Our Lady of Lourdes High School - Knight Yearbook (Marinette, WI)

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we SOLILOQUY OF MACBETI-I BEFORE THE STONE OF SCONE Is this the sacred stone I see before me, Its legends so famed in lore? Ah, let me serve thee. I have thee not, and yet by legal claim thou art mine. Art thou not, O ,Iacob's Stone, the shrine Of Scottish kings forever? or art the Fates all faithless grown, and joy Our destinies to sever? Not thus is it willed. Glamis am I, And Thane 'of Cawdor, too, and shalt be What I'm promised: All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter. I dare do all that may become a mang Who dares do more is none. Stars, hide your fires! Let not light see my black and deep desires. OLIVE LACossE, '28. HER HAFTERWARDSH Wl1at! will those hands ne'er be clean ? Does not the anguish and despair of these words move you? Do you not feel for this fear-crazed creature whose hour of retribution has come? Lady Macbeth, cruel, relentless, ambitious, is seen in the new guise of suffering. And suifering invariably elicits sympathy from hearts not yet calloused. ' Remorse and the constant rehearsing in her mind the dreadful crime in which she was so active an accomplice, has stamped indelible lines upon her face and figure. We see her no more as the cold, haughty woman of Shakespeare's former depictions. As she wrings her hands and mutters her scarce-coherent self-condem- nations, her two listeners stand shocked and dismayed. 'Tis fear and remorse which finally drive her to this. This undaunted woman has been overtaken by a Superior Power. She stands a crazed, broken creature-a fit example of Divine retribution. Mrs. Jameson says, Those who can feel and estimate the magniiicent conception and poetical de- velopment of the character, have overlooked the grand moral lesson it conveys 3 they forget that the crime of Lady Macbeth terriiies us in proportion as we sym- pathize with her, and that this sympathy is in proportion to the degree of pride, passion, and intellect, we may ourselves possess. CATHERINE KUCHENBERG. E VX - , . Q. ' -a : 5 ,sl 'X f MQ 5 .,3JJIf 0 259, AMW' A ' :R K A - - Page' 58

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Sufi? sg - .s - ' ' egg 95 AZ' -'Nr ii XXV ' ' CQ,,4:5'.,fL,9- f 'Qt5i, 5b B- 'ROYAL BANQUETS From our very infancy we have been fed with literary royal banquets, though, of course, they were not given that name. In the nursery-rhyme days we learned of Old King Cole, the merry old soul who caused his feast to be enlivened by his fiddlers three 3 the Queen of Hearts, who made her tartsg and last, and rather gruesome, the fearful ogre whose greatest joy would have been to feast upon poor jack's bones ground to a pulp. At a somewhat later period Biblical lore furnished us with accounts of a dif- ferent kind of banquet. Among these was that of Queen Esther, by means of which she saved the lives of her countrymeng Baltassar's, where the power and justice of God were showng and Herod's during the course of which the dance of Salome merited the head of St. John, the Baptist. Then next are the parables of Our Lord relating so frequently to feasts and banquets. As our studies carried us farther on the paths of knowledge, we arrived at the classical literature, where the feast of Beowulf is the first to fascinate us. Stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, describing their deeds and entertainments, follow next in line. And last of all is the famous ban- quet scene in Macbeth, It is interesting to note how like and yet how unlike the foregoing scenes is this the last named. The external setting, the splendor and the magnificence of the banquet hall, to my mind, would correspond with that described in the Tales of the Round Table. The order of knighthood was still in vogue and the customs of the people were strikingly similar. The principal characters at the banquet of Macbeth and Bal- tassar are in the same frame of mind. The latter while using the sacred vessels for profane purposes realizes his guilt, and the former, weighed down by his fears, also assumes a forced gaiety in an effort to conceal his inner feelings. In one of the Parables, where the invited guests did not appear at a feast the king had pre- pared, and he then called in the beggars and serfs of his realm, the guests are not in harmony with their host. So this is like to Macbeth. Here the courtiers ap- peared because they were afraid to do otherwise and their fears were not un- foundedg in the Parable the people care little about anything except the food they obtain and the merriment created for them. The usual ending of banquets is the feeling of satiation, though there is re- maining the emptiness of unsatisfied human desires, but in the royal banquets of Macbeth and Baltassar, the end comes suddenly and with an awful crash. The frightened guests disperse and we leave Macbethis scene with a feeling that Shakespeare has created a Royal Banquet, in catastrophe second only to that of ancient Bible lore. ELIZABETH SCHERER, '28. rx , . Q, ' - . ,- , . ' 5 . ,g U , -Gi 3'S'Kif 05l', +5.45-19 V A S K MSSQQ, by ss 1 1 Page 57

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