Edm. So please your lordship, none. [Putting up the letter. Glos. Why so earnestly seek you to put up that letter? Edm. I know no news, my lord. Glos. What paper were you reading? Edm. Nothing, my lord. 6 Glos. 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. Edm. 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. Glos. Give me the letter, sir. Edm. I shall offend, either to detain or give it. The contents, as in part I understand them, are to blame. Glos. Let's see, let's see. Edm. I hope, for my brother's justification, he wrote this but as an essay or taste of my virtue. 7 Glos. [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 fonds bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny; who sways, not as it hath power, but as it is suffer'd. Come Poetaster: "Thou art a younger brother, and hast nothing but thy bare exhibition." The word is still so used in the English Universities. - Upon the gad is in haste; the same as upon the spur. A gad was a sharp-pointed piece of steel, used in driving oxen; hence goaded. 6 Terrible because done as if from terror; terrified. 7 That is, this policy, or custom, of reverencing age. The idea is, that the honouring of fathers and mothers is an old superstition, which smart boys ought to cast off, knock their fathers on the head, and so have a good time while they are young. We have a like expression in scene 4: "This milky gentleness and course of yours." See vol. xiv. page 148, note 22. 8 Here, as commonly in Shakespeare, fond is foolish, 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, enjoy half his revenue. EDGAR. Hum-conspiracy!-Sleep till I waked him, you should 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? Edm. It was not brought me, my lord; there's the cunning of it: I found it thrown in at the casement of my closet. Glos. You know the character to be your brother's? Edm. 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. Glos. It is his. Edm. It is his hand, my lord; but I hope his heart is not in the contents. Glos. Has he never before sounded you in this business? Edm. 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. Glos. O villain, villain! His very opinion in the letter! Abhorred villain ! Unnatural, detested,9 brutish villain! worse than brutish!- Go, sirrah, seek him; I'll apprehend him. Abominable villain ! Where is he? Edm. 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, 10 if you violently proceed against him, mistaking his purpose, it would make a great gap in 9 Detested for detestable. The Poet so uses a good many words ending in -ed. See vol. x. page 172, note 35. 10 Where and whereas were used indiscriminately. Here, a certain course" is a safe or sure course. 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 11 of danger. Glos. Think you so? Edm. 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. Glos. He cannot be such a monster Edm. Nor is not, sure. Glos. to his father, that so tenderly and entirely loves him. — Heaven and Earth! - Edmund, seek him out; wind me into him,12 I pray you: frame the business after your own wisdom. I would unstate myself to be in a due resolution.13 Edm. I will seek him, sir, presently; convey 14 the business as I shall find means, and acquaint you withal. Glos. 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: 15 love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond crack'd 'twixt son and father. This villain 11 Pretence was very often used for intention or purpose. See vol. vii. page 187, note 2. 12 Me is here expletive. — Wind into him is the same as our phrase 'worm yourself into him"; that is, find out his hidden purpose. 13 "I would give my whole estate, all that I possess, to be satisfied or assured in the matter." The Poet often has resolve in this sense. 14 To convey, as the word is here used, is to manage or carry through a thing adroitly, or as by sleight of hand. 15" Though reason or natural philosophy may make out that these strange events proceed from the regular operation of natural laws, and so have no moral purpose or significance, yet we find them followed by calamities, as in punishment of our sins.” 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 banish'd! 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 by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, 16 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!17 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. EdgarEnter EDGAR. And pat he comes like the catastrophe of the old comedy.18 16 Treachers for traitors. The word is used by Chaucer and Spenser. 17 Warburton thinks that the dotages of judicial astrology were meant to be satirized in this speech. Coleridge remarks upon Edmund's philosophizing as follows: Thus scorn and misanthropy are often the anticipations and mouthpieces of wisdom in the detection of superstitions. Both individuals and nations may be free from such prejudices by being below them, as well as by rising above them." 18 Perhaps alluding, satirically, to the awkward catastrophes of the old comedies, which were coarsely contrived so as to have the persons enter, pat, just when they were wanted on the stage. - Cue, as here used, is prompt-word or hint. - Bedlam, an old corruption of Bethlehem, was a well My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o' Bedlam. O, these eclipses do portend these divisions! fa, sol, la, mi. 19 Edg. Now 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? 20 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, 21 banishment of friends, dissipation of cohorts, nuptial breaches, and I know not what. Edg. How long have you been a sectary astronomical? 22 Edm. Spake you with him? Edg. Ay, two hours together. known hospital for the insane. - Tom was a name commonly given to Bedlamites. An instance of it will be seen afterwards in Edgar. - Edmund is here pretending not to be aware of his brother's entrance. 19 "Shakespeare shows by the context that he was well acquainted with the property of these syllables in solmization, which imply a series of sounds so unnatural that ancient musicians prohibited their use. Edmund, speaking of the eclipses as portents, compares the dislocation of events, the times being out of joint, to the unnatural and offensive sounds fa sol la mi." So says Dr. Burney. But Mr. Chappell, perhaps a better authority, assures Mr. W. A. Wright, the Clarendon editor, that there is no foundation for Burney's remark; and that Edmund is merely singing to himself in order not to seem to observe Edgar's approach." 20 That is, turn out badly. The Poet often uses success for issue or consequence, whether good or bad. The usage was common. 21 Diffidences for distrustings, ruptures of confidence. An old usage. 22" How long have you belonged to the sect of astronomers?" Judicial astrology, as it is called, formerly had its schools and professors. |