Macbeth In Act I Scene 2 of the tragedy of Macbeth, Shakespeare -- after giving a brutally graphic description of how Macbeth "unseam'd…from the nave to the chaps" an enemy soldier -- makes his hero's name rhyme with the word "death" at the scene's conclusion (64-5). Of course the technique of the play is to combine psychological realism with densely-written poetic language. Yet I hope that an examination of the play's supposed moment of comic relief in prose -- the "Porter Scene" that opens Macbeth Act 2 Scene 3 -- reveals, when read as poetry, an additional level of grotesque imagery. I think a closer examination will reveal that, although the Porter's dialogue is written in prose, it deserves to be called "prose-poetry," for Shakespeare still uses metaphor, linguistic detail, and context in order to achieve the same level of condensed and knotty language which characterizes his verse.

The "Porter Scene" technically begins at the conclusion of the previous scene. But it is necessary to look a little more closely at how the conclusion of Act 2 Scene 2 "sets up" the porter scene and establishes its poetic context. So the introduction of the Porter directly follows the murder of Duncan by the Macbeths,...

As Lady Macbeth offers the glib pun as she expresses a plan to frame Duncan's grooms for his death -- "I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal / and make it seem their guilt" -- she exits while a loud knocking comes in the opposite direction. The effect is surreal, as though somehow justice itself were calling out for Duncan to be avenged. Yet neither Macbeth nor Lady Macbeth ever falter in the rhythm of their blank verse, even after killing Duncan, and indeed are capable of the most sophisticated sorts of wordplay: not only the toying pun with "gild" and "gilt" to refer to smearing blood on the grooms, but also the ornately classical vocabulary of Macbeth's "multitudinous seas incarnadine" mean that the formality of the verse does not falter at the most horrifying moment of the drama. But if we have been hearing iambic pentameter with more or less metronomic regularity throughout the play -- there are scattered moments of prose (such as the letter read by Lady Macbeth) but overall the choice to violate the metrical poetic regularity of the play at this moment mimics the disruption caused by Duncan's assassination.
But the next way in which the…