The true
character of the two eldest daughters, Regan and Gonerill (they are
so thoroughly hateful that we do not even like to repeat their
names) breaks out in their answer to Cordelia who desires them to
treat their father well--'Prescribe not us our duties'--their hatred
of advice being in proportion to their determination to do wrong,
and to their hypocritical pretensions to do right. Their deliberate
hypocrisy adds the last finishing to the odiousness of their
characters. It is the absence of this detestable quality that is the
only relief in the character of Edmund the Bastard, and that at
times reconciles us to him. We are not tempted to exaggerate the
guilt of his conduct, when he himself gives it up as a bad business,
and writes himself down 'plain villain'. Nothing more can be said
about it. His religious honesty in this respect is admirable. One
speech of his is worth a million. His father, Gloster, whom he has
just deluded with a forged story of his brother Edgar's designs
against his life, accounts for his unnatural behaviour and the
strange depravity of the times from the late eclipses in the sun and
moon. Edmund, who is in the secret, says when he is gone: 'This is
the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune
(often the surfeits of our own behaviour) 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
treacherous 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.
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