Smith College - Smith College Yearbook (Northampton, MA)

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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

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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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love in a world of sorrow and pain and to make the harmony sound sweeter because of the discords of despair is the gift of a great singer. To bring a world of lawless- ness under the regime of law requires a God. Shakspere was a great poet, a great singer, a great teacher and being the sum total of all these things, a great man, he recognized the possibility of a God. He became a scholar and strove to find out the meaning of the laws of that God. He found that man was a part of the divine law. He watched him, studied him, loved him, as only a true student can, sympathetically, lovingly, unswervingly. Then after he had observed, the teacher, the artist, the poet, in the world ' s greatest singer awoke, and he wrote of what he had learnt. He told of man, who had sinned and gone astray, of the penalty that his sin must cause him to bear. He called these stories tragedies because man of his own will had wandered away from life and chosen death. Yet ever and anon amid these tales of sorrow he told of those who, living in a sinful world, were yet pure. He told his story simply, sincerely, so that those who read were filled with hope rather than despair, with courage rather than faint-heartedness. Then welcome each rebuff That turns earth ' s smoothness rough, Each sting that bids not sit, nor stand, but go. Be our joys threefold pain Strive and hold cheap the strain Learn, nor account the pang ; dare never grudge the throe. It is not the voice of Rabbi Ben Ezra alone that speaks. It is the echoes from the ages growing stronger, not fainter as they come to us. Alice Jackson. 21