King Lear (Folger Shakespeare Library)

by William Shakespeare

EDMUND This is the excellent foppery of the world, that 125 when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of 126 our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters 127 the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains 128 on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, 129 thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; 130 drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced 131 obedience of planetary influence; and all that we 132 are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable 133 evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish 134 disposition on the charge of a star! My father 135 compounded with my mother under the Dragon’s 136 tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it 137 follows I am rough and lecherous. ⟨Fut,⟩ I should 138 have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the 139 firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.