King Lear by William Shakespeare
page 25 of 204 (12%)
page 25 of 204 (12%)
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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 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. |
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