Edm. I know no news, my lord. Glo. What paper were you reading? Glo. No? What needed then that terrible despatch 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'erread; for so much as I have perused, I find it not fit for your oyer-looking. Glo. 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. Glo. Let's see, let's see. Edm. I hope, for my brother's justification, he wrote this but as an essays or taste of my virtue. Glo. [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 fond9 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.-Humph-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? 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. То 8.As an essay,' &c. means as a trial or taste of my virtue. assay, or rather essay, of the French word essayer,' says Baret; and a little lower: To taste or assay before; prælibo. 9 i. e. weak and foolish. Glo. 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. Glo. It is his. Edm. It is his hand, my lord; but, I hope, his heart is not in the contents. Glo. Hath he never heretofore sounded you in this business? Edm. Never, my lord: But I have often heard him maintain it to be fit, that, sons at perfect age, and fathers declining, the father should be as ward declined to the son, and the son manage his revenue. Glo. 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? 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; where10, 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 pretence12 of danger. Glo. 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. Glo. He cannot be such a monster. 10 Where for whereas. 11 The usual address to a lord. 12 i. e. design or purpose. [Edm. Nor is not, sure. Glo. To his father, that so tenderly and entirely loves him.-Heaven and earth13!]-Edmund, seek him out; wind me into him14, I pray you: frame the business after your own wisdom: I would unstate myself, to be in a due resolution15. Edm. I will seek him, sir, presently; convey16 the business as I shall find means, and acquaint you withal. Glo. 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 effects17: love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked between 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 graves18! Find out this villain, Edmund, it shall lose thee nothing; do it carefully: 13 The words between brackets are omitted in the folio. 14 Wind me into him Another example of familiar expressive phraseology not unfrequent in Shakspeare. See vol. iii. p. 341, note 1. 15 I would unstate myself to be in a due resolution,' means would give all that I am possessed of to be satisfied of the truth. So in The Four Prentices, Reed's Old Plays, vol. viii. p. 92:C Ah, but the resolution of thy death Made me to lose such thought." Shakspeare frequently uses resolved for satisfied. And in the third act of Massinger's Picture, Sophia says: I have practis'd For my certain resolution, with these courtiers.` And in the last act she says: - Nay, more, to take For the resolution of his fears, a course That is, by holy writ, denied a Christian." 16 To convey is to conduct, or carry through. 17 That is, though natural philosophy can give account of eclipses, yet we feel their consequences. 18 All between brackets is omitted in the quartos. -And the noble and true-hearted Kent banished! his offence, honesty!-Strange! strange! [Exit. Edm. This is the excellent foppery of the world19! 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 treachers20 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 star21! 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-] L Enter EDGAR. and pat he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy 22: My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o'Bedlam.-0, these eclipses do portend these divisions! fa, sol, la mi23.) 19 Warburton, in a long and ingenious note on this passage, observes that in this play the dotages of a judicial astrology are intended to be satirized. It was a very prevailing folly in the poet's time. 20 Treachers is the reading of the folio, which is countenanced by the use of the word in many of our old dramas. Chaucer, in his Romaunt of the Rose, mentions the false treacher; and Spenser many times uses the same epithet. The quartos all read treacherers. 21 So Chaucer's Wife of Bath (v. 6196): I followed ay min inclination By vertue of my constellation." Bernardus Sylvestris, an eminent philosopher and poet of the twelfth In stellis Codri paupertas, copia Crœsi 22 Perhaps this was intended to ridicule the very awkward conclusions of our old comedies, where the persons of the scene make their entry inartificially, and just when the poet wants them on the stage. 23 Shakspeare shows by the context that he was well acquainted in 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 you24, 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 cohorts25, 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. Why, 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, till some little time hath qualified the with the property of these syllables in solmisation, which imply a series of sounds so unnatural that ancient musicians prohibited their use. The monkish writers on music say mi contra fa, est diabolus: the interval fa mi, including a tritonus or sharp fourth, consisting of three tones without the intervention of a semi-tone, expressed in the modern scale by the letters F G A B, would form a musical phrase extremely disagreeable to the ear. Edmund, speaking of eclipses as portents and prodigies, compares the dislocation of events, the times being out of joint, to the unnatural and offensive sounds fa sol la mi. Dr. Burney. 24 The folio edition commonly differs from the first quarto, by augmentations or insertions, but in this place it varies by the omission of all between brackets. It is easy to remark that in this speech, which ought, I think, to be inserted as it now is in the text. Edmund, with the common craft of fortunetellers, mingles the past and the future, and tells of the future only what he already foreknows by confederacy, or can attain by probable conjecture. 25 For cohorts some editors read courts. Johnson. |
