It was great ignorance, Gloster’s eyes being out, To let him live:  where he arrives he moves All hearts against us:  Edmund, I think, is gone, In pity of his misery, to dispatch His nighted life.

Her father’s curse is nothing to her.  She scorns even to mention the gods.[169] Horrible as she is, she is almost awful.  But, to set against Regan’s inferiority in power, there is nothing:  she is superior only in a venomous meanness which is almost as hateful as her cruelty.  She is the most hideous human being (if she is one) that Shakespeare ever drew.

I have already noticed the resemblance between Edmund and Iago in one point; and Edmund recalls his greater forerunner also in courage, strength of will, address, egoism, an abnormal want of feeling, and the possession of a sense of humour.  But here the likeness ends.  Indeed a decided difference is observable even in the humour.  Edmund is apparently a good deal younger than Iago.  He has a lighter and more superficial nature, and there is a certain genuine gaiety in him which makes one smile not unsympathetically as one listens to his first soliloquy, with its cheery conclusion, so unlike Iago’s references to the powers of darkness,

     Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

Even after we have witnessed his dreadful deeds, a touch of this sympathy is felt again when we hear his nonchalant reflections before the battle: 

     To both these sisters have I sworn my love: 
     Each jealous of the other, as the stung
     Are of the adder.  Which of them shall I take? 
     Both? one? or neither?

Besides, there is nothing in Edmund of Iago’s motive-hunting, and very little of any of the secret forces which impelled Iago.  He is comparatively a straightforward character, as straightforward as the Iago of some critics.  He moves wonder and horror merely because the fact that a man so young can have a nature so bad is a dark mystery.

Edmund is an adventurer pure and simple.  He acts in pursuance of a purpose, and, if he has any affections or dislikes, ignores them.  He is determined to make his way, first to his brother’s lands, then—­as the prospect widens—­to the crown; and he regards men and women, with their virtues and vices, together with the bonds of kinship, friendship, or allegiance, merely as hindrances or helps to his end.  They are for him divested of all quality except their relation to this end; as indifferent as mathematical quantities or mere physical agents.

     A credulous father and a brother noble,
      ...  I see the business,

he says, as if he were talking of x and y.

     This seems a fair deserving, and must draw me
     That which my father loses; no less than all: 
     The younger rises when the old doth fall: 

he meditates, as if he were considering a problem in mechanics.  He preserves this attitude with perfect consistency until the possibility of attaining his end is snatched from him by death.