King Lear: Act 1, Scene 2 Translation

A side-by-side translation of Act 1, Scene 2 of King Lear from the original Shakespeare into modern English.

Original Text	Translated Text
Source: Folger Shakespeare Library
Enter Edmund, the Bastard. 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 5 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,” 10 “base,” Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take More composition and fierce quality Than doth within a dull, stale, tired bed Go to th’ creating a whole tribe of fops 15 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 th’ legitimate. Fine word, “legitimate.” Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed 20 And my invention thrive, Edmund the base Shall top th’ legitimate. I grow, I prosper. Now, gods, stand up for bastards!	Edmund, Gloucester's illegitimate son, is miffed. He complains about the way society treats younger brothers and "illegitimate" children. He's just as smart, attractive, and talented as his brother, Edgar, but when Gloucester dies, Edgar will get property and an important position. Edmund will get nothing. Edmund also insists that since his parents had such an awesome and "lusty" time in bed when he was conceived, he's far more superior to any person legitimately conceived in a "stale tired bed." He says that one way or another, Edmund is going to get his brother's land, and we doubt that he's interested in a time share. Finally, Edmund calls on the gods to "stand up for bastards!" (You know nothing, Jon Snow.) (Helpful Hint: If you're getting "Edmund" and "Edgar" confused already, here's a tip: Think "G" for good—Edgar is the good brother, and "M" for "malice"—Edmund is the malicious one.)
Enter Gloucester. GLOUCESTER Kent banished thus? And France in choler parted? And the King gone tonight, prescribed his power, 25 Confined to exhibition? All this done Upon the gad?—Edmund, how now? What news? EDMUND So please your Lordship, none. He puts a paper in his pocket. GLOUCESTER Why so earnestly seek you to put up that letter? 30 EDMUND I know no news, my lord. GLOUCESTER What paper were you reading? EDMUND Nothing, my lord.	When Gloucester (Edmund and Edgar's father) comes in, Edmund puts his plan into action. He very conspicuously puts away a letter he's supposedly been reading, and when his dad asks him about it, he acts squirrely. "Letter? What letter? It's nothing."
GLOUCESTER No? What needed then that terrible dispatch of it into your pocket? The quality of nothing 35 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’erread; and for so much as I have perused, I find it not fit for 40 your o’erlooking. GLOUCESTER Give me the letter, sir. EDMUND I shall offend either to detain or give it. The contents, as in part I understand them, are to blame. 45 GLOUCESTER Let’s see, let’s see. Edmund gives him the paper. EDMUND I hope, for my brother’s justification, he wrote this but as an essay or taste of my virtue.	Edmund hints that the contents of the letter, which is from his brother, are pretty bad and will probably offend Gloucester. And when Gloucester takes the bait and demands to see it, Edmund acts like he really doesn't want to get his bro in trouble and says, "Maybe he just wrote this to test me."
GLOUCESTER (reads) "This policy and reverence of age makes the world bitter to the best of our times, keeps 50 our fortunes from us till our oldness cannot relish them. I begin to find an idle and fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny, who sways not as it hath power but as it is suffered. Come to me, that of this I may speak more. If our father would sleep till I waked 55 him, you should enjoy half his revenue forever and live the beloved of your brother. Edgar." Hum? Conspiracy? “Sleep till I wake him, you should enjoy half his revenue.” My son Edgar! Had he a hand to write this? A heart and brain to breed it 60 in?—When came you to this? Who brought it?	The letter—supposedly from brother Edgar—suggests that the brothers conspire to kill their father. In the letter, "Edgar" claims that obedience to one's elders is a total drag and highly overrated. Plus, by the time Gloucester dies and Edgar (the eldest brother) gets his inheritance, he'll be too old to enjoy it. But, if Edmund (the younger brother) were to help Edgar get rid of their old man, they could both split the profits. Gloucester, naturally, is shocked and outraged. He asks Edmund where he got the letter, and whether this is really Edgar's handwriting.
EDMUND It was not brought me, my lord; there’s the cunning of it. I found it thrown in at the casement of my closet. GLOUCESTER You know the character to be your 65 brother’s? EDMUND If the matter were good, my lord, I durst swear it were his; but in respect of that, I would fain think it were not. GLOUCESTER It is his. 70 EDMUND It is his hand, my lord, but I hope his heart is not in the contents. GLOUCESTER Has he never before sounded you in this business? EDMUND Never, my lord. But I have heard him oft 75 maintain it to be fit that, sons at perfect age and fathers declined, the father should be as ward to the son, and the son manage his revenue.	Edmund, who's beginning to look a lot like an evil genius, says someone threw it in his bedroom window. It just breaks his heart to have to tell his beloved father that the handwriting is definitely Edgar's, and that while Edgar never specifically planned a "let's murder-our-father" meeting, he's always running around saying he can't wait for Gloucester to kick the bucket.
GLOUCESTER O villain, villain! His very opinion in the letter. Abhorred villain! Unnatural, detested, brutish 80 villain! Worse than brutish!—Go, sirrah, seek him. I’ll apprehend him.—Abominable villain!— Where is he?	Gloucester immediately declares Edgar to be an "unnatural" villain and is ready to have him arrested.
EDMUND I do not well know, my lord. If it shall please you to suspend your indignation against my brother 85 till you can derive from him better testimony of his intent, you should run a certain course; where, if you violently proceed against him, mistaking his purpose, it would make a great gap in your own honor and shake in pieces the heart of his obedience. 90 I dare pawn down my life for him that he hath writ this to feel my affection to your Honor, and to no other pretense of danger. GLOUCESTER Think you so? EDMUND If your Honor judge it meet, I will place you 95 where you shall hear us confer of this, and by an auricular assurance have your satisfaction, and that without any further delay than this very evening.	Edmund, pretending to be the virtuous younger brother, says Gloucester shouldn't jump to any hasty conclusions. Perhaps Edgar wrote this letter to test Edmund's love for their father. Whatever the case, he promises he can provide his father with some kind of resolution: that very evening, he'll have a conversation with Edgar on which Gloucester can spy. Edmund will talk to Edgar of the business, and Gloucester can form his own conclusion.
GLOUCESTER He cannot be such a monster. EDMUND Nor is not, sure. 100 GLOUCESTER To his father, that so tenderly and entirely loves him! Heaven and Earth! Edmund, seek him out; wind me into him, I pray you. Frame the business after your own wisdom. I would unstate myself to be in a due resolution. 105 EDMUND I will seek him, sir, presently, convey the business as I shall find means, and acquaint you withal. GLOUCESTER These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of 110 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 115 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 120 graves.—Find out this villain, Edmund. It shall lose thee nothing. Do it carefully.—And the noble and true-hearted Kent banished! His offense, honesty! ’Tis strange. He exits.	Gloucester really doesn't want to believe Edgar is a monster, so he agrees it's a good idea for Edmund to do a little more research. Then Gloucester laments that the recent solar and lunar eclipses in Britain seem to tell of bad things to come: failed loves, civil wars, treason, mutinies, divided brothers, and even the breaking of bonds between father and son (which is conveniently relevant). As further evidence that things are out of whack, Gloucester points out that Lear has recently banished his favorite daughter and his best friend. Gloucester is feeling seriously gloomy. He worries that they've already seen the best days of their lives, and that only disorder and grief will come with the future. Before he leaves, he reminds Edmund that it's now up to him to sort out this Edgar business.
EDMUND This is the excellent foppery of the world, that 125 when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; 130 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 on the charge of a star! My father 135 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. Fut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar— 140 Enter Edgar. and 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.	Edmund takes time to snicker gleefully about the fact that people are often ready to blame their own failings and circumstances on the stars and their fates, as if they couldn't help being as villainous as they are. He says that he knows knows that he'd still be a rotten guy even if he'd been born during the best zodiacal circumstances. He sees his brother coming and is pleased at how nicely his villainous plan is coming together.
EDGAR How now, brother Edmund, what serious contemplation 145 are you in? EDMUND I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read this other day, what should follow these eclipses. EDGAR Do you busy yourself with that? EDMUND I promise you, the effects he writes of succeed 150 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, 155 nuptial breaches, and I know not what. EDGAR How long have you been a sectary astronomical?	Edmund makes a little speech about the eclipses promising death and division that will impact both states and families, and Edgar states his surprise that his brother would waste him time with such superstitious silliness.
EDMUND Come, come, when saw you my father last? EDGAR The night gone by. 160 EDMUND Spake you with him? EDGAR Ay, two hours together. EDMUND Parted you in good terms? Found you no displeasure in him by word nor countenance? EDGAR None at all. 165 EDMUND Bethink yourself wherein you may have offended him, and at my entreaty forbear his presence until some little time hath qualified the heat of his displeasure, which at this instant so rageth in him that with the mischief of your person it would 170 scarcely allay.	Edmund changes the subject and asks Edgar when he last saw their dad. He's asking, he says, because he just talked to dear old dad and was surprised at how angry he is with Edgar.
EDGAR Some villain hath done me wrong.	Edgar is shocked. He says someone must have badmouthed him to his dad.
EDMUND That’s my fear. I pray you have a continent forbearance till the speed of his rage goes slower; and, as I say, retire with me to my lodging, from 175 whence I will fitly bring you to hear my lord speak. Pray you go. There’s my key. If you do stir abroad, go armed. EDGAR Armed, brother? EDMUND Brother, I advise you to the best. I am no 180 honest man if there be any good meaning toward you. I have told you what I have seen and heard, but faintly, nothing like the image and horror of it. Pray you, away.	Edmund says that's what he's afraid of—someone is out to get Edgar. (Gee, we wonder who...) He lays it on thick about how Edgar should worry about his enemies, even suggesting Edgar shouldn't go out without a weapon. Edmund also provides a plan, saying if Edgar goes back to his place, he'll drop by and fetch him to speak to their father when the time is right.
EDGAR Shall I hear from you anon? 185 EDMUND I do serve you in this business. Edgar exits. A credulous father and a brother noble, Whose nature is so far from doing harms That he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty My practices ride easy. I see the business. 190 Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit. All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit. He exits.	Edgar leaves, convinced that Edmund has his best interests in mind. Like his father, Edgar is a gullible guy. Edmund, alone, crows over how lucky he is to have a brother and father so good that they won't suspect his treachery, simply because they couldn't fathom it. This will make his evil deeds easy. Edmund declares he's sure to get Gloucester's land, if not by rightful inheritance, then by his own wits.

Original Text

Translated Text

Enter Edmund, the Bastard.

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 5
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,” 10
“base,”
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth within a dull, stale, tired bed
Go to th’ creating a whole tribe of fops 15
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 th’ legitimate. Fine word, “legitimate.”
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed 20
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top th’ legitimate. I grow, I prosper.
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

Edmund, Gloucester's illegitimate son, is miffed. He complains about the way society treats younger brothers and "illegitimate" children. He's just as smart, attractive, and talented as his brother, Edgar, but when Gloucester dies, Edgar will get property and an important position. Edmund will get nothing.

Edmund also insists that since his parents had such an awesome and "lusty" time in bed when he was conceived, he's far more superior to any person legitimately conceived in a "stale tired bed." He says that one way or another, Edmund is going to get his brother's land, and we doubt that he's interested in a time share.

Finally, Edmund calls on the gods to "stand up for bastards!" (You know nothing, Jon Snow.)

(Helpful Hint: If you're getting "Edmund" and "Edgar" confused already, here's a tip: Think "G" for good—Edgar is the good brother, and "M" for "malice"—Edmund is the malicious one.)

Enter Gloucester.

GLOUCESTER
Kent banished thus? And France in choler parted?
And the King gone tonight, prescribed his power, 25
Confined to exhibition? All this done
Upon the gad?—Edmund, how now? What news?

EDMUND So please your Lordship, none. He puts a
paper in his pocket.

GLOUCESTER Why so earnestly seek you to put up that
letter? 30

EDMUND I know no news, my lord.

GLOUCESTER What paper were you reading?

EDMUND Nothing, my lord.

When Gloucester (Edmund and Edgar's father) comes in, Edmund puts his plan into action. He very conspicuously puts away a letter he's supposedly been reading, and when his dad asks him about it, he acts squirrely. "Letter? What letter? It's nothing."

GLOUCESTER No? What needed then that terrible dispatch
of it into your pocket? The quality of nothing 35
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’erread; and
for so much as I have perused, I find it not fit for 40
your o’erlooking.

GLOUCESTER Give me the letter, sir.

EDMUND I shall offend either to detain or give it. The
contents, as in part I understand them, are to
blame. 45

GLOUCESTER Let’s see, let’s see.

Edmund gives him the paper.

EDMUND I hope, for my brother’s justification, he
wrote this but as an essay or taste of my virtue.

Edmund hints that the contents of the letter, which is from his brother, are pretty bad and will probably offend Gloucester. And when Gloucester takes the bait and demands to see it, Edmund acts like he really doesn't want to get his bro in trouble and says, "Maybe he just wrote this to test me."

GLOUCESTER (reads) "This policy and reverence of age
makes the world bitter to the best of our times, keeps 50
our fortunes from us till our oldness cannot relish
them. I begin to find an idle and fond bondage in the
oppression of aged tyranny, who sways not as it hath
power but as it is suffered. Come to me, that of this I
may speak more. If our father would sleep till I waked 55
him, you should enjoy half his revenue forever and
live the beloved of your brother. Edgar."

Hum? Conspiracy? “Sleep till I wake him, you
should enjoy half his revenue.” My son Edgar! Had
he a hand to write this? A heart and brain to breed it 60
in?—When came you to this? Who brought it?

The letter—supposedly from brother Edgar—suggests that the brothers conspire to kill their father. In the letter, "Edgar" claims that obedience to one's elders is a total drag and highly overrated. Plus, by the time Gloucester dies and Edgar (the eldest brother) gets his inheritance, he'll be too old to enjoy it. But, if Edmund (the younger brother) were to help Edgar get rid of their old man, they could both split the profits.

Gloucester, naturally, is shocked and outraged. He asks Edmund where he got the letter, and whether this is really Edgar's handwriting.

EDMUND It was not brought me, my lord; there’s the
cunning of it. I found it thrown in at the casement
of my closet.

GLOUCESTER You know the character to be your 65
brother’s?

EDMUND If the matter were good, my lord, I durst
swear it were his; but in respect of that, I would
fain think it were not.

GLOUCESTER It is his. 70

EDMUND It is his hand, my lord, but I hope his heart is
not in the contents.

GLOUCESTER Has he never before sounded you in this
business?

EDMUND Never, my lord. But I have heard him oft 75
maintain it to be fit that, sons at perfect age and
fathers declined, the father should be as ward to the
son, and the son manage his revenue.

Edmund, who's beginning to look a lot like an evil genius, says someone threw it in his bedroom window. It just breaks his heart to have to tell his beloved father that the handwriting is definitely Edgar's, and that while Edgar never specifically planned a "let's murder-our-father" meeting, he's always running around saying he can't wait for Gloucester to kick the bucket.

GLOUCESTER O villain, villain! His very opinion in the
letter. Abhorred villain! Unnatural, detested, brutish 80
villain! Worse than brutish!—Go, sirrah, seek
him. I’ll apprehend him.—Abominable villain!—
Where is he?

Gloucester immediately declares Edgar to be an "unnatural" villain and is ready to have him arrested.

EDMUND I do not well know, my lord. If it shall please
you to suspend your indignation against my brother 85
till you can derive from him better testimony of his
intent, you should run a certain course; where, if
you violently proceed against him, mistaking his
purpose, it would make a great gap in your own
honor and shake in pieces the heart of his obedience. 90
I dare pawn down my life for him that he hath
writ this to feel my affection to your Honor, and to
no other pretense of danger.

GLOUCESTER Think you so?

EDMUND If your Honor judge it meet, I will place you 95
where you shall hear us confer of this, and by an
auricular assurance have your satisfaction, and that
without any further delay than this very evening.

Edmund, pretending to be the virtuous younger brother, says Gloucester shouldn't jump to any hasty conclusions. Perhaps Edgar wrote this letter to test Edmund's love for their father. Whatever the case, he promises he can provide his father with some kind of resolution: that very evening, he'll have a conversation with Edgar on which Gloucester can spy. Edmund will talk to Edgar of the business, and Gloucester can form his own conclusion.

GLOUCESTER He cannot be such a monster.

EDMUND Nor is not, sure. 100

GLOUCESTER To his father, that so tenderly and entirely
loves him! Heaven and Earth! Edmund, seek him
out; wind me into him, I pray you. Frame the
business after your own wisdom. I would unstate
myself to be in a due resolution. 105

EDMUND I will seek him, sir, presently, convey the
business as I shall find means, and acquaint you
withal.

GLOUCESTER These late eclipses in the sun and moon
portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of 110
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 115
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 120
graves.—Find out this villain, Edmund. It shall
lose thee nothing. Do it carefully.—And the noble
and true-hearted Kent banished! His offense, honesty!
’Tis strange.

He exits.

Gloucester really doesn't want to believe Edgar is a monster, so he agrees it's a good idea for Edmund to do a little more research.

Then Gloucester laments that the recent solar and lunar eclipses in Britain seem to tell of bad things to come: failed loves, civil wars, treason, mutinies, divided brothers, and even the breaking of bonds between father and son (which is conveniently relevant). As further evidence that things are out of whack, Gloucester points out that Lear has recently banished his favorite daughter and his best friend.

Gloucester is feeling seriously gloomy. He worries that they've already seen the best days of their lives, and that only disorder and grief will come with the future.

Before he leaves, he reminds Edmund that it's now up to him to sort out this Edgar business.

EDMUND This is the excellent foppery of the world, that 125
when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of
our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters
the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains
on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves,
thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; 130
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 on the charge of a star! My father 135
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. Fut, I should
have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the
firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar— 140

Enter Edgar.

and 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.

Edmund takes time to snicker gleefully about the fact that people are often ready to blame their own failings and circumstances on the stars and their fates, as if they couldn't help being as villainous as they are. He says that he knows knows that he'd still be a rotten guy even if he'd been born during the best zodiacal circumstances.

He sees his brother coming and is pleased at how nicely his villainous plan is coming together.

EDGAR How now, brother Edmund, what serious contemplation 145
are you in?

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

EDGAR Do you busy yourself with that?

EDMUND I promise you, the effects he writes of succeed 150
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, 155
nuptial breaches, and I know not what.

EDGAR How long have you been a sectary
astronomical?

Edmund makes a little speech about the eclipses promising death and division that will impact both states and families, and Edgar states his surprise that his brother would waste him time with such superstitious silliness.

EDMUND Come, come, when saw you my father last?

EDGAR The night gone by. 160

EDMUND Spake you with him?

EDGAR Ay, two hours together.

EDMUND Parted you in good terms? Found you no
displeasure in him by word nor countenance?

EDGAR None at all. 165

EDMUND Bethink yourself wherein you may have offended
him, and at my entreaty forbear his presence
until some little time hath qualified the heat
of his displeasure, which at this instant so rageth in
him that with the mischief of your person it would 170
scarcely allay.

Edmund changes the subject and asks Edgar when he last saw their dad. He's asking, he says, because he just talked to dear old dad and was surprised at how angry he is with Edgar.

EDGAR Some villain hath done me wrong.

Edgar is shocked. He says someone must have badmouthed him to his dad.

EDMUND That’s my fear. I pray you have a continent
forbearance till the speed of his rage goes slower;
and, as I say, retire with me to my lodging, from 175
whence I will fitly bring you to hear my lord speak.
Pray you go. There’s my key. If you do stir abroad,
go armed.

EDGAR Armed, brother?

EDMUND Brother, I advise you to the best. I am no 180
honest man if there be any good meaning toward
you. I have told you what I have seen and heard, but
faintly, nothing like the image and horror of it. Pray
you, away.

Edmund says that's what he's afraid of—someone is out to get Edgar. (Gee, we wonder who...) He lays it on thick about how Edgar should worry about his enemies, even suggesting Edgar shouldn't go out without a weapon. Edmund also provides a plan, saying if Edgar goes back to his place, he'll drop by and fetch him to speak to their father when the time is right.

EDGAR Shall I hear from you anon? 185

EDMUND I do serve you in this business. Edgar exits.
A credulous father and a brother noble,
Whose nature is so far from doing harms
That he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty
My practices ride easy. I see the business. 190
Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit.
All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit.

He exits.

Edgar leaves, convinced that Edmund has his best interests in mind. Like his father, Edgar is a gullible guy.

Edmund, alone, crows over how lucky he is to have a brother and father so good that they won't suspect his treachery, simply because they couldn't fathom it. This will make his evil deeds easy. Edmund declares he's sure to get Gloucester's land, if not by rightful inheritance, then by his own wits.

King Lear: Act 1, Scene 2 Translation

A side-by-side translation of Act 1, Scene 2 of King Lear from the original Shakespeare into modern English.

Original Text

Translated Text

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