Thou liest, thou shag-haired villain.

Nor am I sure that, if the son of Coriolanus had been murdered, his last words to his mother would have been, ‘Run away, I pray you.’

I may add two remarks.  The presence of this child is one of the things in which Macbeth reminds us of Richard III. And he is perhaps the only person in the tragedy who provokes a smile.  I say ‘perhaps,’ for though the anxiety of the Doctor to escape from the company of his patient’s husband makes one smile, I am not sure that it was meant to.

5

The Porter does not make me smile:  the moment is too terrific.  He is grotesque; no doubt the contrast he affords is humorous as well as ghastly; I dare say the groundlings roared with laughter at his coarsest remarks.  But they are not comic enough to allow one to forget for a moment what has preceded and what must follow.  And I am far from complaining of this.  I believe that it is what Shakespeare intended, and that he despised the groundlings if they laughed.  Of course he could have written without the least difficulty speeches five times as humorous; but he knew better.  The Grave-diggers make us laugh:  the old Countryman who brings the asps to Cleopatra makes us smile at least.  But the Grave-digger scene does not come at a moment of extreme tension; and it is long.  Our distress for Ophelia is not so absorbing that we refuse to be interested in the man who digs her grave, or even continue throughout the long conversation to remember always with pain that the grave is hers.  It is fitting, therefore, that he should be made decidedly humorous.  The passage in Antony and Cleopatra is much nearer to the passage in Macbeth, and seems to have been forgotten by those who say that there is nothing in Shakespeare resembling that passage.[246] The old Countryman comes at a moment of tragic exaltation, and the dialogue is appropriately brief.  But the moment, though tragic, is emphatically one of exaltation.  We have not been feeling horror, nor are we feeling a dreadful suspense.  We are going to see Cleopatra die, but she is to die gloriously and to triumph over Octavius.  And therefore our amusement at the old Countryman and the contrast he affords to these high passions, is untroubled, and it was right to make him really comic.  But the Porter’s case is quite different.  We cannot forget how the knocking that makes him grumble sounded to Macbeth, or that within a few minutes of his opening the gate Duncan will be discovered in his blood; nor can we help feeling that in pretending to be porter of hell-gate he is terribly near the truth.  To give him language so humorous that it would ask us almost to lose the sense of these things would have been a fatal mistake,—­the kind of mistake that means want of dramatic imagination.  And that was not the sort of error into which Shakespeare fell.