...legitimate brother, Edgar, and usurp his inheritance. Edmund, too, is a worshiper of Mother Nature: "Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound" (I.ii.1). But this is not the nature that guarantees the ties of kinship, what Lear calls "Propinquity...

...'t. 295 GONORIL We must do something, and i'th' heat. Exeunt Sc . 2 Enter Edmund the bastard EDMUND Thou, nature, art my goddess . To thy law My services...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',...

...on't. GONERIL We must do something, and i' th' heat. 295 * ^ I.2 Enter Bastard [Edmund] solus. EDMUND Thou, Nature, art my goddess. To thy law My services are bound. Wherefore should I Exeunt. Stand in the plague of custom and permit 3 The curiosity of nations to deprive me 4 For that...

...Exchange have got, In vain our Poets Preach, whilst Church-men Plot. Act I (Enter BASTARD solus.) BASTARD Thou Nature art my Goddess, to thy Law My Services are bound, why am I then Depriv'd of a Son's Right because I came not In the dull Road that custom has prescrib'd?...

...Bentham's Anarehical Fallatits ( Whs., vol. ii.), Lewis' Use and Abuse of some Political Terms (1832). 1 " Thou, nature, art my goddess ; to thy law My services are bound." — Lear, I. n. • Afaebrth, V. i. 79. forces with and on which it works on the other side; and it...

...Vice of the morality plays. As Gloucester's 'natural' son, he decides that he will act 'naturally': Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law My services...and permit The curiosity of nations to deprive me, For that I am some twelve of fourteen moonshines Lag of a brother ? Why bastard ? Wherefore base ?...

...hestiaL Therefore 'namre' is his goddess: Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law My services are hound. 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 hrother? Why hastard? Wherefore hase? When...

...then, one begins to suspect that the radical opposition between physis and nomos implicit in Edmund's "Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law my services are bound ..." - the radical contrast he would draw between the laws of Nature and the laws of men - far from...

...Edmund's view is of course directly the opposite. When all by himself with no one to hear him he says, "Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound," he is thinking of Nature simply as the way things are and of its only law as the law of the jungle....

...'Natural' Edmund may be, but he isn't loyal. When Edmund says, at the beginning of Act I, Scene ii: Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law My services are bound. (lines 1-2) Gloucester is quick to detect any divergence from the natural order and interprets Lear's...