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.
