Enter Edmund with a letter.

EDMUND. Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law My services are bound. Wherefore should I Stand in the plague of custom, and permit The curiosity of nations to deprive me? For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base? When my dimensions are as well compact, My mind as generous, and my shape as true As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us With base? With baseness? bastardy? Base, base? Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take More composition and fierce quality Than doth within a dull stale tired bed Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops Got ’tween asleep and wake? Well then, Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land: Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund As to the legitimate: fine word: legitimate! Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed, And my invention thrive, Edmund the base Shall top the legitimate. I grow, I prosper. Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

Enter Gloucester.

GLOUCESTER. Kent banish’d thus! and France in choler parted! And the King gone tonight! Prescrib’d his pow’r! Confin’d to exhibition! All this done Upon the gad!—Edmund, how now! What news?

EDMUND. So please your lordship, none.

[_Putting up the letter._]

GLOUCESTER. Why so earnestly seek you to put up that letter?

EDMUND. I know no news, my lord.

GLOUCESTER. What paper were you reading?

EDMUND. Nothing, my lord.

GLOUCESTER. 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.

EDMUND. 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 perus’d, I find it not fit for your o’er-looking.

GLOUCESTER. Give me the letter, sir.

EDMUND. I shall offend, either to detain or give it. The contents, as in