This essay examines the "Porter Scene" in Shakespeare's Macbeth (Act 2, Scene 3) as an example of prose-poetry, arguing that the scene's apparent comic relief conceals a layer of grotesque, nightmarish imagery. The author traces how Shakespeare's shift from iambic pentameter to prose mirrors the disruption caused by Duncan's assassination, while the Porter's references to Hell Gate and Beelzebub blur the line between figurative and literal damnation. The essay also considers how language in the surrounding scenes — including Lady Macbeth's "gild/guilt" pun and Macduff's ambiguous use of "late" — reinforces the argument that Shakespeare's prose achieves the same condensed, knotty quality as his verse.
In Act I, Scene 2 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). The technique of the play is to combine psychological realism with densely-written poetic language. Yet a close examination of the play's supposed moment of comic relief in prose — the "Porter Scene" that opens Act 2, Scene 3 — reveals, when read as poetry, an additional level of grotesque imagery. 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 to achieve the same level of condensed and knotty language that characterizes his verse.
The "Porter Scene" technically begins at the conclusion of the previous scene, so it is necessary to look closely at how the end of Act 2, Scene 2 sets up the Porter Scene and establishes its poetic context. The introduction of the Porter directly follows the murder of Duncan by the Macbeths, which is itself followed by the horrifying knocking at the scene's conclusion. As Lady Macbeth offers a glib pun while expressing her 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 from the opposite direction. The effect is surreal, as though justice itself were calling out for Duncan to be avenged.
Yet neither Macbeth nor Lady Macbeth ever falters in the rhythm of their blank verse, even after killing Duncan. They remain capable of the most sophisticated sorts of wordplay: not only the toying pun with "gild" and "gilt" referring to smearing blood on the grooms, but also the ornately classical vocabulary of Macbeth's "multitudinous seas incarnadine." The formality of the verse does not falter even at the drama's most horrifying moment. Yet having heard iambic pentameter with more or less metronomic regularity throughout the play — with only scattered moments of prose, such as the letter read by Lady Macbeth — the choice to violate the metrical regularity of the play at this precise moment mimics the disruption caused by Duncan's assassination.
"Hell Gate imagery and nightmarish comic tone"
I stated at the outset that the Porter Scene ought to be thought of as "prose-poetry." On the level of language, Shakespeare makes the Porter's three speeches each as densely and carefully written as verse. It is illuminating to see how Shakespeare draws us out of the phantasmagoric hellscape of the Porter's speech through Macduff's stern return to reality:
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