The humour of having a drunken Porter in the middle of the play can be thought of as a ‘laugh conductor’ and would prevent the audience from doing this later on in the scene.
“Here’s a farmer that hung himself on the expectation of plenty”. This links with the theme of nature in the play and how Lennox describes the strange happenings and the brutality of the night when nature seemed to have been in key with the violence of men’s doings. Later on in the Porters speech, “Faith, here’s an English tailor come hither for stealing out of a French hose”. This associates with the image of clothing and how Macbeth is not worthy of, or comfortable with, the robes of kingship as he has taken the rightful king’s throne for his own.
In addition to adding the part of a Fool to make sure the play was well attended, this scene is essential to the practicalities of staging. In a theatre production Macbeth and Lady Macbeth need to go and clean themselves and dress in nightgowns before the entry of Macduff, who whilst they are standing in the courtyard covered in blood is knocking on the door awaiting the porter to let him in. A time-filler is desperately needed and the porter scene supplies this.
The Porters speech portrays, in comic form, some of the crucial ideas in the play, such as damnation, the supernatural and equivocation as we can see by “Faith, here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for G-d’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O! come in equivocator”. This also refers to the gunpowder plot, and that equivocation would remind the audience about the horror of attempting to kill a king, which is exactly what Macbeth does.
Shakespeare’s Fool speaks in prose and uses riddles and rambling speech to name truths that bring us beyond appearances, offering commentary or summarising the play so far. It is appropriate that this character talks of hell-fire, damnation, ambition, equivocation and the supernatural as these are all themes of the play and would have been very familiar to an Elizabethan audience schooled in Medieval Morality Plays.
By Referring to himself as the Porter of hell-gate and mentioning “Beelzebub” and “the other devils name”, a link is made between Macbeth’s castle and hell, based on the fact that in the previous scene, lady Macbeth has called upon “Murdering Ministers” and “the dunnest smoke of hell”. Due to the Porter opening the gates, war, famine, pestilence and death flooded from Inverness into Scotland. He lets out the ‘hell’ that the Macbeths have created by defying natural order. Again, this concept of the Porter being that of hell-gate would remind the audience of the traditional character of the Porter of hell-gate in medieval plays, making the story universal.
In some ways the Porter’s jokes tell us something about Macbeth, who you might feel is also confused; he too has become corrupted (drunk) with evil, will be ruined by having too much ambition, believes too much in the witches’ half truths and he has ‘stolen’ the king’s crown.
Certainly, the porter gives a satirical picture of a dishonest world. What with treachery, lying and unnatural events such as Lennox recounts “strange screams of death” and “the night has been unruly”, it is, for the audience at that moment, no surprise that people like Macbeth rise to be kings. However, as in all good morality tales, Nemesis is usually not far behind.
In conclusion, the comical Porter and his speech provide a ‘take’ on a range of issues in everyday Elizabethan life. Shorter scenes in the play are either a reminder of what has happened so far, or a preparation for what is coming. This scene is light hearted and relieves the tension of the last scene as well as contrasting with the next, when Duncan’s murder is discovered.
