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.
Glou.
He cannot be such a monster.
Edm.
Nor is not, sure.
Glou. 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.
Edm. I will seek him, sir, presently; convey the business as I shall find means, and acquaint you withal.
Glou. 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.]
Edm. This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,—often the surfeit of our own behaviour,—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the 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.—Tut! I should have 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 villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’ Bedlam.—O, these eclipses do portend these divisions! fa, sol, la, mi.
Edg.
How now, brother Edmund! what serious contemplation are you in?
Edm. I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read this other day, what should follow these eclipses.
Edg.
Do you busy yourself with that?
Edm. 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.
Edg.
How long have you been a sectary astronomical?
Edm.
Come, come! when saw you my father last?
Edg.
The night gone by.
Edm.
Spake you with him?
Edg.
Ay, two hours together.
Edm. Parted you in good terms? Found you no displeasure in him by word or countenance?
Edg.
None at all.
Edm. 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.
Edg.
Some villain hath done me wrong.
Edm. 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 you, go; there’s my key.—If you do stir abroad, go armed.
Edg.
Armed, brother!
Edm. 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!
Edg.
Shall I hear from you anon?
Edm.
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.]
SCENE III. A Room in the Duke of Albany’s Palace.
[Enter Goneril and Oswald.]
Gon.
Did my father strike my gentleman for chiding of his fool?
Osw. Ay, madam.
Gon.
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.
Osw.
He’s coming, madam; I hear him.
[Horns within.]
Gon.
Put on what weary negligence you please,
You and your fellows; I’d have it come to question:
If he distaste it,
