 and I know not what.
Edgar
455 How long have you been a sectary astronomical?
Edmund
456 Come, come! when saw you my father last?
Edgar
457 The night gone by.
Edmund
458 Spake you with him?
Edgar
459 Ay, two hours together.
Edmund
460 Parted you in good terms? Found you no displeasure in him by word
461 or countenance?
Edgar
462 None at all.
Edmund
463 Bethink yourself wherein you may have offended him: and at my
464 entreaty forbear his presence until some little time hath
465 qualified the heat of his displeasure; which at this instant so
466 rageth in him that with the mischief of your person it would
467 scarcely allay.
Edgar
468 Some villain hath done me wrong.
Edmund
469 That's my fear. I pray you have a continent forbearance till the
470 speed of his rage goes slower; and, as I say, retire with me to
471 my lodging, from whence I will fitly bring you to hear my lord
472 speak: pray you, go; there's my key.—If you do stir abroad, go
473 armed.
Edgar
474 Armed, brother!
Edmund
475 Brother, I advise you to the best; I am no honest man
476 if there be any good meaning toward you: I have told you what I
477 have seen and heard but faintly; nothing like the image and
478 horror of it: pray you, away!
Edgar
479 Shall I hear from you anon?
Edmund
480 I do serve you in this business.
[Exit Edgar.]
Edmund
481 A credulous father! and a brother noble,
482 Whose nature is so far from doing harms
483 That he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty
484 My practices ride easy!—I see the business.
485 Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit:
486 All with me's meet that I can fashion fit.
[Exit.]

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Notes

TLN 323cultural context
“Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law”
Edmund opens his soliloquy by invoking 'nature' as his goddess, meaning raw biological law rather than the social and moral 'nature' that Elizabethans equated with divine order. He rejects custom — the inherited rule that a legitimate son inherits while a bastard gets nothing — as an arbitrary human invention that has nothing to do with his actual abilities. 'The curiosity of nations' means the over-precise, fussy distinctions societies make about birth.
historical The great chain of being (order and degree)
TLN 344cultural context
“Now, gods, stand up for bastards!”
Edmund ends his soliloquy with a war-cry addressed to the play's pagan gods. Throughout King Lear the characters swear by Jupiter, Apollo, and other classical deities -- reflecting the play's legendary pre-Christian British setting. Having just made 'Nature' his goddess and renounced the claims of custom and legitimacy, Edmund now calls grandly on the gods to back the bastard's cause -- crowning his manifesto of self-interest with a swaggering exit line.
historical King Leir and legendary Britain
TLN 346archaic vocab
“subscrib'd his pow'r! / Confin'd to exhibition!”
Gloucester is stunned that Lear has signed away his royal authority. 'Subscrib'd his power' means formally surrendered it — 'subscribe' comes from the Latin for to write under, that is, to sign a document of submission or renunciation. 'Confin'd to exhibition' means reduced to a living allowance: 'exhibition' was the Elizabethan legal term for a pension or regular stipend granted to a dependent. Gloucester is saying that Lear, once an absolute king, is now on a fixed income from his daughters.
TLN 348archaic vocab
“Upon the gad!”
'Upon the gad' means on the spur of the moment, impulsively. A 'gad' was a sharp metal spike or goad used to drive cattle; the phrase catches the way Lear's decision jabbed everything forward without warning. Gloucester, having just rehearsed the shocking speed of events — Kent banished, France gone, the king gone — uses the phrase to sum up that none of it was deliberated.
TLN 405archaic vocab
“by an auricular assurance have your satisfaction”
'Auricular assurance' means proof heard with your own ears — 'auricular' comes from the Latin auris, ear. Edmund is offering to let Gloucester eavesdrop on a conversation between himself and Edgar so that Gloucester can hear with his own ears that Edgar's intentions are harmless. The phrase sounds formal and reliable, which is precisely Edmund's strategy: reassuring language to lower Gloucester's guard.
TLN 416historical topical
“These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us”
Gloucester reads the family crisis and the kingdom's disorder as symptoms of celestial warnings. 'Late eclipses' refers to real events: a lunar eclipse in September 1605 and a solar eclipse in October 1605 had been widely reported and interpreted as omens of political disaster. Elizabethan and Jacobean astrology held that eclipses signalled disruptions in the social order — exactly the catalogue Gloucester gives: 'love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked twixt son and father.'
historical Astrology and the late eclipses
TLN 429cultural context
“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune”
'Foppery' here means foolishness or credulity, not foppishness in dress. Edmund's soliloquy is a sustained attack on fatalism: people who blame their failures on the stars are making an 'admirable evasion' — a magnificent excuse — for their own bad behaviour. 'Whoremaster man' means man as a lecher, governed by lust; 'goatish disposition' tags lust specifically, since goats were proverbially lascivious. Edmund's point is that a man who was himself conceived in lust calls his lust the stars' fault.
historical Astrology and the late eclipseshistorical The Stage Machiavel
TLN 442historical topical
“my cue / is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o' Bedlam”
'Tom o' Bedlam' was a recognized type of wandering beggar in Elizabethan England — a discharged or escaped inmate of Bethlem Royal Hospital (Bedlam, London's notorious asylum) who roamed the roads acting mad or half-mad, begging by frightening or entertaining people. Edmund says he will play the role of gloomy, troubled melancholic — a 'Tom o' Bedlam' act — when Edgar arrives. The reference plants the identity Edgar will actually take on later in the play when he disguises himself as 'Poor Tom.'
historical Harsnett's Declaration and Poor Tom's devils
TLN 483historical topical
“on whose foolish honesty / My practices ride easy!”
'Practices' here means scheming plots and machinations — not innocent activities. Edmund closes the scene by congratulating himself that Gloucester's credulity and Edgar's honest nature make his plots easy to execute. The closing couplet ('Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit: / All with me's meet that I can fashion fit') is a formal declaration of the stage Machiavel's creed: what matters is not inherited right but the ability to scheme, and everything is legitimate if it can be made to serve his purpose.
historical The Stage Machiavel