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 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 pre-dominance;
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.
