The villain Edmund sets the father against the son. Gloucester, lost in a reverie, repines, and on his exit is rebuked by his bastard son:
GLOUCESTER
These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us: though the wisdom of 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 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
graves. Find out this villain, Edmund;
it shall
lose thee nothing; do it carefully.
And the
noble and true-hearted Kent banished! his
offence, honesty!
'Tis strange.
Exit
EDMUND
This is the excellent foppery of the world,
that,
when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit
of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our
disasters the sun,
the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity;
fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers,
by spherical predominance; 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
So much beauty, and I really can't tell you why.
The other day I a did reading from The Beautiful Struggle, and a young lady, noting the rhythm of the text, used the word "assonance." I listened to her and thought to myself, "I have no idea what that means." And I felt like an idiot. Here was a woman complimenting me, and I was too ignorant to really get the import.
It's the funniest thing. I write by ear and have only slightest notion why a particular assembly of words sounds good, while still another does not. Sometimes I dearly wish I knew and other times I just enjoy turning it under my tongue like a peppermint.
Answers are not always the point. And even the answers dispensed in labels--off-rhyme, dissonance, iambic pentameter etc.--don't do the question justice. They can tell you what it is, but not why this...
...though the wisdom of 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...
...just feels good. The rhythm, itself--beyond plot, beyond character--says something.
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