Complete Plays, The (125 page)

Flourish. Exeunt all but King Of France, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia

King Of France

Bid farewell to your sisters.

Cordelia

The jewels of our father, with wash’d eyes
Cordelia leaves you: I know you what you are;
And like a sister am most loath to call
Your faults as they are named. Use well our father:
To your professed bosoms I commit him
But yet, alas, stood I within his grace,
I would prefer him to a better place.
So, farewell to you both.

Regan

Prescribe not us our duties.

Goneril

Let your study
Be to content your lord, who hath received you
At fortune’s alms. You have obedience scanted,
And well are worth the want that you have wanted.

Cordelia

Time shall unfold what plaited cunning hides:
Who cover faults, at last shame them derides.
Well may you prosper!

King Of France

Come, my fair Cordelia.

Exeunt King Of France and Cordelia

Goneril

Sister, it is not a little I have to say of what most nearly appertains to us both. I think our father will hence to-night.

Regan

That’s most certain, and with you; next month with us.

Goneril

You see how full of changes his age is; the observation we have made of it hath not been little: he always loved our sister most; and with what poor judgment he hath now cast her off appears too grossly.

Regan

’Tis the infirmity of his age: yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself.

Goneril

The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash; then must we look to receive from his age, not alone the imperfections of long-engraffed condition, but therewithal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them.

Regan

Such unconstant starts are we like to have from him as this of Kent’s banishment.

Goneril

There is further compliment of leavetaking between France and him. Pray you, let’s hit together: if our father carry authority with such dispositions as he bears, this last surrender of his will but offend us.

Regan

We shall further think on’t.

Goneril

We must do something, and i’ the heat.

Exeunt

S
CENE
II. T
HE
E
ARL
OF
G
LOUCESTER
’
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 moon-shines
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 Gloucester

Gloucester

Kent banish’d thus! and France in choler parted!
And the king gone to-night! subscribed 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’er-read; and for so much as I have perused, I find it not fit for your o’er-looking.

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 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?

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

Hath he never heretofore 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 declining, 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 shall 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 wrote this to feel my affection to your honour, and to no further 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.

Exit

Edmund

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,— often the surfeit of our own behavior,— we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by 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. Tut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar —

Enter Edgar

And pat he comes like the catastrophe of the old comedy: my cue is villanous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’ Bedlam. O, these eclipses do portend these divisions! 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 about 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

Come, come; when saw you my father last?

Edgar

Why, 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 or countenance?

Edgar

None at all.

Edmund

Bethink yourself wherein you may have offended him: and at my entreaty forbear his presence till 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 spied 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; go armed: I am no honest man if there be any good meaning towards 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 practises 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

S
CENE
III. T
HE
D
UKE
OF
A
LBANY
’
S
PALACE
.

Enter Goneril, and Oswald, her steward

Goneril

Did my father strike my gentleman for chiding of his fool?

Oswald

Yes, madam.

Goneril

By day and night he wrongs me; every hour
He flashes into one gross crime or other,
That sets us all at odds: I’ll not endure it:
His knights grow riotous, and himself upbraids us
On every trifle. When he returns from hunting,
I will not speak with him; say I am sick:
If you come slack of former services,
You shall do well; the fault of it I’ll answer.

Oswald

He’s coming, madam; I hear him.

Horns within

Goneril

Put on what weary negligence you please,
You and your fellows; I’ll have it come to question:
If he dislike it, let him to our sister,
Whose mind and mine, I know, in that are one,
Not to be over-ruled. Idle old man,
That still would manage those authorities
That he hath given away! Now, by my life,
Old fools are babes again; and must be used
With cheques as flatteries,— when they are seen abused.
Remember what I tell you.

Oswald

Well, madam.

Goneril

And let his knights have colder looks among you;
What grows of it, no matter; advise your fellows so:
I would breed from hence occasions, and I shall,
That I may speak: I’ll write straight to my sister,
To hold my very course. Prepare for dinner.