Knock [within]
PORTER 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. O, come in, equivocator.
Knock [within]
Knock, knock, knock. Who’s there? Faith, here’s an English tailor come hither for stealing out of a French hose. Come in, tailor. Here you may roast your goose. (2.3.6-12)
More knocking, at the gate and from the Porter. Who’s there, in th’other devil’s name?The usual interpretation is that he’s too drunk to remember the name of another devil, but it’s probably Lucifer, the fallen angel, once beloved of God, cast out of heaven for his overreaching ambition. Appropriate, obviously. And next to arrive (in the Porter’s vivid and topical imagination) is an equivocator. This is usually explained in relation to the Gunpowder Plot and the equivocator here is particularly identified with Father Henry Garnett, who had for decades been one of the leading figures in the Jesuit mission in England; he was not involved in the plot, but had known of it (and had probably tried to prevent it), but this was enough to see him tortured, convicted of treason, and executed on 6 May 1606. Equivocation, also known as mental reservation, was a practice defended and therefore, in effect, promoted by some Jesuits, whereby someone might tell what was a lie in such a way as to make it sound true, at the same time acknowledging its falsehood in their conscience and so therefore not, technically, telling a falsehood. Although Garnett himself had written in its defence, setting out its operation and limitations in logical terms, equivocation was popularly seen as a spiritual get-out-of-jail-free card for liars, recusants, and traitors, and it’s in that sense that the Porter is mocking the equivocator, assumed to be a Jesuit and perhaps the recently-executed Garnett himself, who finds now that he cannot equivocate to heaven. It probably went down well with a patriotic London crowd still all too aware of how catastrophic it would have been had the Plot succeeded (and who were regularly reminded of that in sermons and pamphlets), and who were long accustomed to seeing Jesuits as bogeymen.
The English tailor is a perennial, albeit less topical figure of mockery in the period. Tailors were assumed to be thieves, trusted with expensive cloth which they then skimped on, stealing the offcuts, or surreptitiously doubling over fabric when cutting out so that they cut twice as much and stole even more. French hose here are probably baggy, meaning that there would be potentially more to steal, and part of the joke, perhaps, is that English men were thought to have no native fashions, but rather to borrow from every other nation, hence the English tailor making breeches in the fashionable French style. The goose that he will roast is a small pressing iron, the sort that might be used for pressing flat a seam or a facing. And there’s also a more obscene set of associations, whereby the goose is a prostitute (or a lymphatic swelling associated with syphilis) and the tailor suggests tail, female genitalia and the hose, the male. Editors mostly don’t note, however, that a tailor’s hell was the basket or other container under his board, the table on which he sat cross-legged to sew, into which he threw offcuts and scraps, stolen or not, for reuse. That tailor’s hell is the starting point for this vignette of the dishonest English tailor, condemned to burn eternally for his filching and legerdemain.
(I am finishing a book about Shakespeare and early modern textile culture. I know far too much about tailors…)
