CHRISTOPHER BAKER

Saint Peter and Macbeth’s Porter

Few now would agree with Coleridge’s opinion of the porter’s
scene in Macbeth as a “disgusting passage” which should be
regarded as merely “an interpolation of the actors.”1 Casting
himself as the gatekeeper of hell, the porter instead implies through
his drunken banter the divine judgment to be visited on regicides.
His smirking reference to damnation underscores the religious
dimension of Duncan’s murder which carries to the play’s end
and beyond, to resonate with events in contemporary Jacobean
politics. By greeting the knocker at the gate as an “equivocator”
(2.3.8), the porter draws attention to the threat on the life of James
I by alluding to the equivocal statements of the Jesuit defendant
Henry Garnet during the Gunpowder Trial of 1606. No matter
how much he may strive to preclude either divine or human
justice, such an equivocator, like the murdering Macbeth, cannot
“equivocate to heaven” (2.3.11) and merits punishment not merely
for a crime but for a sin.2 Since Glynn Wickham first argued
the point several decades ago, it is now widely accepted that
the drunken porter’s role-playing derives from the figure of the
doorkeeper at the gates of hell as portrayed in the medieval cycle
plays which persisted in England until the 1570s.3 However, one
New Testament incident portrayed in these plays may lend a more
specific biblical dimension to the porter’s reference to equivocators

The Ben Jonson Journal 18.2 (2011): 233–253

DOI: 10.3366/bjj.2011.0025
© Edinburgh University Press
www.eupjournals.com/bjj
234 BEN JONSON JOURNAL

beyond its topical political relevance. Contemporary audiences

may have heard refracted in the porter’s quip not only Garnet’s
equivocation but also Saint Peter’s verbal evasions which make the
gospel accounts of his denial of Christ so compelling.
Following Christ “a farr of[f], euen into the hall of the hie Priest”
(Mk 14:54) prior to the crucifixion, Peter attempts to sidestep the
female porter who questions him by affecting not to know what she
is talking about; this is followed by additional denials, and still later
by his remembrance of Christ’s prophecy of his betrayal and his
tearful recognition of his guilt. The earliest gospel records Peter’s
first evasion: “I knowe him not, nether wot I what thou saiest”
(Mk 14:68); Matthew alters this slightly: “I wot not what thou
saist” (26:70). Luke moves the equivocation to the third denial and
changes the gatekeeper to a male: “Man, I knowe not what thou
saiest” (22:60).4 The brief but dramatic intimation of Peter’s denial
by Macbeth’s porter contributes a biblically relevant coloring to the
motif of equivocation so prominent in the play, from Macbeth’s
prevaricating welcome to Duncan at Inverness to Garnet’s treatise
in defense of equivocation which was publicized at his trial. By
triangulating Macbeth’s equivocal invitation to his king with the
equivocal statements of the papal Peter and the Jesuit Garnet,
Shakespeare is able to scripturally contextualize Macbeth as a
dramatic representation of Catholic threats to the Jacobean regime
and to affirm James’s wary opposition to Catholic toleration. As
audiences would recall, Peter’s denial of Christ was followed by his
profound remorse, yet Shakespeare’s porter implies only Peter’s
equivocal betrayal, a parallel which James I, attentive to threats to
his divine right, may have perceived as endorsing his suspicion of
broader toleration for papists.

The gospel story of Peter’s denial of Jesus was a well-known

incident accessible in a variety of literary avenues to medieval
and Elizabethan audiences. After his declarations of firm devotion
to Christ (Mt 26:35, Mk 14:31, Lk 22:33, Jn 13:37), Peter makes a
sudden turnabout that is one of the most dramatic incidents in the
 Saint Peter and Macbeth’s Porter 235

passion story; it was an essential element in liturgical readings and

an enduring feature of continental and English literary depictions
of the life of Christ, occasionally presented with unique variations.
In the twelfth-century Benediktbeuern passion play, for example,
Peter’s verbal refusal to commit himself is explicit. When the
Ancilla in the Benediktbeuern asks, “Nonne vidi te cum illo in horto?”
[“Didn’t I see you with him in the garden?”], he replies, “Nescio quid
dicis” [“I don’t know what you are saying”].5 The Ludus de passione
of the Carmina Burana (composed c.1180) unbiblically but quite
appropriately juxtaposes Peter’s denial with Judas’s betrayal.6 In
Jean Michel’s 30,000-line French Passion staged in Angers in 1468,
the portress who confronts Peter also hammers the crucifixion
nails, while in the German Alsfeld passion (last performed in 1517),
the cock that signals Peter’s repentance “had a speaking part and
walked in the procession”; its onomotopoetic words ‘ “Peter lug lug
lug nu da!’ announce that ‘Peter lies lies lies now then!” ’7
In England, Shakespeare’s Anglican audience would have heard
all four versions of Peter’s denial read during the gospel readings
for Holy Week, and each account was read three times a year
as the second lesson for Morning Prayer.8 Like the stage persona
of Herod that informs Macbeth’s characterization, Peter’s offense
also figured significantly in the medieval dramas and cycle plays
Shakespeare may have witnessed as a young man.9 It appears in
the Passio Domini Nostri Jhesu Christi, the second of three plays in
the often ribald Cornish Ordinalia of the late fourteenth century.10
The denial itself is not present in the Townley cycle, though it
is predicted by Jesus in the play of The Conspiracy and Capture;
Peter later appears as the gatekeeper of heaven in the concluding
Judgment Day play.11 Drawing upon the version of the denial
found in the poetic Northern Passion,12 the York text of Christ
before Annas and Caiaphas offers the most theatrically innovative
rendition of the denial in the cycle plays. When the “Woman”
first confronts Peter, she quickly spots his suspiciously withdrawn
behavior, noting that he “He looks lurking, like an ape” (line
105),13 a directorial description of the actor’s body language. He
brusquely dismisses her question: “Woman, thy words and thy
wind thou not waste,/Of his company never ere was I kenned”
(lines 119–22). The York Realist even adds a reprimand from the
woman, but Peter’s first reply remains equivocal. His statement,
236 BEN JONSON JOURNAL

“I was never known to be in his company” (line 120), shifts the

burden of proving a guilty association away from himself and on
to those who would make that claim.
We can glimpse the reaction of some Early Modern audiences
to dramatizations of Peter’s denial in a unique passage from Juan
Luis Vives’ commentary on Augustine’s City of God. In the chapter
“Of the honor that Christians give to Martirs,” Vives derides
contemporary playgoers for their boorish lack of respect for the
sacred scenes enacted in religious plays:

There Iudas plaieth the most ridiculous Mimike, euen then

when he betraies Christ. There the Apostles run away, and the
soldiers follow, and all resounds with laughter. Then comes
Peter, and cuttes off Malchus eare, and then all rings with
applause, as if Christs betraying were now reuenged. And by
and by this great fighter comes and for feare of a girle, denies
his Maister, all the people laughing at her question, and hissing
at his denial: and in all these reuells and ridiculous stirres
Christ onely is serious and severe . . . 14

Vives is not referring here to English plays because this commen-

tary predates his first visit to England in 1523; nevertheless, the
passage reveals that the denial scene had sufficient energy to excite
onlookers enough to jeer at the apostle’s behavior. Not only does
Vives reveal Peter’s denial to be a target of popular mockery, but
the amusement provoked by the portress anticipates audiences’
later comic reaction to Macbeth’s porter.
These literary and dramatic portrayals of the apostle document
Karen Bruhn’s contention that “in pre-Reformation Christianity,
Peter arguably had been the most recognizable religious figure after
Jesus and Mary”; over eleven hundred English churches of this
period were named for him.15 Numerous sermons by Elizabethan
reformers recast his popular image from sinner to model repentant,
but “[n]egative representations of St. Peter never completely
disappeared from early modern English Protestant writings, nor
was he ever divorced completely from associations with Rome and
the papacy.”16 Juliet swears by “St. Peter’s church and Peter too”
that “Paris shall not make me there a joyful bride” (Romeo and Juliet,
 Saint Peter and Macbeth’s Porter 237

3.5.116–17), and Peter’s denial is briefly recollected in a Roman

Catholic context at the opening of Hamlet, when what Stephen
Greenblatt terms “a distinctly Catholic ghost” flees at the crowing
of a cock “like a guilty thing” and “an extravagant and erring
spirit” (1.1.148, 154).17 Shakespeare’s more elaborate references to
Peter stress his role as heavenly gatekeeper. In Much Ado About
Nothing Beatrice, anticipating spinsterhood, imagines meeting St.
Peter after delivering her apes in hell (2.1.41–49), and Othello
summons Emilia as “You, mistress,/That have the office opposite
to Saint Peter,/And keeps the gate of hell!,” telling her to “turn the
key and keep our counsel” (4.2.90–92, 94).
The apostle’s iconography had, since the early Church, shown
him as the heavenly gatekeeper.18 But his denial of Christ linked
him to Hell as well, as in John Udall’s 1584 sermon on “Peter’s
Fall”: “For Peter who before woulde neuer forsake Christ, is now
gone so farre from him, as any man can: for hee is now throwne into
the verie deapth of sinne, into the gates of hell, and into Sathans
clawes . . . ”19 Although his eventual authority within Christendom
is assured by his being given “the keyes of the kingdome of
heauen” (Mt 16:19), this post positions him as the exact counterpart
of the medieval stage figure who inspires Macbeth’s porter. Peter
is rewarded for his piety by being made a porter, a task ironically
recalling his confrontation with the portress that led him into his
denial of Jesus. When Michael J. B. Allen notes that Shakespeare’s
porter “intrudes into our consciousness with his great keys, like a
jailer” we are reminded of the ease with which these props may
have enabled early audiences to see in him an infernal reflection of
Peter.20
A reference to Peter’s denial in Macbeth also exploits the fact that
“the very themes with which Peter was most associated—Rome,
the papacy, temporal ecclesiastical power—were at the heart of
the theological and ecclesiastical debates between Protestants and
Catholics in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.”21 Such Catholic
associations of the apostle were notably popularized with the
publication of Robert Southwell’s St. Peter’s Complaint in 1595,
shortly after the Jesuit poet’s execution. Frank Brownlow points out
that the “power and subtlety of Southwell’s penetration of Peter’s
psychology . . . would have appealed strongly to a wide range of
readers quite independently of any doctrinal position it implied.”22
238 BEN JONSON JOURNAL

Significantly, “Southwell seems to have assumed that his readers

would know the story, as they would know Peter’s later history.”23
Southwell captures the apostle’s emotional anguish as he recalls
the moment when the portress gains access to his cowardly soul
through her interrogation:

O portresse of the doore of my disgrace

Whouse toung, unlockt the trueth of vowed mind;
Whose wordes, from cowards hart did courage chase,
And let in death-full feares my soule to blinde.
(lines 211–14)24

Peter remembers his former declaration of loyalty to Christ and

the “dispossessed divels that out I threw,/In Jesus name” (lines
607–8), but now he must accept the full burden of his evasiveness:
“My perjury was musicke to their daunce:/And now they heap
disdaines on my mischance” (lines 611–12). The poem’s success
(five editions between 1595 and 1599) offered Shakespeare yet
another literary rendering of the saint’s “perjury.”
For popular as well as biblically literate audiences, then, Saint
Peter would have been an apt referent for Macbeth’s porter’s
welcome to an equivocator who is deserving of hellfire. Despite his
subsequent remorse, Peter’s evasion is the most offensive example
of an equivocal statement in the New Testament, certainly no less
so than Judas’s hypocritical “God saue thee, Master” (Mt 26:49).
It is given close attention by John Calvin, who condemns Peter’s
evasion in his commentary on the harmony of Mt 26:70, Mk 14:68,
and Lk 22:57, labeling Peter’s statement as sophistry and accusing
his act of threatening the redemption itself.

I know not what thou sayest. The form of denial which is here
set down, shows sufficiently that the wretched sophists, who
endeavor to escape by ambiguous expressions, which they
turn to a variety of meanings, when they are called to give
an account of their faith, gain nothing by their dexterity in
fraud. Peter does not absolutely deny the whole doctrine of the
Gospel; he only denies that he knew the man; but because in the
person of Christ he indirectly buries the light of the promised
redemption, he is charged with base and shameful treachery.25
 Saint Peter and Macbeth’s Porter 239

Calvin stresses the irony of the sudden, embarrassing defeat by a

woman of the formerly stalwart Peter; he is “terrified by a woman’s
voice [and] immediately denies his Master.”26 Calvin’s emphasis
upon a “plain and candid profession” as the proper “testimony”
from professing Christians foreshadows the expectations of Henry
Garnet’s prosecutors towards his equivocal trial statements and
illuminates the position from which Calvin wishes the gospel
reader to perceive Peter’s own “ambiguous expressions.”
Equivocal statements were of course not confined to religious
speech only, and they could also prove to be useful political
stratagems; James I’s own motto was “‘Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit
regnare’ [He who does not know how to dissimulate does not know
how to reign].”27 The justification of equivocal speech lay in the
purpose it served; it could easily be seen as apostasy or treason,
hence Calvin’s and Sir John Cheeke’s criticism of it. Conversely,
Malcolm appears to follow James’s motto when he calculatedly
misrepresents himself as a moral reprobate and thereby verifies
Macduff’s loyalty (4.3.130–31).28 On more philosophical grounds
Francis Bacon judged against it in The Advancement of Learning
as “the great sophism of all sophisms.”29 However, the aim of
Garnet’s A Treatise of Equivocation, completed by 1598 and used by
Sir Edmund Coke and others to indict him, sought to defend its
use by clarifying its moral utility.30 The first use of equivocation in
the sense of “words or expressions that are susceptible of a double
signification, with a view to mislead” appears in Macbeth (5.5.42)
(OED, definition 2). The majority of Shakespeare’s uses of the word
and its variants also surface in Macbeth and were prompted by
its use during Garnet’s trial; Henry Paul believes that “the porter
scene was not finished until after the execution of Henry Garnet on
May 3, 1606.”31 Macbeth’s porter appears to draw upon the fact
that Garnet himself had pointedly condemned Peter’s denial in
his treatise; if, as seems likely, Shakespeare had knowledge of this
text, his porter may be calling attention not merely to the equivocal
Jesuit but to the equivocal saint as well.
Garnet’s conviction was largely based upon his possession and
revision of A Treatise of Equivocation. He opens his defense of
equivocation by citing “propositions” which are “mixed,” that is,
“wch partlye consisteth in voice and partlye is reserved in the
mynde, is then to be adiudged trewe, not whan that parte onley
240 BEN JONSON JOURNAL

wch is expressed, or the other onely wch is reserved, is trewe, but

whan both together do contayne a truthe.”32 Someone uttering such
a statement “doth not say false or lye before God, howsoever he
may be thought to lye before men, or otherwise commit therin
some other synne.”33 Garnet lists several instances where Christ
and various saints made such mixed, equivocal statements. For
example, Jesus states (Mk 13: 32) that he does not know the day of
judgment, “wch by consent of the holy ffather is to be vnderstood
that he knewe it not for to vtter it, although they were never so
desyerous to know it, whereas his ffather knowing it had vttered
it, vnto hym as man . . . ”34 However, Garnet rejects equivocations
which deny the faith, offering as his single example of this error
the same scriptural incident which Macbeth’s porter recollects.

This may also be confirmed by the example of St Peters

denying of o[u]r Saviour, whose words all of them, albeit they
might haue had some trew sense if he had intended the same,
as he did not;—for he knew not Christe p[er]fectlye, wheras
none knoweth the sonne but the ffather; neither did he know
the man whom they spake of, whereas he was not a pure
man, but also God; neither did he follow Jesus of Nazareth
as one of Galiley or of Nazareth, but as the sonne of God, and
the Messias of the worlde; and whan, being charged to be a
disciple of Christe, he aunswered “I am not,” his words might
also have had a trew sense, for God is he onely w[hi]ch is, in
respect of whome all creatures are nothinge;—although, I say,
St. Peter had intended all these and other meaninges, as St.
Ambrose largely discourseth, yet had he synned . . . 35

None of the possible statements of genuine faith which Peter

might have intended was the basis for his statement, which sprang
instead from a fearful concern for his own life instead of devotion
to Jesus and the punishment for which is, as the porter announces,
“th’ everlasting bonfire” (2.3.19). Even had his words contained
“some trew sense” he would still be denying the faith.
In Mark’s account, the portress elicits Peter’s denial by cleverly
uttering an accusatory statement designed to evoke an admission
from him: “Thou wast also with Iesus of Nazaret” (14:67). Peter
 Saint Peter and Macbeth’s Porter 241

realizes that he is being interrogated, as the second Geneva gloss on

this verse makes clear: “Peter prepareth him self to flee if he were
further laid unto.” Robert Parsons’ explanation of equivocation in
A Treatise Tending to Mitigation towards Catholic Subjects in England
(1607) implies that Peter’s statement is not a “proper” equivocation
but rather the “formal lying equivocation” which “may be called
equivocation . . . for that the hearer is always wrongfully deceived,
or intended to be deceived by some falsity, which is known to
be such by the speaker, and consequently is plain lying . . . ”36 In
short, Peter’s statement has no extenuating feature which might
make it a justifiable equivocation. To the probable satisfaction of
James I (who had secretly observed Garnet’s trial), an allusion to
Peter’s traitorous behavior would have allowed Shakespeare not
only to condemn the conspirators by calling attention to Garnet’s
repudiation of the divinely-sanctioned monarch but also to censure
the papacy by recalling the spiritual lapse of the first bishop of
Rome.

II

Richard Wilson has observed that at the start of act 4 in Macbeth

the witches are “summoned by Grey Malkin at the climactic
moment of Christ’s denial, when ‘Thrice the brinded cat hath
mewed’ (4.1.1),” the cat’s mewing presumably rehearsing Saint
Peter’s three-fold denial of Jesus.37 But the most telling feature of
Shakespeare’s reimagining of Peter’s denial occurs much earlier,
in the porter’s welcome to an “equivocator.” The visitors, Macduff
and Lennox, are not themselves the guilty equivocators, but the
porter’s hellish greeting, coming immediately after Macbeth’s
pusillanimous account of Duncan’s death to Lady Macbeth,
momentarily transforms Inverness into the underworld, and
recalls, in a kind of theatrical palimpsest, the actual murderers
already present in the castle who will ultimately face punishment
for their equivocal and deadly welcome of their king.38
As his comment of “Anon, anon” (2.3.20) indicates, Macbeth’s
porter, like the doorkeeper in the gospels, must cross a courtyard
to open the palace gate. While it is a young girl who meets Peter
242 BEN JONSON JOURNAL

instead of an old serving-man in most of the gospel accounts,

their functions are similar (the Geneva gloss on Mk 14:69 notes
that “when the second denial is spoken of in Luke there is a man
servant mentioned and not a maid”). The word used to describe her
is, in Greek, the feminine form of “porter;” in the Rheims-Douay
version she is termed a “portress” (Jn 18:16–17).39 The palaces of
both the Sanhedrin and Macbeth are chilly; Mark, Luke, and John
all record that Peter and the others are warming themselves by a
fire, while Macbeth’s porter bitterly notes that “This place is too
cold for hell” (2.3.16–17). He has been summoned from within the
castle, presumably warmed there by a fire, and he does in any case
welcome his guest to an “everlasting bonfire” (2.3.19). Finally, in
Mark’s version Jesus states to Peter, “Verely, I say vnto thee, this
day, euen in this night, before the cocke crowe twise, thou shalt
denie me thrise” (14:30). Macbeth’s porter is also awake at the same
hour of Peter’s final denial; he had been “carousing till the second
cock” (2.3.24–25).
Among the gospel accounts, Peter’s equivocal statement to the
portress is best captured in Mark’s rendering of the first denial:
“And when she saw Peter warming him self, she loked on him,
and said, Thou wast also with Iesus of Nazaret. But he denied it,
saying, I knowe him not nether wot I what thou saiest” (14:67–68).
Raymond Brown notes of Mark’s verb “deny” (arneisthai) that
it “can bear the meaning of denying that one has a personal
involvement with or relation to someone.”40 The word thus directs
our attention not only to Peter’s relationship to Jesus but also
to Macbeth’s own personal unfaithfulness toward Duncan, he
having been the king’s “kinsman and his subject,/ . . . [and] his
host” (1.7.13–14). The unexpected knocking at the gate of Inverness
recalls the suddenness of the maid’s unexpected confrontation
with the nonplussed Peter, shifting our attention to another
equivocal moment with a comparable narrative impact.41 Thomas
DeQuincey’s comment in his classic essay on this event catches
a significant element which the Shakespearean scene shares with
this gospel incident: “We were to be made to feel that the human
nature . . . was gone, vanished, extinct, and that the fiendish nature
had taken its place”; “the great storm of passion” which rages
in Macbeth “will create a hell within him, and into this hell we
are to look.”42 When Peter is suddenly shocked enough to reject
 Saint Peter and Macbeth’s Porter 243

his allegiance to Christ and then suffer intense guilt, we glimpse

another private hell. In his Bakhtinian reading of the denial scene,
Walter Reed recognizes that “Peter’s three denials are increasingly
emphatic.”43 Peter at first tries to avoid the fact that he is trapped
in a paradoxically dialogic event: to deny Christ is to save himself
physically but condemn himself spiritually, whereas to affirm
Christ is to lose his life yet find it (cf. Mt 10:39). When Peter weeps
in shame after his denial, he could well have uttered Macbeth’s
words after Duncan’s death: “I am afraid to think what I have
done” (2.2.48).
Both the passion narratives and Macbeth record the killing of
a king, one heavenly yet living as a man, the other earthly yet
possessing a divine right. While critics have been wary of terming
Duncan a “Christ-figure,” they nevertheless acknowledge that his
role seems suffused with undeniably religious overtones.44 He is
an exemplary monarch who carries the divinity that hedges a
medieval ruler, he suffers an unmerited death, and the language
used to describe him carries unmistakably biblical resonances.
Even his murderer remarks that Duncan’s virtues “Will plead
like angels, trumpet-tongu’d, against/The deep damnation of
his taking off” (1.7.19–20). Macbeth acknowledges that pity will
stride the “blast,” the storm to follow Duncan’s death recalling
Matthew’s reference to the earthquake following the death of Jesus
(27:51). Lennox rewrites that catastrophe in his description of the
night preceding Duncan’s death, when “Some say the earth/Was
feverous and did shake” (2.3.60–61). All three synoptics note that
at the death of Christ “the vaile of the Temple was rent in twayne”
(Mt 27:51, Mk 15:38, Lk 23:45), a desecration that Macduff appears
to have in mind when he declares of the deceased Duncan that
“Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope/The Lord’s anointed
Temple” (2.3.67–68).45 David Norbrook contends that “critics tend
to exaggerate his sacramental character,” but Macbeth himself
graphically invites us to compare the symbolic impact of Duncan’s
murdered body with the bloodied corpus on a crucifix: “His
silver skin [was] laced with his golden blood/And his gashed
stabs looked like a breach in nature/For ruin’s wasteful entrance”
(2.3.112–14).46 Duncan’s death as a near-sacramental signifier
underlies James Calderwood’s assertion that Macbeth “literalizes
244 BEN JONSON JOURNAL

the symbolism of the Mass, which does memorize Golgotha, by

killing the Christ-figure in fact.”47
The king’s murder, couched in these overtones of the savior’s
death, suggests the Macbeths’ palace as not only a kind of medieval
hell on earth and the abode of a damned couple but also as
a revisiting of the palace of Caiaphas, who sought to execute
Jesus. The dramatic force of Macbeth’s irreligion relies upon our
countervailing awareness of the very spiritual codes he defies,
another expression of the play’s motif of equivocation.48 Despite
his rejection of all religious scruples, he casts his own perception
of justice in terms of a perverted eucharist: “This even-handed
Justice/Commends th’ Ingredience of our poyson’d Challice/To
our own lips” (1.7.10–12). His announcement of the king’s death—
“it is done” (2.1.62)—“evokes the consummatum est.”49 Prior to his
denial Peter had asserted his loyalty to Christ in each gospel, and
the thane asserts he has no designs upon the kingship: “to be
king/Stands not within the prospect of belief” (1.3.73–74); yet with
the news of Cawdor’s death, he begins to align himself with his
wife’s plans. Unlike the female gatekeeper who meets Peter and,
as René Girard says, “feels that Peter tries to share in something
in which he should not share,” Lady Macbeth encourages her
husband to join her in a subversive folie á deux, now dedicated to
their own “imperial theme” (1.3.129).50 Like Peter, Macbeth knows
full well the gravity of his act: “False face must hide what the false
heart doth know” (1.7.82).51 Between his denial and his contrition,
Peter’s life too is a null sign, “signifying nothing” (5.5.28). “Peter
does not belong anywhere or with anybody,” asserts Girard. “He
has lost touch with his own being.”52 He now seeks to identify with
a new group instead of with the followers of Christ, a linkage which
would cancel his assertion of loyalty to Jesus; yet he equivocates
and thereby places himself in neither camp. The betrayal of the
messiah by his perjuring apostle is recalled in the murder of
Duncan by his dissembling thane. For the play’s audiences, this
parallel echoes Garnet’s equivocal self-defense during March and
April of 1606 against his alleged role in the plot against the
king. An allusion by the porter lends a biblical proportion to
Garnet’s evasions even as it implies, through a comparison with
Macbeth’s impunity which far exceeds Peter’s subsequent grief,
 Saint Peter and Macbeth’s Porter 245

that those unwilling to show remorse for treasonous acts deserve

fit punishment as “rarer monsters” (5.8.25).
The porter’s scene, remarks Harry Levin, “has been regarded
more often than not as a mere excrescence or intrusion”; however,
its position within the play’s larger architecture may also reflect
Shakespeare’s appropriation of Mark’s narrative technique in the
denial scene.53 Mark frequently employs a so-called “Markan
sandwich” in which a brief incident intrudes into a bracketing
outer story to which it is usually directly related, often ironically. In
the denial scene, in passages of almost identical length, Jesus is first
arraigned before the Jewish leaders (14:53–65) and then arraigned
before Pilate (15:1–15), after which he is crucified. Between these
two arraignments, Peter is suddenly “arraigned” by the portress
and denies Jesus. Macbeth’s gatekeeper enters the tragic action
with an apparently digressive suddenness not unlike the arrival of
Mark’s girl at the gate. Shakespeare first directs our attention to the
immediate aftermath of Duncan’s murder and the consternation of
the Macbeths over their act; then, at the knocking at the gate, the
porter intrudes for an interval of forty lines; Macduff then arrives
to announce the king’s death; and finally we are returned to the
plotters themselves and their feeble attempts to appear incredulous
at what has just transpired. DeQuincey implicitly recognizes this
“sandwich” structure when he terms the appearance of the porter
a “reflux of the human” back into the action.54 Frank Kermode’s
observation on Mark’s narrative skill clarifies the apparent non
sequitur posed by the porter’s arrival: Mark’s method is to “as it
were cultivate structural oppositions, bring together significantly
antithetical persons or actions or even words.”55 As Stephen Marx
has observed, elements of biblical narrative are present in aspects of
Shakespeare’s dramatic designs, and Mark’s technique could have
appealed to a dramatist who often combined contrasting genres or
juxtaposed differing dramatic moods.56
Unlike Henry Garnet, Peter is not guilty of an allegedly
premeditated treason assumed to be rooted in an outlawed
theology, but his cowardly statement nevertheless renders him a
silent accomplice who does nothing to prevent the death of his
spiritual king; the gospel gatekeeper’s repeated questioning of
him proleptically analogizes Sir Edward Coke’s close interrogation
of Garnet. Shakespeare’s juxtaposition of these two equivocators
246 BEN JONSON JOURNAL

affirms for playgoers the frailty of the person on whom

papal authority was grounded while simultaneously casting the
intransigent Jesuit as an enemy of the state. Peter’s sin exceeded
Garnet’s involvement in the plot, but their use of ambiguous
speech differs more in magnitude than in kind. Garnet’s need to
preserve the privacy of information heard in confession may have
mitigated his crime, yet this requirement would have counted for
little among those who saw in confessional secrecy a potentially
subversive political strategem. As Garnet’s fellow Jesuit John
Gerard aptly noted, “because confession itself being in England
rejected the good and necessity of the secrecy thereof is not so much
esteemed as their public peace and prosperous proceedings in
their worldly estate.”57 Nor was Shakespeare unaware of dramatic
portrayals of equivocal popes, as attested by his company’s
mounting of Barnabe Barnes’s play on the Gunpowder plot, The
Devil’s Charter. As Gary Wills explains, “though the historical time
of the play precedes the founding of the Jesuits, the Pope is
presented as a proto-Jesuit done in by his own equivocations with
the devil.”58 Shakespeare’s remembrance of Peter deftly reinforces
for his audience the equivocal tenor of the play from a scriptural
vantage, for no other apostle has quite the mixture of faith and
diffidence, dedication and denial that Peter demonstrates.
An allusion to Peter’s denial presents a caustic view of
ambiguous speech in Macbeth while ironically underscoring the
porter’s own ribald criticism in a dramatically effective way. As
seen in both Calvin and Garnet, Christians—whether reformed
or Catholic—condemned Peter’s denial as sacrilege. But by
omitting any reference to Peter’s remorse, Shakespeare departs
from the late-Tudor Protestant rehabilitation of his reputation that
emphasized his amendment of life; the porter invites us to envision
Peter primarily as feckless follower of Jesus rather than as absolved
repentant. By conflating a reference to Peter’s equivocal denial
of Christ with the porter’s echo of Garnet’s evasion, Shakespeare
instead aligns this scene with a more denigratory view of the
apostle’s reputation. It seems appropriate for Shakespeare to have
alluded to a biblical equivocator in a play which is so keenly aware
of the tension between allegiance to a Jamesian absolutism and
more republican calls for the limitation of royal prerogatives such
as those expressed in, for example, George Buchanan’s De juri regni
 Saint Peter and Macbeth’s Porter 247

(1579) and History of Scotland (1582).59 The porter’s recollection

of this cautionary incident in the life of the apostle does not
finally resolve such equivocal problems within the play, but, by
juxtaposing a reference to the apostle’s rejection of Christ with
Macbeth’s own devious defiance and Garnet’s failed defensive
strategy, it offers a theatrical moment which reflects widespread
anti-Catholic feeling in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot.

Armstrong Atlantic State University

NOTES

1. Terence Hawkes, ed., Coleridge’s Writings on Shakespeare (New York:

Capricorn Books, 1959), 188.
2. All citations to Shakespeare’s works in the text are from The Riverside
Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, 2d ed. (Boston, MA:
Houghton Mifflin, 1997). On Macbeth’s sin, see Herbert R. Coursen, Jr., “In
Deepest Consequence: Macbeth,” Shakespeare Quarterly 18 (1967): 365–88;
and Richard Waswo, “Damnation, Protestant Style: Macbeth, Faustus, and
Christian tragedy,” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1974):
63–99.
3. Glynn Wickham, “Hell-Castle and its Door-Keeper,” Shakespeare
Survey 19 (1966): 68–74.
4. Unless otherwise noted, all biblical citations are from The Geneva
Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, intro. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1969; rpt. Hendrickson Publishers, 2007).
In John’s gospel, Peter denies Jesus three times but without equivocating
(18:17–27).
5. “The Passion Play (Benediktbeuern),” in Medieval Drama, ed. David
Bevington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 215.
6. Peter Dronke, ed., Nine medieval Latin plays (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 217–19. The conjunction of Peter with Judas is
found as well in the English ballad of Judas; see Dronke, 189.
7. Lynette Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 131, 133.
8. John E. Booty, ed., The Book of Common Prayer 1559: The Elizabethan
Prayer Book (Charlottesville, VA: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976),
36–47, 122, 131, 139, 147.
9. See R. Chris Hassel, Jr., “‘No Boasting Like a Fool’? Macbeth and
Herod,” Studies in Philology 98.2 (Spring 2001): 205–24.
248 BEN JONSON JOURNAL

10. The Cornish Ordinalia: A Medieval Dramatic Trilogy, trans. Markham

Harris (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1969), 118,
122.
11. On Peter in medieval drama and Calvin’s response to him, see the
entry on “Peter” in A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature,
ed. David Lyle Jeffrey (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 606–7. In The
Fletchers, Bowiers, Cowpers, and Stringers Playe (Trial) in the Chester cycle,
Peter first equivocates with the “Damsel” (380), but responds to a “Jewe”
more directly: “Shame have I, and myckell woo,/yf ever I did him before
knowe/or keepe him companye” (52–55); The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R.
M. Lumiansky and David Mills, 2 vols. (Oxford: Early English Text Society,
1974), 1:302–3. See also The Trial Before Annas and Cayphas in the N-Town
cycle for the three denials (195–212) and Peter as heavenly gatekeeper
(53–56); The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D.8, ed. Stephen Spector,
2 vols. (Oxford: Early English Text Society, 1991), 1:303–4, 411.
12. The Northern Passion, ed. Frances A. Foster, 2 vols., original series vol.
147 (Oxford: Early English Text Society, 1916; rpt. 1971), 82.
13. “Christ before Anna and Caiaphas,” in York Mystery Plays: A Selection
in Modern Spelling, ed. Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 138–53. Subsequent quotations in the
paragraph are from this edition.
14. St. Augustine, Of the Citie of God: with the learned comments of Io. Lod.
Vives. Englished by J. H. (London: George Eld, 1610), 337. I thank Sarah
Carpenter for directing me to this reference.
15. Karen Bruhn, “Reforming St. Peter: Protestant Constructions of St.
Peter the Apostle in Early Modern England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 33.1
(Spring 2002): 35.
16. Ibid., 39.
17. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2001), 240.
18. Bruhn, 36 n. 12.
19. John Udall, Peter’s Fall. Two sermons upon the historie of Peters
denying Christ . . . (London, 1584), n. p. Compare Udall’s view of Peter’s
immersion in the “deapth of sinne” with Michael J. B. Allen’s description
of Macbeth as “a fully grown, fully mature human being who deliberately
and consciously transforms himself into a spiritual degenerate.” See
his “Macbeth’s Genial Porter,” English Literary Renaissance 4 (1974):
335.
20. Allen, 334.
21. Bruhn, 35.
22. F. W. Brownlow, Robert Southwell (New York: Twayne, 1996), 86.
Bruhn, 43–49, notes that Southwell’s poem heavily influenced William
 Saint Peter and Macbeth’s Porter 249

Broxup’s more Calvinist poem on the same topic three years later, Saint
Peter’s path to the joyes of heavuen.
23. Brownlow, 87.
24. The Poems of Robert Southwell, S.J., ed. James H. McDonald and Nancy
Pollard Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 94. Subsequent
quotations in the paragraph are from this edition. John Klause argues
for the presence of numerous Shakespearean allusions to Saint Peter’s
Complaint in Shakespeare, the Earl, and the Jesuit (Madison and Teaneck,
NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), 92. For a more cautious
analysis of the Southwell-Shakespeare relationship, see Alison Shell,
“Why Didn’t Shakespeare Write Religious Verse?” in Shakespeare, Marlowe,
Jonson: New Directions in Biography, ed. Takashi Kozuka and J. R. Mulryne
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 85–112.
25. John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew,
Mark, and Luke, trans. Rev. William Pringle, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Printed
for the Calvin Translation Society, 1845–46), 3:262. In 1710, Presbyterian
Matthew Henry described Peter’s statement in Matthew 26:70 as “a
shuffling answer.” Matthew Henry’s Commentary in One Volume (Grand
Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1960), 1:348.
26. Calvin, 3:261. Randall Zachman has suggested to me that Calvin’s
use of “sophists” likely refers to Sorbonne theologians with whom he
disagreed. Sir John Cheeke uses the term to criticize traitors in The Hurt of
Sedicion (1569): a traitor “cannot plainely withstand and useth subtilties of
sophistrie, mistaking the thing, but persuading men’s minds and abusing
the plaine meaning of the honest to a wicked end of religious overthrow.”
Qtd. in Stephen Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in
Renaissance England (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997),
118.
27. James is quoted in Steven Marx, Shakespare and the Bible (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 5, 100. See also David Norbrook, “Macbeth
and the Politics of Historiography” in The Politics of Discourse: The Literature
and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N.
Zwicker (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), 110–12.
28. On Malcolm’s equivocation, see Richard C. McCoy, “Spectacle and
Equivocation in Macbeth,” in Robert E. Stillman, ed., Spectacle and Public
Performance in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2006),
145–56.
29. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. W. A. Wright
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), passage xiv.6.7, 243.
30. Henry Garnet, A Treatise of Equivocation, ed. David Jardine (London:
Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851). Garnet’s authorship has
250 BEN JONSON JOURNAL

now been established; see Frances Edwards, S.J., The Enigma of Gunpowder
Plot, 1605: The Third Solution (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008), 272 n. 2.
31. Henry N. Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth (New York: Macmillan,
1950), 232.
32. Garnet, 9–10.
33. Ibid., 10. It is noteworthy, in view of the porter’s reference to a farmer
(2.3.4–5), that one of Garnet’s examples is also of a farmer: “A farmer hath
corne to sell. He selleth all that he can sell because he reserveth the rest
for his owne necessary vse. Than cometh one and desyereth to buy corne.
He may trewly say and sweare (if it be needeful) that he hath none; for
the circumstance of the person interpreteth the meaning to be, that he hath
none to sell” (17). Kenneth Muir, Macbeth (1951; rpt. London: Thompson
Learning, 2003), xxviii, notes that the porter’s farmer “is connected with
the equivocator because Garnet went under the alias of Farmer,” but
Garnet’s inclusion of this anecdote speaks to the substantive nature of
equivocation, not merely to Garnet’s alias. Alison Shell, Oral Culture and
Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), 135, notes that “A garneter was the overseer of a granary, and
the idea of priests reaping the English harvest of souls was a commonplace
metaphor which Garnet himself used.”
34. Garnet, 24.
35. Ibid., 58–59, 60. On equivocation in Southwell’s verse, see also Gary
Kuchar, The Religious Poetry of Sorrow in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 37, 73 n. 13.
36. Qtd. in William C. Carroll, ed., Macbeth: Texts and Contexts (Boston,
MA: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1999), 269–70.
37. Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and
Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 188.
38. On use of the palimpsest effect in Macbeth, see Alan Stewart,
Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 33; and
Jonathan Gil Harris, “The Smell of Macbeth,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58.4
(Winter 2007): 472–73, 485: “the scent of the play’s squibs might have
prompted associations with the scent of Catholic churches” (484).
39. H. W. Fawkner, Deconstructing Macbeth: The Hyperontologial View
(Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990), 126, suggests
that Shakespeare’s porter has a traditionally female function; he is “also
a housekeeper [emphasis in original] one who preserves the domestic
enclosure by supervising its entrance.”
40. Raymond Brown, The Death of the Messiah, 2 vols. (New York:
Doubleday, 1994), 1:599. See also Heinrich Schlier’s entry on “´
ν έ o
´
”
in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, trans.
 Saint Peter and Macbeth’s Porter 251

Geoffrey W. Bromiley, 12 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans,

1964; rpt. 1999), 1:469, 470.
41. “The intensity of Peter’s denials increases with the accusations: he
first denies that he knows what is being said, then he denies with an
oath that he knows Jesus, then he denies Jesus with both an oath and
a curse (probably of Jesus). Peter’s movements, which take him further
and further away from Jesus, also add drama: he is in the courtyard, then
he goes to the gateway, then he leaves altogether.” See Dale C. Allison,
Jr., “Matthew,” The Oxford Bible Commentary, ed. John Barton and John
Muddiman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 882.
42. Thomas DeQuincey, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” in
S. Schoenbaum, ed., Macbeth: Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 1991),
17–18.
43. Walter Reed, Dialogues of the Word: The Bible as Literature according to
Bakhtin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 33.
44. Commentators have noted the religious dimensions of the play
while heeding G. K. Hunter’s warning against “the dangers of simple-
minded christianizing”; see “‘Macbeth’ in the Twentieth Century,”
Shakespeare Survey 19 (1966): 7. Paul Jorgensen, Our Naked Frailties:
Sensational Art and Meaning in Macbeth (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1971), 53–54, does not equate Duncan with Christ but
approvingly recalls Roy Walker’s comparison of Duncan’s murder with
Judas’s betrayal; Jorgensen sees Duncan’s “golden blood” as “Duncan’s
saintly nature perfected and manifest” (88). Harry Levin, “Two Scenes
from Macbeth” in Shakespeare’s Craft: Eight Lectures, ed. Philip H. Highfill,
Jr. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 49, finds
spiritual aspects in Macduff but denies he is a Christ figure. More recently
Susan Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 174, complicates Duncan
as a Christ-figure by noting that his blood is both destructive and holy;
“Duncan’s hacked body, unthinkable and unviewable, is hypoststatized as
sacred”; his blood flows “from multiple wounds, like stigmata” (175). But
she notes that he is not thereby excused for failing to recognize Cawdor’s
personality flaws or for his role as warrior-king (192 n.7). Herbert R.
Coursen, Macbeth: A Guide to the Play (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1997), 51–73, comments on a variety of biblical echoes. Nick Moschovakis,
Macbeth: New Critical Essays (New York and London: Routledge, 2008),
41–43, reviews Christian approaches to the play. On the sacred aspects of
the English monarch generally, see Richard C. McCoy, Alterations of State:
Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2002).
252 BEN JONSON JOURNAL

45. Kenneth Muir traces the phrase “Lord’s anointed” to 1 Samuel 24:10
and 2 Corinthians 6:16 . Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s
Plays (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 629–630, also
offers in comparison Revelation 11:19, John 2: 19–21, and 1 Corinthians
3:17 and 6:19. Neither Muir nor Shaheen mentions a link to the gospel
passion narratives. If King James found in 1 Samuel a foundation for his
belief in divine right, as Muir, 63 n. 67, argues, he could perhaps have
found in Peter’s denial a disturbing confirmation of his well-known fears
of assassination. The text on which I focus most closely (Mk 14:68) does
not appear in Shaheen’s list of scriptural entries, although he notes a link
between Mark 14:65 and I Henry IV 1.3.239.
46. Norbrook, 94. See also Steven Mullaney’s reading of this passage
as “a disassembled pun” (125). W. A. Murray, “Why was Duncan’s
Blood Golden?,” Shakespeare Survey 19 (1966): 34–44, sees this image in
alchemical terms. Duncan’s bloody death is also reminiscent of medieval
crucifixion plays which lingered over grisly details of Christ’s death.
Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in
Late Medieval England (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press,
1997), 147; 148, notes the “intimate involvement of the body in late
medieval spirituality . . . Holiness also was lodged in the body, and bodily
effluvia such as tears and blood were signs of saintly privilege”; in a
comment relevant to Macbeth, she remarks that “To a striking degree the
violence against Christ is personalized, staged as the actions of individual
agents, not as an anonymous exercise in abstract power, an emphasis that
calls attention to the operations of power embodied in real individuals.”
See also Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act
in the York Corpus Plays (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001),
chapter two; and Clifford Davidson, “Suffering and the York Plays,”
Philological Quarterly 81.1 (Winter 2002): 1–31.
47. James Calderwood, If It Were Done: Macbeth and Tragic Action
(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 100.
48. Numerous commentators have found equivocation a significant
theme in the play, for example: F. L. Huntley, “Macbeth and the
Background of Jesuitical Equivocation,” PMLA 79 (1964): 390–400; two
works by Richard McCoy, “‘The grace of grace’ and Double-Talk in
Macbeth,” Shakespeare Survey 57 (2004): 27–37, and “Shakespearean Tragedy
and Religious Identity,” in Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, eds.,
A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, 4 vols. (Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishers, 2003)), 1:178–98; Mariangela Tempera, “The Art of Lying
in Macbeth,” Textus 6 (1993): 57–76; Sue Tweg, “Equivocation and
Cosmic Disturbance in Macbeth,” in Brian McFarlane, Viewpoints on
 Saint Peter and Macbeth’s Porter 253

Shakespeare (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1990), 36–45; and Abraham

Stoll, “Macbeth’s Equivocal Conscience” in Moschovakis, Macbeth, 132–150.
49. Norbrook, 101.
50. See René Girard, “Peter’s Denial and the Question of Mimesis,”
Notre Dame English Journal 14.3 (Summer 1982): 181.
51. Macbeth, clearly petrified, here reiterates almost exactly Peter’s
reaction to his denial as depicted in Robert Southwell’s St. Peter’s
Complaint, lines 667–69. Of these lines Kuchar, 33, remarks, “Peter
both interprets and enacts the self-deceiving motions of transgression:
‘Bewitching evill, that hides death in deceits,/Still borrowing lying
shapes to maske thy face,/Now know I the deciphring of thy sleights.”’
John Klause does not note this parallel in his study of Southwell and
Shakespeare.
52. Girard, 181.
53. Levin, 49. Shakesepare’s close knowledge of Mark is emphasized by
Sarah C. Velz, “Man’s Need and God’s Plan in ‘Measure for Measure’ and
Mark IV,” Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972): 37–44, who finds this gospel the
primary biblical basis of Measure for Measure.
54. DeQuincey, 19.
55. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of
Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 132.
56. See for example Marx’s discussion of the appropriation of
biblical “entrapping interrogations” in Measure for Measure (93–95). On
Shakespeare’s mingling of styles see Stephen Orgel, “Shakespeare and
the Kinds of Drama,” Critical Inquiry 6 (1979): 107–23. The oddly sui
generis quality of the porter’s scene is shared, albeit for somewhat different
reasons, by Peter’s denial scene, of which Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1953), 45, has said in an important discussion that “It
is too serious for comedy, too contemporary and everyday for tragedy,
politically too insignificant for history . . . ”
57. Qtd. in Philip Caraman, Henry Garnet, 1555–1606: And the Gunpowder
Plot (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964), 392.
58. Garry Wills, Witches & Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 25.
59. See Alan Sinfield, “Macbeth: History, Ideology, and Intellectuals,”
Critical Inquiry 28 (1986): 63–77; rpt. in Stephen Orgel and Sean Keiler,
eds., Shakespeare and History (New York: Garland, 1999), 215–29. On the
politically equivocal tone of the play, see Rebecca Lemon, “Sovereignty
and Treason in Macbeth,” in Moschovakis, Macbeth, 74. The play also
appears to have contributed to a celebratory sermon on the survival of the
king preached by Lancelot Andrewes (Harris, “Smell of Macbeth,” 474).