Smith College - Smith College Yearbook (Northampton, MA)

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Lady Macbeth, refined, delicate, sensitive, with courage and nervous energy enough to urge Macbeth on to his frightful bloodshed and murder, could she have drawn back and lived a life of love and pity? Here ' s the smell of blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not serve to whiten this little hand. What ' s clone cannot be undone. The spot, the spot, the damned spot. Was Lady Macbeth or was fate accountable for that spot ? There ' s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will. So cried Hamlet ; so have cried the voices of all ages. Did Shakspere believe in the doctrine of predestination ? He does not say. He never expressed a belief that such a force does exist ; he sometimes implies that it may exist. Often we are led to believe that he thought it was predominant in the world, and yet, should we be asked: Did Shakspere always believe in predestination? which one of us would say yes. Did he ever believe in predestination is another question. Undoubtedly, at one time, he did. Just as the lines in an old man ' s face are the emblems left to tell of the battles fought in life, so there are marks in these tales of sorrow to tell of the battles that Shakspere waged whilst struggling after truth. It is the stars above us, govern our conditions. How many times he must have uttered that cry in doubt and perplexity. How many times he must have looked upon a struggling world of men given up to sin. There is an Antony, losing his better 13

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Upon a high pinnacle a traveller stood one day and watched the wild winds blow over the earth. Whence they came he could not tell nor whither they went. He watched them as they whirled about, doing what harm they would, without restraint it seemed to him, without control. Then out of the depth of his being he cried aloud Oh, God, if there be a God, give to me the meaning of these winds. Why in this world of law and order can such things be! Poor weak creatures of the earth the God replied, those winds which you have seen, at whose violence you have trembled, are subjected to a law, which they are as powerless to evade as is the earth to stand still or the sun to cease to shine. Man in his weakness and folly cannot understand. Did Shakspere understand the law of retribution? Were there not mysterious passages through which he had to walk unguided? It could not have seemed just to him that Desdemona should have died. It was the final step in the working out of some law. He did not understand the law; yet, not understanding, he recognized its existence. Closely related to the justice of Desdemona ' s death comes this other question : Is man predestined to sin or does he fall through the agency of his own wilful sin? Has he the power to break away from evil and do well or is he bound to follow the path allotted to him ? Macbeth urged on by the witches, going from bad to worse, ruining a mind by nature noble, was he predestined to fall or could he have broken away from the fetters of ambition and lived to be Thane of Cawdor and Glanis if not king of Scotland? 12

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self in his blind love for a Cleopatra; there a Coriolanus eaten up by a false pride; there an Achilles smothered by self-conceit; there a Brutus ruined by a wrong idea of his duty to his country. Everywhere men struggling towards a false goal. A world where love and duty are abandoned for avarice and greed. It is easy to say that Shakspere must have at one time believed in predestination. It is far harder to say why we think he grew out of that belief. Oh, my soul ' s joy If after every tempest comes such calms, May the winds blow till they have wakened death ! Not the dead calm of resignation but the living calm of hope. After the storm- tossed sea of tragedy, after the terror and the pain, we are driven into the haven, and rest in that calm. This is the spirit in which we leave the tragedies. We have not been dwelling in an unhealthy atmosphere. We do not feel that we must yield our- selves victims to life; life is our victim to do with as we will. Could we feel this if we believed in the existence of predestination? Could Shakspere make us feel in that way if he believed in it? It is poor logic to say we believe because we feel, but is it not the logic upon which our whole religion is based? Another question must come to us, although one by no means so important as that of predestination. Did Shakspere believe that retribution might extend into another world or are all sins atoned for in this world? Was it enough for Iago to live a life devoid of all faith in beauty and in virtue or must he receive more material punishment in the life that is to come? 14