brother, when his father enters, to pretend that they are fighting with their swords. Edgar agrees, though it is quite incomprehensible why he should do so. The father finds them fighting. Edgar runs away and Edmund scratches his own arm to draw blood, and persuades his father that Edgar was using charms to kill his father and had wanted Edmund to help him, but that he had refused to do so and Edgar had then thrown himself upon him and wounded him in the arm. Gloucester believes everything, curses Edgar, and transfers all the rights of his elder and legitimate son to the illegitimate Edmund. The Duke of Cornwall, hearing of this, also rewards Edmund.

In Scene II before Gloucester’s castle, Lear’s new servant Kent, still unrecognised by Lear, begins without any reason to abuse Oswald (Goneril’s steward), calling him “a knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; ... the son and heir of a mongrel bitch,” and so on. Then drawing his sword he demands that Oswald should fight him, saying that he will make of him a “sop o’ the moonshine,” words no commentator has been able to explain, and when he is stopped, he continues to give vent to the strangest abuse, saying, for instance, that he, Oswald, has been made by a tailor, because “a stone-cutter, or a painter, could not have made him so ill, though they had been but two hours at the trade.” He also says that, if he is allowed, he will tread this unbolted villain into mortar, and daub the wall of a privy with him.

And in this way Kent, whom nobody recognises,--though both the king and the Duke of Cornwall, as well as Gloucester who is present, should know him well,--continues to brawl, in the character of a new servant of Lear’s, until he is seized and put in the stocks.