The vulgarity of the Porter's language, in the third scene of
the second act, repelled Coleridge, who pronounced it to be
an after-thought of some baser hand. "I dare pledge myself to
demonstrate," said he, that it was an interpolation of the actors.
Other critics have followed with the same feeling of condemnation. But
only Shakspeare could have risen above such a conventional estimate,
and have put this piece of solid consistency into that part of the
tragedy which it strengthens: there it stays in the only place where
Nature could have lent to it her justification. We can readily admit
that the undisguised lechery of Pandarus in "Troilus and Cressida," and
the brothel scenes in "Pericles," were subsequent additions to those
plays by a pen that was accustomed to deal in broad effects without
regard to the organic exaction of the other characters. Perhaps they
were fragments of older plays left over by carelessness, or, what is
much more likely, introduced as gags by the play-actors. But we can
spare them out of the legacy of Shakspeare because they are not in
the manner which he used when broadness served his purpose. When the
gross details are hung over and fondled lewdly, recurred to morbidly,
laid open with ingenious particularity till we detect the sickening
odor of the dissecting-room which rises from slashed and naked
subjects, we may determine at once that the scene preserves not one
stroke of Shakspeare's pen. The lines seem suffocating in a close and
tainted place. What a brisk draught ventilates the honest coarseness
of the Porter! what a light, bantering touch hits off the vice which
is needful to finish the portrait of Falstaff! Even Parolles, his
prototype, only ventures far enough to make a scene coherent with
Helena's unspoken thought.[8]
Let us see if Nature was not fortunate in finding the Porter at his
post at an hour when he was needed as never before.
The air around the castle of Macbeth "nimbly and sweetly" recommended
itself to Duncan's senses; and Banquo noticed that the swallow, most
confiding and unsuspicious of birds, approves the place "by his lov'd
mansionry." On every frieze, buttress, coigne of vantage, Nature had
colonized this domestic wing, as if to hint to the wayfarer "a pleasant
seat," peace and unviolated sleep within. But we remember that a raven
had croaked the fatal entrance of Duncan into the castle. The swallows
twittering in the delicate air cannot drown this omen of insecurity:
as we enter with the unconscious Duncan, the weird sisters slip by us
from their blasted heath, and the house darkens with a fated purpose.
It was an unruly night, and the owl clamored the livelong hours.
Towards morning, after the accomplishment of the murder, Lady Macbeth
snatched the bloody daggers from the hand of her husband to carry them
back into the chamber. The air that was interrupted at the lips of the
gracious Duncan seems breathless as he, appalled at the deed; and our
consciousness of it sinks into an awful silence. Just then a knocking
at the gate is heard.
De Quincey, in an essay "On the Knocking at the Gate," rightly notices
that it reflects "back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and depth
of solemnity," and he explains this effect. "When the deed is done,
when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes
away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard,
and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced; the human
has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning
to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world
in which we live first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful
parenthesis that had suspended them."
Admirable as this criticism is to justify the profound art of
Shakspeare, it does not seem to me entirely to exhaust the effect
produced by the knocking. It not only makes known to us that human life
recurs, and thus emphasizes our sense of the unhuman world of murder,
but it also startles us with the sudden consciousness that the human
which thus recurs does it in entire ignorance of the scene at which
it knocks. That makes us catch our breath, to feel how thoughtlessly
life is about to stumble into the tremendous scene. What a contrast of
innocent unconsciousness,--so innocent, so remote from the event, that
we should think it was impertinent if our pity for the shock it brings
upon itself did not prevail! We wonder who will first discover what has
occurred, whether man or woman; somebody is doomed to blunder into the
ghastliness of that room where Macbeth murdered sleep. What will be
the sensation that thrills from the inhospitable bed around which the
angels of honor and loyalty ought to have watched with spotless wings?
Some one steps into this pool where all the safeguards and trusts of
human life lie drenched. How will he manage to escape from it, and will
the tongue be palsied "with the act of fear" to refuse to the lips
words adequate to express the villainy? And yet this must be done.
We therefore become aware of this additional feeling, that the life
which knocks at the gate, though unconscious, is pregnant with the
design of an overruling Power; just for a moment, there seems to be
the supernatural arrival of something with a commission to detect the
murder. Every knock smites the bare heart of Macbeth, who may well
exclaim, "Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou could'st!"
Shakspeare makes another world for Macbeth,--a sequestered hell. The
knocking announces the existence and reappearance of another life, as
De Quincey notices; but he does not note the fine prolongation of the
Hell into the humorous fancy of the Porter who comes to open the gate.
To the old French taste, this Porter was one of the Shakspearean
violations of decency and tragic sentiment,--a vulgar fellow who has
been waked out of a drunken sleep, and who talks outrageous matter that
is the farthest removed from murder, so that solemnity is affronted and
abruptly leaves the hearts which it had just monopolized. But the more
we dwell upon Shakspeare's characters, "the more we shall see proofs of
design and self-supporting arrangement, where the careless eye had seen
nothing but accident."
The Porter, as if he had been privy to the transactions of the
night, translates each knock into a candidate for admission into
his quaint fancy of a hell, of which he keeps the gate. Fleay, in
his "Shakspeare's Manual," shows that the Porter makes allusions to
contemporaneous circumstances of the year 1606, when "Macbeth" was
first produced. "The expectation of plenty:" wheat, barley, and malt
were extraordinarily cheap. The "equivocator" is the Jesuit, Garnet,
who was tried for gunpowder treason in that year. "Stealing out of a
French hose:" the fashion of hose became short in 1606; yet the tailors
took the old measure of material and cabbaged the difference. So that
the Porter belongs to that year, and could not have been subsequently
interpolated.
"If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have often turning the
key. Who's there?" "An equivocator, that could swear in both the
scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's
sake, yet could not equivocate to Heaven! Oh, come in, equivocator!"
Yes, this is the very house for him to come to, where a treason has
just been committed which will be unable to equivocate to Heaven. "I'll
devil-porter it no farther: I had thought to have let in some of all
professions, that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire." If
the outer life is to gain admission at all again to this castle, this
grotesque hint of the hell within undoes the gate appropriately: by no
abrupt transition, and by the bridge of a perilous smile, human life
is reached again. The Porter delays by his successive fancies, till we
begin to grow impatient, like those emissaries of Heaven who shiver
at the gate. This impatience, humorously created for us, introduces
another human feeling to qualify our awe; and thus we rejoin our common
humanity.
When the Porter lets in Macduff and Lenox, he seems to have admitted
also a very garish and vulgar kind of day, that displays loosely some
infirmities of men, unconscious of the more awful crime within,--a
very broad and unequivocal daylight that lies sharply on all objects
without toning them. The Porter's disquisition upon drinking and
lechery is apparently superfluous and revolting, but it is really well
conceived; for we want something to carry our mood as far as possible
away from Duncan's chamber and from all thoughts about discovering
the deed, because Macbeth is about to enter. "Our knocking has awaked
him." Then our feeling, which has gained a temporary relief, is able
to take up again the awful clew, and to wait during Macbeth's feigned
unconsciousness till Macduff bursts upon us with his horror. Moreover,
the carousing which the Porter mentions was the cover to Macbeth's
opportunity, and just keeps the night alive in our memory, while we
think how innocently drunk the whole household was to provide a human
weakness for an act of death. Macbeth enters, whose wife conceived
the stratagem of the drinking, and soon the result of it arrives. An
after-clap of Hell settles back on the Porter's traces; but he has
performed his function by letting life and human nature in upon the
sexless and monstrous scene, and may now vacate his post.
Still, the Porter is conventionally vulgar, and cannot be accepted by
a taste that is more fastidious than the world itself is. But, if the
world chooses to be vulgar, why needed Shakspeare to have imported this
base touch of realism into his art? Only by the permission of Humor,
and the justification of an exigency to drag our feelings back to life
by the handiest strand, however coarse it may be. And after he had
invented that thrilling moment of the knocking at the gate, he cannot
get along without the house-porter, who is the only one awake enough to
let honest Nature in. So we must take him as he is, and admire the poet
who did not send the Muse of Tragedy to draw the bolt.
The Agamemnon of Æschylus reaches a breathless moment of suspense, when
Clytemnestra has left the scene to plan the murder of her husband, and
the Chorus, shuddering with its divination of the deed, expresses our
expectation. All at once a stifled exclamation struggles out from the
interior of the palace: the Chorus whispers, "Hush! who is it that
cries out, 'A blow'?" and the play soon closes with the sombre feeling
unrelieved. Nothing intervenes to assist the spectators back to life,
and to the other persons whose interests implicate them so deeply in
the plot. There is but one interest and one action in a Greek Tragedy,
and when that is reached the nature of the scene is exhausted; the poet
has no more to say, and is not conscious of any craving for variety
in his listeners. His play was an artistic embodiment of the current
religious ideas, and so far was secluded, as the modern pulpit is,
from manifold life. It is not possible to discover a place in these
solemn developments of Fate, where a feeling of Humor could intrude.
The Chorus, listening to the blow, intervenes instead of a Porter. It
is the voice of an audience conscious of the crime. So is a modern
audience conscious of Macbeth's crime, but that consciousness is
itself the Chorus, whose ancient function is distributed through the
silent hearts of the spectators, who are thus permitted to mingle in
every awful occurrence, and therefore need to be restored again to the
ordinary world of justice and emotion.
Shakspeare exhibits the supreme nature of his genius when he meets
this exigency which antique religion did not feel. He admits the free
play of life into its real closeness with all our moral and pathetic
emotions; but we never find that Humor weakens the religious purpose
of the play, as it would if our private anguish were unseasonably
interrupted by it, because our personal fortunes are not touched by
the tragedy. We are implicated in the scene only by our instinct of
observation and sympathy; that needs relief, but, if the blow struck
us and became a "fee-grief due to each single breast," we could endure
it as we do in real life, as we prefer to do, with a temper that keeps
all other strings muted but sorrow. So the Humor which we would not
tolerate when the tempest breaks upon our roof-tree, and is sullen
within every chamber, is no unwelcome surprise when the heart is so
keenly summoned by the mimic scene.