Explore "King Lear" by William Shakespeare on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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!