"----Be my horses ready?"

"Thy asses are gone about 'em. The reason why the seven
stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason."

"Because they are not eight?"

"Yes, indeed: thou would'st make a good fool."

And so on.

After this lengthy scene, a gentleman enters and announces that the
horses are ready. The fool says:

"She that's a maid now, and laughs at my departure,
Shall not be a maid long, unless things be cut shorter."

The second part of the first scene of the second act begins by the
villain Edmund persuading his brother, when their father enters, to
pretend that they are fighting with their swords. Edgar consents, altho
it is utterly incomprehensible why he should do so. The father finds
them fighting. Edgar flies and Edmund scratches his arm to draw blood
and persuades his father that Edgar was working charms for the purpose
of killing his father and had desired Edmund to help him, but that he,
Edmund, had refused and that then Edgar flew at him and wounded his arm.
Gloucester believes everything, curses Edgar and transfers all the
rights of the elder and legitimate son to the illegitimate Edmund. The
Duke, hearing of this, also rewards Edmund.

In the second scene, in front of Gloucester's palace, Lear's new
servant, Kent, still unrecognized by Lear, without any reason, begins to
abuse Oswald, Goneril's steward, calling him,--"A knave, a rascal, an
eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave;--the son and heir of a
mongrel bitch." And so on. Then drawing his sword, he demands that
Oswald should fight with him, saying that he will make a "sop o' the
moonshine" of him,--words which no commentators can explain. When he is
stopped, he continues to give vent to the strangest abuse, saying that a
tailor made Oswald, as "a stone-cutter or a painter could not have made
him so ill, tho they had been but two hours o' the trade!" He further
says that, if only leave be given him, he will "tread this unbolted
villain into mortar and daub the wall of a jakes with him."

Thus Kent, whom nobody recognizes, altho both the King and the Duke of
Cornwall, as well as Gloucester who is present, ought to know him well,
continues to brawl, in the character of Lear's new servant, until he is
taken and put in the stocks.

The third scene takes place on a heath. Edgar, flying from the
persecutions of his father, hide