Gloucester.

These late eclipses in the sun and

moon 105 '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 110 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.

115

106. wisdom of nature: wisdom concerning nature, the knowledge

of natural laws. (Furness.)

107. reason it thus and thus: explain the eclipses, etc.

nature: human nature, society.

As Gloucester tries to reason concerning Edgar's apparent treachery, his mind turns to those explanations popularly given for unusual events; and his words are in the nature of a soliloquy. Lines 116 and 117 are the only ones addressed to Edgar.

Belief in astrology, or the possibility of reading the course of human events in the stars, was quite common in Shakespeare's time and cannot be considered incongruous to the pagan characters of this drama. A form of fatalism, linked with reverence for the heavenly bodies, lies at the foundation of astrology; and it is as a fatalist that Gloucester is here presented.

Gloucester's credulity, soon to be satirized, gives a natural basis for the foolish confidence which he places in Edmund's story concerning Edgar. No man can see himself; and Gloucester, even while he mourns over the sad results of Lear's folly, is unconscious of his own foolishness.

110. villain: a term of reproach here applied to Edgar.

112. bias: the general and natural regard for one's own children, Here the particular fondness which Lear had felt for Cordelia.

113. best of our time. (See line 48.)

113, 114. hollowness: insincerity.

114. disquietly: causing disquiet.

117. thee: affectionate and intimate form of the pronoun.

Edmund.

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that 120

when we are sick in fortune,-often the surfeits of our own

behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars; as if we were villains ou necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an 125 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 on 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 130 follows I am rough and lecherous. I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar

120. foppery: foolishness, stupidity. (See line 14.)

121. sick in fortune: suffer misfortune.

surfeits: sickness caused by the satiety of our own misdeeds. 122, guilty: hold the sun, etc., responsible for our misfortunes. disasters: literally evil stars, a term of astrology.

123. stars: not the stars in general, but individual stars as exercising special influence upon the individual person,

Edmund scorns the superstitions of astrology, according to which, as he says, man's fate and character are governed by the stars, especially by such as were supposed to be in positions to exercise influence at the hour of his birth. We may note the aptness of .this scorn from Edmund. He is a rebel against all authority, and will recognize no power of control outside of his own will.

Breaking from the fetters of convention, he also frees himself from the false excuses which men make, and boldly attributes himself and his character to natural inheritance and self-determination.

He scorns the influence of the stars by the force of a naturalism too materialistic for superstition, even as we may scorn it to-day because of a superior spiritualism. According to Coleridge upon this passage, both individuals and nations may be free from such prejudices by being below them as well as by rising above them. Edmund is below them; and in estimating his character, we must recognize this fact.

124, 125. spherical predominance: an astrological term,-influence of the heavenly spheres.

127. thrusting on: compulsion.

128. of on the part of.

goatish disposition: lustfulness.

on: to.

130. dragon's tail: The dragon is a constellation of stars, as is also Ursa Major, or the Great Bear.

Pat he comes like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My 135

cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o' Bedlam.

Edmund.

I am thinking, brother, of a predic

tion I read this other day, what should follow these

eclipses.

Edgar. Do you busy yourself with that?

140

Edmund. I promise you, the effects he writes of 145

succeed unhappily. When saw you my father *

last?

Edgar. The night gone by.

135. Pat! fitly, appropriately. This is an exclamation of delighted surprise that Edgar comes just as he was about to speak of him.

catastrophe: Edgar's appearance at the moment is as oppor

tune as the climax to a play when all are expecting it.

136. cue: a sign whereby an actor may know to begin his part, or a hint as to his opening words. Here it is a hint as to the nature of the part which Edgar proposes to play.