Macbeth by William Shakespeare/Macbeth by William Shakespeare (Voyager)(CMACBEM-894)(1994).iso/Comments/2.3com

Text File | 1994-04-01 | 16KB | 14 lines

. This scene featuring the drunken porter, the gatekeeper to Macbeth’s castle, is, like the witches’ scenes (1.1 and 1.3), full of sexual innuendo and the babble of obscure and demonological reference; and like the witches’ verse ditties, the porter’s loquacious, seemingly meandering prose needs decoding. This character would have originally been played by one of the rough clowns of Shakespeare’s theatrical company, and there surely would have been a good deal of physical “business” in his performance – rude gestures and noises, pratfalls, and probably some improvisation with the language itself. The clown’s wordiness, low jokes about drunkenness and impotency, and his surly, slow “ooze” towards the gate are in themselves boisterously farcical in the doing (if merely puzzling and a bit irritating in the reading). Indeed, comedians in our own time such as Red Skelton, Dean Martin, and Richard Pryor, have made a lucrative profession of impersonating cheerful inebriation, though misuse of alcohol creates an endemic social disease in our own times, as it did even more prominently in Shakespeare’s. Perhaps one of the theatrical issues here is the amusement we take when an actor very much in control of his craft creates the illusion of loss of control. Moreover, the flaunting of insobriety also allows us to enjoy a vicarious defiance of proper decorum and social morality, even while disdaining the lowness of the stewed gatekeeper. Certainly, this scene has often been referred to, even dismissed, as “comic relief” in that it takes us away briefly from the high political and mortal matters we have been witnessing to return us to a more ordinary, raucous “human” level. We laugh at the clown; and, indeed, the genre of comedy usually places us in a superior vantage point from which to observe and scorn. But if this is comic relief, it is “relief” not mainly in the sense of relaxation, but in the sense of effecting bold contrast and shadowing (as in the sculptural term bas relief), which actually serve to make the horror more horrible. The porter’s delay and the insistent knocking at the gate claw at our nerves and delay agonizingly the inevitable discovery of Duncan’s brutal murder. The scene’s construction powerfully recalls the confusion caused by someone pounding on our door in the middle of the night and our nightmarish groping out of a heavy sleep to respond – or our anxious and guilty remembrances about what the night’s violent excess might have wrought. In each case, we seemed trapped between dream and waking, urgency and trepidation, and a night of carousing can only exaggerate, even encourage, that confusion. Moreover, as you may now suspect from Shakespeare (or my version of Shakespeare), the drunken porter’s experienced disquisition on the pernicious and equivocal effects of alcohol tells us something not only about the subject and speaker but about the Macbeths as well. Lord and Lady Macbeth are drunkards too, but of a far more dangerous and intractable sort. Theirs is the metaphoric or symbolic drunkenness of blood lust and political greed. They have “drunk of the insane root”: Lady Macbeth, having given the King and his grooms much wine in hypocritical hospitality boasts at the beginning of the immediately previous scene (2.2) that the brew “which hath made them drunk hath made me bold” (employing an implied pun on “spirits/spirited,” that is, alcoholic spirits have intensified her boldness, made her male-like, and she, like the witches, has offered contaminated nourishment to her victims). Her scornful description of the “swinish sleep” and “drenched natures” of the king’s “spongy officers” (1.7.61-72) is all the more hypocritical because she herself has provided the wine and drugged it! By such imagery, she unconsciously seeks to dehumanize them, I would guess, in order to kill them more casually. Furthermore, here is a characteristic example of Shakespeare seeking to dramatize his metaphors for us at an “actual” or literal level. We are led to understand a mental state (and its consequence in regicide) by comparing it to a physical one (which many of us know too intimately). In other words, the porter’s slovenly inebriation is the actualization of the Macbeths’ spiritual and hidden vice. We are shown the metaphor. Likewise, in Hamlet, a play which explores the tragic tensions between seeming and being, Shakespeare brings on a troupe of traveling actors, professionals in seeming, to dramatize the metaphysical questions of being and meaning; and in King Lear, the profound, painful analysis of Lear’s foolishness is made immeasureably more specific and poignant by the wise and loving mockeries of a character called the Fool.  Since the porter is an authority on drunkenness, we should attend his lecture carefully – and be ready to compare his physical condition to the psychological and metaphysical state of the Macbeths. The gatekeeper is, more than he knows, the “porter of hell gate” whose employers have begun to “go the primrose way to th’everlasting bonfire” (1, 15-16). Their peremptory bad planning is something like the “farmer, that hanged himself on th’expectation of plenty” (3-4) and their confusion of sex and larceny is like the English tailor who stole “out of a French hose” (13-14) – equivocators all. According to the gatekeeper, who uses the entering Macduff as his straight-man, drink “is a provoker of three things” (20), namely “nose-painting, sleep, and urine” (22). The urine refers, I believe, to the poisons that the Macbeths have begun to expel into the body politic and moral of Scotland, and is one of many liquids – blood, wine, milk, water, tears, witches’ potion, and semen – that Shakespeare interconnects metaphorically and dramatically to enrich his analysis of Scotland’s predicament and the Macbeths’ tragic sickness. Moreover, their actions create the very fitful, equivocal sleep and sleeplessness of the porter’s description: Macbeth has, as he acknowledges, “murder[ed] sleep” (2.2.39), and Lady Macbeth will reveal and destroy herself in the “equivocal” state of sleepwalking. The porter’s “nose painting” refers to the comical red noses, the broken capillaries, of drunkards – but on a larger scale it may refer to the inevitable physical manifestations which lead to discovery of a hidden vice – “crime will out,” says the proverb. Prince Hamlet proclaims that “murder, though it have no tongue, will speak” (2.2.600), and Macbeth will soon admit that “blood will have blood,” revealing even “the secret’st man of blood” (3.4.122-126). Lady Macbeth herself foolishly assumes that “a little water clears us of this deed” (2.2.70), but neither she nor her husband can avoid outward manifestations of their sickness and self-incrimination. With a comic timing and scrupulously balanced syntax that plays teasingly against his sottishness (and keeps his audience, Macduff and us, captivated), the porter now remembers something more that drink both “provokes and unprovokes”: the greedy, illicit sexual desire he calls “lechery.” Drink makes men lecherous and then cruelly deprives them of their ability to perform “the deed.” The porter now vividly and bawdily describes (with appropriately obscene gestures) how “much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery”:  it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and   it takes him off; it persuades him and disheartens   him, makes him stand to and not stand to. In   conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and   giving him the lie, leaves him. (25-29) As with the Macbeths, there is here a terrible gap between desire and achievement; and with the homely imagery that every fraternity boy or barfly can understand, the porter defines the bad behavior, bad sex, bad faith, and bad politics that lie beneath the glamor of excessive conviviality or coercive seduction or regicide. (But also note the formal, balanced rhetoric with which the porter and Shakespeare describe the paradox of drunkenness.) And to see just how intensively Shakespeare has compacted the references to drink, sex, and dishonor, consider the puns that lie beneath Macduff’s reply to this routine: “I believe drink gave thee the lie last night” (30). As Professor Braunmuller suggests in his note to the text, “giving the lie” may simultaneously refer to:  (1) accusing a man of lying (as one does when calling    another man out to duel – or as Lady Macbeth    did to Macbeth, 1.7.47-51);   (2) throwing him to the floor (as in sex or wrestling);  (3) making him urinate (lie = lye);  (4) deceiving a man (because he cannot perform sexually    as he intended or promised);  (5) making him lose his erection. According to Macduff, drink has made the porter a liar and caused him to lie down and become slothful, though the porter assures his “second banana” that he has tried to vomit out the drink; in the Polanski film the porter actually takes time to relieve himself against the castle wall. Macduff’s final question to the porter, “Is thy master stirring?” ends the comic interchange by connecting Macbeth to the comical discourse of sexual innuendo (“stirring,” as in becoming erect) and plunges us into the terrible discovery and furious movement of the last 106 lines of the scene. That some 33 lines of mere “comic relief” could occasion so much commentary speaks both to Shakespeare’s intensity and to the difficulty we always have in decoding the slang, innuendo, and farce of another era. Just as the opening third of the scene has been a very model of low language and behavior and of plot delay, the last two-thirds is filled with intense activity and noble sentiment raised to the level of high, even old-fashioned tragic diction: “O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart | Cannot conceive nor name thee” (56-57). Prose shifts back to blank verse, and the imagery is now of vast confusions in the heavens and of the murdered king as “The Lord’s anointed temple” (46-61). The pounding at the gate and in the porter’s head give way to the alarum bell that cries out “Murder and Treason!” (68). The seemingly appalled Macbeths indict themselves in different ways: she by her uncharacteristic near silence and fainting (real or pretended?), and he by two grand speeches (84-89 and 101-111). The first expresses his wishes, both hypocritical and true, that   Had I but died an hour before this chance,  I had lived a blessèd time, for from this instant,  There’s nothing serious in mortality.  All is but toys; renown and grace is dead,  The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees  Is left this vault to brag of. (84-89)  For Macbeth the moment before his assassination of Duncan existed in a completely different moral zone from the moment after; the division between innocence and guilt is absolute and, he believes, unbreachable. Macbeth’s second speech (101-111) hypocritically justifies his murder of the grooms. But in re-imagining Duncan’s “gashed” body, its “silver skin laced with his golden blood,” and in reiterating the imagery of his pre-murder soliloquy at the start of 1.7, Macbeth also indicts himself, enacting a kind of ritual murder against his own soul: “Who could refrain [stop oneself from murdering the guilty], | That had a heart to love and in that heart | Courage to make’s love known?” The word “love” twice reiterated is, I think, the specific cause of Lady Macbeth’s faint. This fall is, I believe, genuine – not a feint – in spite of her previous toughness and symbolizes theatrically her moral fall. Banquo takes command of the scene (118-125) in a magnificent speech that at once acknowledges human frailty and need for tears and the imperative religious and political need for justice: “In the great hand of God I stand and thence | Against the undivulged pretense I fight | Of treasonous malice.” The scene concludes with the decision of the king’s two sons to flee this place where “There’s daggers in men’s smiles” (133), Malcolm to England and Donalbain to Ireland.W
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