Abstract
At the beginning of Act 2, scene 3 of Macbeth the drunken Porter comes on stage after a loud knocking at the gate of Macbeth’s castle. Macduff and Lennox have just arrived to awaken King Duncan, who—they will soon discover—has been treacherously murdered in his bed. Coming before this gruesome discovery the Porter’s speech provides brief comic relief from the unbearable tension of the preceding scene. But there is also a dark side to this speech: the Porter imagines himself as “the porter of hell gate” from the medieval mystery play The Harrowing of Hell:
PORTER: Here’s a knocking indeed! If a man were a porter of Hell Gate, he should have old turning the key. (Knock.) Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there, I’ th’ name of Belzebub? Here’s a farmer, that hang’d himself on th’ expectation of plenty. Come in time! Have napkins enow about you, here you’ll sweat for’t. (Knock.) Knock, knock! Who’s there in th’ other devil’s name? Faith, here’s 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. (3.2.1–11)
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Notes
For a reading of Macbeth which presents Malcolm as the true hero of the play and the play as an endorsement of his equivocation, see Richard C. McCoy, “Spectacle and Equivocation in Macbeth,” in Spectacle and Public Performance in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Robert E. Stillman (Boston: Brill, 2006), 145–56.
For Macbeth’s “all too literalistic” imagination, see Donald Foster, “Macbeth’s War on Time,” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986), 337.
See Gary Wills. Jesuits and Witches: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Oxford University Press, 1996).
See Henry N. Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth: When, Why, and How it was Written by Shakespeare (New York: Macmillan, 1950).
See, for example, Michael Hawkings, “History, Politics, and Macbeth,” in Focus on Macbeth, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982)
Alan Sinfield, “Macbeth: History, Ideology, and Intellectuals,” in Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 95–108.
See Nick Aitchison, Macbeth: Man and Myth (Stroud: Sutton, 1999).
Quoted from James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 153.
John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–1700 (Oxford University Press, 1985), 99.
Robert Southwell, Collected Poems, ed. Peter Davidson and Anne Sweeney (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2007), 14.
René Weis, Shakespeare Unbound: Decoding a Hidden Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), 353–54.
For a favorable view of Garnet that contradicts the Protestant mythology of the evil Jesuit, see Robert Miola, “Two Jesuit Shadows in Shakespeare: William Weston and Henry Garnet,” in Shakespeare and Religion: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives, ed. Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 25–45.
Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (University of Chicago Press, 2001), 137.
James Travers, Gunpowder: The Players behind the Plot (Kew: National Archives, 2005), 110–11.
Jonathan Dollimore, “Dr Faustus (c. 1589–92): Subversion through Transgression,” in Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (London: W.W. Norton, 2005), 323–32 (326).
On anti-Marian iconoclasm, see Gary Waller, The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2011), chapter 1.
For murder and masculinity, see Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Franz Kalka, “Before the Law,” in Collected Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1993), 175.
Peter C. Herman, “Macbeth: Absolutism, the Ancient Constitution, and the Aporia of Politics,” in The Law in Shakespeare, ed. Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 208–32 (218).
Václav Havel, Selected Plays 1963–83 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 209.
Maik Hamburger, “Shakespeare the Politicizer: Two Notable Stagings in East Germany,” in Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism, ed. Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price (University of Toronto Press, 2006), 205–9 (205–6).
Quoted from Jill L. Levenson, “Stoppard’s Shakespeare: Textual Re-visions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, ed. Katherine F. Kelly (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 154–70 (163).
John Bull, “Tom Stoppard and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, ed. Katherine F. Kelly (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 136–53 (142).
Orlando Figes, “A Double Game with Stalin,” New York Review of Books LIX/1 (January 12, 2012), 32–34 (33).
Ira Nadel, Tom Stoppard: A Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), xiv.
See Annabel Patterson, “‘All is True’: Negotiating the Past in Henry VIII,” in Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum, ed. R.B. Parker and S.P. Zitner (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 147–66.
Tom Stoppard, Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York: Grove Press, 2006).
Vaclav Havel, Largo Desolato: A Play in Seven Scenes. English version by Tom Stoppard (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1987), 51.
See Ernest Gellner, “The Price of Velvet: On Thomas Masaryk and Václav Havel,” Telos 94 (Winter 1992–93), 183–92 (92).
See also Alfred Thomas, The Labyrinth of the Word: Truth and Representation in Czech Literature (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995), chapter 10.
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Thomas, A. (2014). “Faith, Here’s an Equivocator”: Language, Resistance, and the Limits of Authority in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Tom Stoppard’s Cahoots Macbeth . In: Shakespeare, Dissent, and the Cold War. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438959_5
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