William Shakespeare: The Tragedy of King Lear

ACT I. 2. Scene II. A Hall in the Earl of Gloster's Castle. (continued)

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.

[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.

Edg.
How now, brother Edmund! what serious contemplation are you in?

Edm.
I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read this other day,
what should follow these eclipses.

Edg.
Do you busy yourself with that?

Edm.
I promise you, the effects he writes of succeed unhappily: as of
unnaturalness between the child and the parent; death, dearth,
dissolutions of ancient amities; divisions in state, menaces and
maledictions against king and nobles; needless diffidences,
banishment of friends, dissipation of cohorts, nuptial breaches,
and I know not what.

Edg.
How long have you been a sectary astronomical?

Edm.
Come, come! when saw you my father last?

Edg.
The night gone by.

Edm.
Spake you with him?

Edg.
Ay, two hours together.

Edm.
Parted you in good terms? Found you no displeasure in him by word
or countenance?

Edg.
None at all.