Enter a Porter. Knocking within

PORTER          Here’s a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell gate he should have old turning the key.

Knock [within]

Knock, knock, knock. Who’s there, i’th’ name of Beelzebub? Here’s a farmer that hanged himself on th’expectation of plenty. Come in, farmer. Have napkins enough about you; here you’ll sweat for’t. (2.3.1-5)

Although the verbal texture of Macbeth is quite varied, especially in the scenes with the witches and also in the astonishing passages of stichomythia between the couple themselves, this is only the play’s second passage of prose, the first being Lady Macbeth’s reading of Macbeth’s letter. This is a radical shift in the soundscape of the play, therefore; like the end of the previous scene it’s punctuated, dominated by the knocking, the same knocking, but there’s been the equivalent of a jump cut, as presumably the Porter has not entered into the same space that the Macbeths have just left, but is rather somewhere nearer to the castle’s south entry, the gate from whence the knocking is heard—so this scene is happening somewhere else. The Macbeths have exited at speed, in order that they may, paradoxically, be prepared to perform sleepiness; the Porter is most likely going to be moving slowly, ostentatiously refusing to respond to the implicit urgency of the knocking. This scene is a needle-scratch, but it doesn’t release tension, but rather—knock, knock, knock—ramps it up.

Here’s a knocking indeed, comments the Porter. What a bloody racket. And straightaway he activates his conceit: he’s the porter at the gates of hell, often imagined as a castle in the morality play tradition. He is therefore perhaps himself a devil—but if a man were porter of hell gate, he should have old, that is, he’d have more than enough of, get sick and tired of, turning the key, constantly opening and shutting the gate as the damned pour in. The Porter, it will soon transpire more explicitly, is drunk, or at the very least hung over; he sees no reason to hurry, but every reason to pause and entertain. Rather than going with all speed to the gate, as the knocking grows ever more urgent, he imagines that he’s opening the gate to a succession of sinners. Who’s there, in the name of Beelzebub? (A devil’s name, naturally, not a divine one.) The first (imaginary) guest is a farmer, who has, it seems, hoarded grain so that he could sell it at a higher price at a time when there was a shortage because of a poor harvest. A familiar scenario, and a familiar hate figure for an early seventeenth-century audience; there were many years of dearth and near-starvation for many around this time, which Shakespeare was to dramatize, indirectly, in Coriolanus. (He wasn’t above a bit of hoarding himself, back in Stratford.) But this imaginary farmer’s selfish gamble hasn’t paid off: there’s been a good harvest, not a bad, and so his carefully hoarded grain can’t be sold for the profit he envisaged—and so he’s hanged himself, on the expectation of plenty, a big pay-off, which hasn’t eventuated. Come in, farmer, says the hell-porter, courteously, as if welcoming a guest to dinner. But make sure that you have enough napkins with you to wipe away the sweat, because it’s hellish hot in here. (There may be a glance at putative cures for syphilis, too, which often involved sweating in hot baths, suggesting that the farmer’s moral and spiritual corruption is matched by his physical corruption.) And the Porter’s only just getting started. Knock, knock, knock.