Smith College - Smith College Yearbook (Northampton, MA)

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air that proclaim the evil deed ; ghosts, who in the dead of night, wander and announce the sin. A Lady Macbeth may be strong enough to keep an awful secret all the day; by the strong fetters of an iron will she may keep it bound, but in the night, when sleep has loosed those fetters, it will escape. Dreams arise and images terrible. A son follows his mother to her chamber and says: Come, come, and sit you down ; you shall not budge ; You go not, till I set you up a glass Where you may see the inmost part of you. A Iachimo cannot endure the thrusts of an evil conscience. I am glad to be constrain ' d to utter that Which torments me to conceal. My heavy conscience sinks my knee As then you force did. Take that life ; beseech you Which I so often owe. An Artemidorus stands ready to say Caesar, beware of Brutus; take heed of Cassius, come not near Casca; have an eye to Cinna, trust not Trebonius. There is but one mind in all these men, and it is bent against Caesar. Sin must be discovered and after the discovery it is only a step farther to the punishment. The inevitable step. It is wonderful to note with what ingenuity Shakspere disposed of his villains, so natural do their untimely deaths seem. He never had to search for an excuse to kill off .this or that character, the excuse seemed to come of its own accord. Living 19

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A stone when it is dropped from a high building will increase its velocity as it comes through space until it reaches the ground. So with each good deed the soul draws nearer to its goal, the divine. It seems strange to think that in a tragedy, one may look for humor. The poor fool ' s wit seems more pathetic there than droll. We doubt if Shakspere ever meant us to laugh at it. Yet humor there is. Dowden, in his treatise on Hamlet, brings out the thought that even here the comic element is present, is present, but not obtruded. Laertes, with all the self-conceited importance of an elder brother takes it upon himself to give to Ophelia a moral lecture. She in turn would give to him some sisterly advice, but he finds that his time is limited. He must away. Too late. Polonius has entered the stage just as the boy would leave it and Leonatus must listen to a long drawn-out speech upon the folly of vice and the wisdom of virtue. There is nothing more comical than the retribution of self-conceit. I have already spoken of Shakspere ' s belief that retribution is an active force which works in the soul and mind of man. This is the phase of the law on which he places the most emphasis, but he by no means abandons the other phase, retribution as shown in material punishment. To the average small child, stories from Shakspere might be as truly a mine of pleasure as are the tales of Grimm. There are punish- ments and horrors, suicides and murders, duels and wars enough to satisfy even the most bloodthirsty ; witches, ghosts, and spirits enough for the most imaginative. The moralist may come to Shakspere for his examples of the weakness of sin. Sin cannot exist unrestrained. It must be punished. There is no cover thick enough to conceal it; no labyrinth so intricate that it cannot be discovered. There are voices in the 18

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in an age when every man held a dagger and stood in readiness to use it at the slightest provocation, nothing could be more natural than that he should introduce the duel into his plays. There, many of his characters appeared for the last time. It was always a combat between good and bad ; the evil was conquered, yet everything seemed natural, nothing forced; the artistic balance of the play was not harmed. Only a great artist could give this effect. Again, if champions did not arise to punish the sinner the guilty one would often, through his own folly and ignorance, take the path that brought him to his doom. Cloten, dressed in Leonatus ' clothes while journeying to find an Imogen, to take away her happiness and to kill her lord, must meet a Belarius whom he would not hesitate to assault. Cassius, mistaking the cry of victory for that of defeat, must fall upon his servant ' s sword. Antony chose to follow the ship of Cleopatra rather than that of the Romans. A king prepared a dreadful draught for Hamlet, but it was the queen who drank it, and he himself who fell by the poisoned dagger prepared for the Prince of Denmark. Goneril and Regen the one the other poisoned and then slew herself. There are hundreds of similar cases. The common curse of mankind is folly and ignorance. Only a few can turn away from the songs of the sirens. To blend so much of mystery, of bloodshed, of things unnatural with things natu- ral, requires the skill of a great artist. To teach a lesson to a child and make him unconscious of the effort he is expending in the task requires a great teacher. To place a flower of purity and beauty, delicate and frail, in a field of bloodshed and carnage and to leave its purity unharmed requires a great poet. To sing the song of 20